Polar Rose, a European startup that has a unique approach to recognizing faces in photos (remember Riya?), is having a bit of a pre-launch coming out party at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today.
We first wrote about the company last December, way before they were ready to take beta testers. But even then it was clear that they were on to something. They use a browser plugin to allow users to tag people in photos anywhere on the web. They use those photos to construct a 3D image of the person, and then make educated guesses as to who is in untagged photos. See the post linked at the top of this paragraph for more details.
The company has been testing the service with a very limited number of beta users. The beta will expand significantly today, however. Every attendee of the Gnomedex conference will be able to register, and will be encouraged to tag photos of the event. A special page at Polar Rose was set up to show the tagged photos (none yet, the conference hasn’t started).
250 Polar Rose Beta Accounts Available
Polar Rose has also given us 250 beta accounts to give out immediately. Just send an email to techcrunch@polarrose.com. If you aren’t one of the first 250, you’ll be placed on the waiting list for the beta – more invites are coming every week.
I wonder who the fist person to be “PolarBombed” (Polar Rose’s equivalent of Googlebombing will be.
Well… I sent out for a beta. But these things so far have not worked out that well. So I will be skeptical until I see it to make it worth while to tag images.
Let’s see if I made it before the crunch.
But… I’m kind of disappointed that Munjal didn’t take this route with Riya. I would have thought licensing the technology would have been a good strategy.
With the need for increase security this product could become very successful and even a utility.
How accurate is the product ?
Why not use inviteshare for this?
Polar Rose so far has seemed to work. Yes, I already have an account. It takes a bit of getting use to, but once you see it working (go to your Facebook account for example), you will understand that it works.
Rex
…if I don’t get my invite in the next 30 minutes, I’m going to become the anti-evangelist. lol
Well riya changed their model to go away from similar model to more around shopping.
Wonder what makes Polar Rose think they can do it differently. Its an interesting technology but not sure it has wat it takes to be something we use.
Michael’s favorite site facebook does it quite well already
it tags photos with who is in it and tells me in my feeds when an of my friends get tagged.
MAybe Polar rose should combine with facebook and based on already entered tags search all my friends albums to tag those which havent yet been tagged…
so ive been tagging photos this afternoon – when do i get the 3-d modeling?
@5 “Why not use inviteshare for this?”
I thought the same thing. InviteShare last “news” was on July 14. Deal fall through or something, Arrington?
Facial recognition is important but what else will this do for automation of recognition for images? What about the issue of indexing the images on Google images and the rest, accurately? Will this experiment in facial recognition come to take up the issue of image recognition? Or is this just a gimmick. That tools is very cool, especially for us beta testers but what other aspects of facial recognition will help the users on the web? Better indexing of pictures with humans but what about all other types of creatures as well as lesser known humans?