Viewdle, a startup developing facial recognition technology for video, has received an unspecified amount of funding from KIT Capital. As part of the deal, Viewdle will partner up with ROO, another KIT portfolio company focused on IPTV broadcasting.
The partnership will provide ROO with full and exclusive access to Viewdle’s white label technology. Both companies will also work together to promote each other’s services. Reuters currently uses Viewdle’s technology to index the people in its video archives (see the Viewdle homepage for an example of what this looks like).
Viewdle presented this past fall at the TechCrunch40 conference. Our coverage of their presentation can be found here. The last (and only) time ROO came on our radar was over a year ago when News Corporation invested in the company without Fox Interactive’s knowledge.
Now that’s smart thinking
Truthfully what is the added value of this feature if it can’t scale to include millions of faces. I mean is it that difficult to find videos with celebrities via typical text searches? The last time I searched for Paris Hilton I found that most of her videos are well tagged and are full of her name in the title/metadata…
Don’t get me wrong, I think this is really really cool. I just don’t see a problem that it solves unless it is able to expand beyond a small group of already famous people.
C’mon Jon Heder’s hardly a challenge given his teeth account for 50% of his face.
I think FBI/CIA have been having wet dreams about this kind of thing for years.
On a serious note, I think it has tonnes of applications that industry insiders would appreciate. One application could be bookmarking the point on a video at which that person appears. ie, rather than having to cycle through the whole tape, you can jump right to the parts where the person shows up?
Congrats to Viewdle! How exactly do you pronounce that?
Upon first glance I thought that was Demetri Martin.
Would be cool if I could upload a photo of myself from my local to viewdle to find every pic of me on the net!
Maybe that is where they are going…
Tuzman is making some serious moves to bring value to his Roo player. Moving to Dubai to be closer to his international client base is a good start. Bringing SputnikAgency into majority ownership and appointing Sputnik’s CEO over as President of Roo brings the web and brand dev. end front and center.
Purchasing Kamera.com for their existing mobile customers on the European front for near nothing was strategic as well.
This on top of the license of Abacast vid on demand and Pando’s P2P software allows Roo to offer clients everything they need to meet the demands of IPTV for the immediate future at least.
Trades as RGRP.ob, plenty of risk at the moment IMO but worth a peek.
I think it will be cool when videos can have transcripts generated automatically. Politicians will have some rough days ahead of them when that happens.
Resistance is Viewdle?
It’s interesting that there is no mention of the fact that the company/technology was originally from Ukraine.
Will Viewdle.com be a better Video search engine than Blinkx.com?
Could Viewdle be a better Video Search engine than Blinkx?
To #2.
Viewdle tech was developed specifically for highly scalable applications. Right now we have much bigger database then one accessible at reuters.viewdle.com - we show there only people who appeared in Reuters content.
Take into account also that our PersonsDB is semantically accurate - you see a thumbnail for a person, and two persons are never mixed in one record.
But you are right that we have to bring massive automated tagging of “long tail personas” to mainstream media. That is current work in progress (API).
Stay tuned.
Only one problem; that’s his twin brother Dan.