Rumors are flying this morning that Riya (a killer photo facial recognition startup) has been or is being acquired by Google in the $40 million range. See Om Malik, Niall Kennedy and Paul Kedrosky.
Even though everyone is blogging about it, this is nothing more than a rumor at this point. It is a rumor, however, that has been confirmed to me by employees of companies that were also apparently in the hunt for Riya but dropped out after the price became too rich.
These rumors will certainly make Riya’s launch party at my house tomorrow night even more interesting.
I want to stress that even though I know the Riya folks and even though I am hosting their launch party, I have no direct confirmation of the deal from them (and yes, I’ve tried). They are silent on this, which is understandable whether the rumor is accurate or not.
I tested Riya last month and came away very impressed. See my profile here. Riya has solid technology and an impressive team.
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If that is true, it would be great for the valley, the industry and another blow to VCs who think they own capitalization of tech startups.
Eciting news. We’ll maybe the Riya technology is self aware. Just upload Larry and Sergi’s pics and if Riya comes back dollar signs, then we’ll know!
silince = probable!
From their blog…
“We had this killer feature using Ajax that would automatically just keep loading photos for you in the background. When you got to the end of a set of photos it would load page 2, etc allowing you to scroll through 1000 or 10000 photos in an album just by scroll down the browser window. Dan and Ben had come up with it. It was brilliant. I thought it was killer feature. We deployed it, it worked under Firefox but was just completely broken under IE (memory usage of the browser when to 1 GB+)…
..maybe thats why google wants them
I can see why Google might be interested. Imagine being able to do a search where you say: “Find me something that looks like THIS,” and it just does it.
This is certainly pretty groundbreaking news and a nice investment to be made on Google’s behalf.
Based on the details and screenshots you provided on October 26, this is certainly a development with massive global potential - even to see it take off without the backing of Google would be brilliant.
Cool. I wish there was somebody other than yourself to validate your claims about coolness of Riya.
This could tie in nicely with Google image search, allowing you to search for photos of people even if they aren’t named in the filename or on the page anywhere.
On the other hand, it could tie in with all the personal information they’ve been gathering with their various products and form the basis for an evil conspiracy (not usually my style, but someone had to say it.)
Wow! This is quite an awesome piece of software Google is getting!!! They will definitely get better and better if they continue this path.
Told yah so. Or at least the sources said so. Nearly 72 hours later, it hits the blogs. Touche’.
I doubt they are buying them for the automatic facial recognition technology - that technology has been around for some time for dating sites.
I think they are interested in the object recognition/tagging feature, but that is just my opinion.
I don’t see anything new about Ryia technology.
Computer Vision has been around for at least 20 years; facial recognition is already in use all over the world as a biometric security measure; search for pictures by similarity has been a standard database functionality in Informix and DB2 databases for at least 7 years.
I also wonder why would Google, with its tones of clever researchers and developers (including in AI) - need to buy another company for what it can develop itself very easily.
No way. They would buy reddit way before digg. Why don’t people fact check anymore before posting? I guess it’s more important to be first to mention rather than the first with accurate info.
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