Is a picture worth a thousand clicks? You’ve heard of contextual ads triggered by keywords on a Web page. Now, get ready for contextual ads triggered by images on the page. Visual-shopping search engine Like.com is running ads on Facebook that appear to match objects in profile photos.

Notice the ad by Like.com in the lower left for aviator sunglasses in the screen shot shown here, sent to us by TechCrunch reader Luke Bearden? Yup, those look eerily similar to the aviator sunglasses Bearden is wearing in his Facebook photo. Well, at least we know that Like.com’s technology works. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. (Can someone from Like/Riya let us know which one it is in comments?).

But if this indeed is Like’s image-matching engine at work, is it effective targeting? Bearden thought the ad was “creepy.” And, um, he obviously already owns a pair of aviator sunglasses.

He also obviously likes them enough to feature himself wearing a pair on his Facebook page. And maybe he lost those beloved glasses or they broke since the photo was taken. So I’d say the ad is both effective and creepy.

Would you click on it?

Update 6/2/08: Riya/Like founder Munjal Shah got back to us to let us know that, while his company’s technology could do this, in this case it was indeed a coincidence. He writes in an e-mail:

1) This ad is not contextually driven - it was just luck that the sunglasses matched - Facebook’s ad API doesn’t let you access the photo on the page for doing this kind of visual targeting.
2) We do have this visual targeting technology and use it on the Rockyou site (called Likesense), but it is not on Facebook at this time.
3) Other than that I liked the article - it is indicative of the direction we are heading…

(Screen shot courtesy of Luke Bearden).

I can’t really say much about Tuyuan yet since it’s in Chinese and there isn’t much information (translated page here), but it certainly looks like they’re trying to tackle the facial recognition problem that has destroyed many a startup.

We’ve seen Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others. Most recently Tagcow came on the scene, but it turns out it uses humans to tag photos, which tends to produce bad data.

Will Tuyuan be any different? We have no idea yet. But we’re contacting them to find out. More soon. Thanks for the tip, Orli.

Most people have thousands of digital photos sitting on their hard drive. And the vast majority of those photos aren’t tagged or searchable. Want to find the 300 pictures of your youngest son amongst 10,000 others? It’s not going to happen. Unless you’ve been diligently tagging and categorizing those photos over the years, and who does that?

The problem is obvious. The solution, not so much. A trail of failed startups have tried to tackle the problem with a fairly serious application of technology, including: Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others.

And now suddenly TagCow appears, which allows users to upload photos and have them tagged within a few minutes. The technology appears to be “magic,” meaning there’s no explanation of it.

If there’s a mountain in the photo, it’s tagged. A dog? yep. A yellow cup? Absolutely. It does people, too. Upload an image of a person and say who it is, and all other images you upload will be tagged with that person, too. The service also integrates with Flickr and will auto tag the photos you have on the service.

Thomas Hawk, the CEO of photo site Zooomr, tried the service and declared it “really, really cool,” although he wonders how it works.

The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo - he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.

I haven’t confirmed this yet. I’ve emailed the company for a description of how the service works but have yet to hear back. Until we do, I’m betting that humans are the taggers. Note that Google has effectively thrown in the towel and uses humans for this kind of work, too.

TagCow appears to be offering the service for free, so the cost side of the business may be a problem for them down the road. And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.

Last November, Munjal Shah made a fairly tough decision and did an about face on his startup, Riya. Instead of continuing to focus on Riya’s existing product - facial recognition and tagging of photos - the company took its core technology and launched an image search engine called Like.com.

Unlike other image search engines, Like.com uses photos as the query, returning similar images as the results. The company focused on ecommerce, particularly fashion items like handbags, watches, shoes, etc.

Fast forward to nearly a year later. The company is generating real revenue from sales on the site - Current gross merchandise sales are running at about $12 million per year (Like.com gets a small percentage of that as an affiliate fee in revenue). 1 million or so unique visitors come to the site each month.

This weekend photo widget startup RockYou started to integrate Like.com results into slide shows shown on the RockYou site (example). For now, results are limited to showing shirts on sale that are similar to the ones being worn by people in the photographs. Viewers can click through and purchase a shirt that look similar to the one their friend is wearing in the photos.

So far, so good. Shah says they are seeing an $0.80 CPM on slide show pages and sharing the revenue wtih RockYou. Other partnerships are ready to roll out.

Slide shows with Like.com results are only being shown on RockYou.com currently - due to issues with advertising on social networks (particularly MySpace), they are not included in the embeddable widgets. It’ll take a whole new round of negotiations before we start seeing them there, too.

Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal based on visual search technology.

Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.

In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.

Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.

Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.

Silicon Valley startup Riya, currently a photo search company focusing on facial recognition, is making a significant strategic and product shift this morning. Riya will continue as is, but the company is leveraging the core technology to launch a new image search engine called Like.com (see our previous coverage of Riya here).

Like.com is image search. There are lots of other image search engines on the web today. But all of them only take queries as text, and compare those text queries to the meta data attached to an image file. This data is notoriously thin, and companies like Google are resorting to using human labor to attempt to add descriptive keywords to images stored on their servers. Even specialty image search engines like Pixsy have fairly thin meta data for images. And all of the existing search engines allow only text for search queries.

