Eyealike, the startup that lets you use photo recognition to help find your ideal mate, is expanding to apply its image processing technology to a new market: advertising. The company says that the new system will allow businesses to place highly targeted advertising alongside photographs that appear on their site (which have long been difficult to monetize).
For now the image recognition is restricted to identifying physical traits of the people in photographs, with categories including age, gender, hair color, and skin color. In the demo I saw, the results were impressive: photographs with babies in them were paired with products for infants and toddlers, and makeup ads were shown near photos with women in them.
The company is also in early stages of identifying company logos in photographs (which could be paired with matching products), and eventually hopes to include support for more objects, like vehicle recognition and applications for travel.
Eyealike isn’t meant as a consumer product. Instead, it’s being licensed at an enterprise level, with a customizable backend that Eyealike will tailor for each customer’s needs. Provided the system works well, Eyealike shouldn’t have any trouble finding customers - sites like MySpace with billions of photos would love to more effectively monetize them.
The problem that Eyealike is trying to solve isn’t a new one, as numerous other startups have tried to implement their own versions of image recognition. Unfortunately, lackluster accuracy has long hampered this kind of technology. Eyealike claims that its algorithms work 90% of the time - an impressive figure that would undoubtedly lead to higher advertising revenues. But because the technology doesn’t have a consumer front-end, I was unable to try it out for myself. Eyealike says that it is in talks to implement its system in a large social network, so we may get to try it for ourselves soon enough.
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Image recognition to me means that it must be able to identify two attached legs.
… and a pulse.
ilike, ialike, eyelike, eyealike? somebody has some explaing to do. Eye like them all.
LikeLocator.com
somebody has some “explaing” to do??
DouchebagLocator.com up one.
seriously, why eyelocator.com? i just don’t get that one, why would someone be looking for an eye?
locator man, just shut up please
anyway, what about yours ilocator ialocator? someone else has some explaing to do
Others are significantly further along in deploying accurate and scalable technology. Good luck guys…
Like who, exactly? As a small VC with limited time for research, I want to be able to say no intelligently.
WOPR
“and makeup ads were shown near photos with women in them”
Since when men are targeted by makeup ads? :-))
This is great! iLikeit
yup. this is great
Thing is, you look at other people’s faces on social networks. The ads will be tailored to them, not you.
Need to budget? Please visit http://www.mint.com.
Regarding the comment about “the ads will be tailored to them not you”.
In our conversations with the SNS - they are not only interested in what you as an individual look at but who you are and what types of images you have posted and what those images might tell us about you. Meaning, the technology can service both sides.
Using this type of “dual serving” technology offers these sites twice the impact on ad relevancy.
Greg Heuss
President - Eyealike
Thanks for clarifying that, Greg. Social networks already have all your personal info explicitly entered in. Just how much more can they find out about you from your pictures that they don’t already know from your profile?
Interesting. Can you identify political images? e.g. obama signs, democrat banners, mccain ads, Sarah palin herself. So I can sell merchandise respectively? Can this be deployed in public places?
It’s pretty cool and yet it’s about time for this application of image recognition.
SN sites have he worst Click rates in the market, primarily due to the fact that people are there to connect with other people, not to click on ads. its a hard road to plow in SN sites, but they have the inventory to offer up. so i gues these guys make money on the uptick in rates, so it will be a long long time before they make some real money. provided it works they scale fast, they should sell to AOL, they have been overpaying for all kinds of things lately. This is not a stand alone company for sure and will not make it to 100M in revenue anytime soon.