How to source like big brother...

A little birdie told me about RIYA, a company whose face-recognition technology automatically tags people in photos so you can search for just the photo you want. And here is the Wow! factor, you can search for these photos in your photo album, your friend's photo album and ON THE WEB! Oooh...

What am I oohing about? Imagine you are looking for a lost love from highschool and all you have to go on is a highschool yearbook picture. Scan your picture, upload it to Riya and it searches its system and then the world wide web for that person's face! Oh, lookee there, your long lost love's picture on the cover of a "Girl's Gone Wild!" video. (Gee, aren't you really sad now that you lost touch with her?)

Howzabout this scenario... Say you are looking for SATCOM engineers and are getting nowhere with your usual methods, but you discover the homepage of Joe Schmo from CoCoMo. Joe is a SatCom guy without a resume linked to his homepage (sad face). He does however, have pictures of himself at a SATCOM seminar/tradeshow along with co-workers and people passing by in the crowd. Hmmm... Why not take that picture, upload it to Riya and track the attendees of the seminar/tradeshow to their homepages and offer them your wonderful opportunity?

Or... License this puppy out to Homeland Security (or Jack Bauer) and scan the internet for no-goodniks who cheesed for the camera or, were in the background of a family photo and did not realize it. How cool would that be? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Riya also recognizes text in a picture. Why care about that? Well, what if you wanted to verify when a picture was taken? For example, you could use Riya to take a closer look at the headline of a newspaper someone was holding in the background. (Dewey for President? This photo was not taken yesterday. It is a fake!)

"Wow!" you say, "Can Riya really do all of that?!" Umm... to some degree, yes. Click here to check out all they have to offer and by the way folks, their service is FREE (and in Alpha stage).

Digability rating: WoW!

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