The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a “visual signature” for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.

What this means - If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.

If you enter a text query, like “brown boots pointed toe,” Like.com will convert that query into variables in the visual signature and look for related image results. See screen shot below for the results from this query.

The site launching today returns results only for shoes, jewelry, hand bags and clothing. The service will expand over time to include other categories, but these initial categories represent a very large portion of consumer discretionary spending in the real world. With each result Like.com will also present a link to purchase the item, and their hope is to generate revenue from subsequent purchases.

A key feature that Like.com will be launching in the next month or so is an image uploader and a toolbar. Upload an image to Like.com to see similar results. Or, simply use the toolbar to use any image found on the web as a search query. Either way, Like.com will return results for similar items.

Robert Scoble at Podtech interviewed Riya CEO Munjal Shah on video in preparation for the launch. See the interview here, and a product demo here.

On a side note, Munjal has written a series of fifteen blog posts talking about his experience as a startup CEO. This is a very useful resource for new entrepreneurs. And given the length of this series, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Munjal publish this as a book at some point as well.

Photo search and facial recognition site Riya (a TechCrunch sponsor) had a million photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and seven million photos uploaded in the first seven weeks. For details on the core service, see this post and listen this podcast interview with Riya founder and CEO Munjal Shah.

Next up - Riya 2.0.

It’s still a few months away from launching, but I spoke with Munjal this evening and he gave me an overview of what to expect from the service. It will be a “visual search engine” - give Riya an image and it will return image results that are similar from across the web. They’ve already begun crawling the web for images, a process that will take many months.

When it’s ready, users will be able to search on an image (the easiest way will be via a browser plugin to search right from the page containing the images). See a rug on ebay that has a pattern you like? See other rugs from across the web containing similar patterns. Riya will make money if the result you click on is from another ecommerce company - Riya pockets the referral fee.

Dating is another (if slightly creepy) use for the new Visual Search engine. See someone’s picture on MySpace that you like? Search on their photo to find single people who look similar and who have profiles up on match.com or other dating sites. Again, Riya makes a referral fee by moving the traffic along.

The infrastructure needed to crawl the web is substantial, says Munjal, and they’ve been working to build out a new data center over the last few months.

I believe Dan Farber was the first to write about Riya 2.0. More on Munjal’s blog, and he briefed Matt Marshall and Laurie Sullivan as well.

In other Riya news, a Mac version of their uploader was released tonight.

Photo search and facial recognition site Riya is now about two months old (see here for our past Riya posts). Founder and CEO Munjal Shah is in the process of memorializing the highs and lows of the launch process, and this is must-read stuff for entrepreneurs looking to launch a company down the road. I may update my “Don’t Blow Your Beta” post based on some of his advice. Part 1 is up now, look for further installments on the blog. Bookmark this stuff, it’s free consulting.

Disclosure: This is the first time I’ve written about a direct advertiser on TechCrunch - Riya became a sponsor a couple of weeks ago.

Photo search and facial recognition startup Riya launched on March 21 and had a million photos uploaded in the first two days. We interview Riya CEO Munjal Shah and Marketing Director Tara Hunt on TalkCrunch to understand what Riya’s plans are in the near future. Check it out over on TalkCrunch.

Tara Hunt, Riya’s chief blogger, says on her personal blog that they’ve had a million photos uploaded just two days after launching. Wow, that’s a lot of pictures. Congratulations (again) Riya.

More on what Riya is all about here.

UPDATE: Riya is not launching a public beta today, but is sending out emails with credentials to people who’ve signed up for the alpha. In a few days Riya will be opening up registration for everyone. More on their blog here.

Rumors are buzzing today that the long awaited, almost acquired photo facial recognition service Riya should be moving out of private alpha and launching a public beta sometime today. The main site is currently down and “asks for your patience”, which certainly suggests that something interesting is going on over there.

Riya, which is funded by Blue Run Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures, and Bay Partners, is a service that automatically recognizes people in photos and groups them. Add a tag to the person and all of the photos are tagged with that name. As your friends and family join Riya too, many of their pictures will automatically be tagged with your data (and their other friends’ data) too.

Riya is a company that I’ve loved from the start (screen shots here), even when it was called Ojos, and have written about it often. Congratulations to the entire Riya team if, in fact, it is launching today as I’ve been unofficially told. I am really hoping that they adopt a partnering strategy and get this built into Flickr and other photo sharing services. Or at the very least build a hell of an importer so that I can move my photos to them. Yahoo, if Riya works (it certainly did in my beta testing), please buy this company.

Facial Recognition company Riya has marked the new year with a whopping $15 million second round venture raise from existing investor Bay Partners.

This is exceptional news for Riya and a great recovery after the acquisition rumor fiasco late last year.

My early review of Riya is here - it is a killer product. Riya continues to take alpha tester requests at the email address: riya_alpha@riya.com.

Riya, the celebrated facial recognition company that has allowed in a few lucky alpha testers over the last few months, was the subject of significant acquisition rumors a few weeks ago. “Sources” put the price in the $30 million range, although the company was understandably silent, even during their launch party a few days later.

Tonight, Founder and CEO Munjal Shah finally addressed the acquisition rumors around Riya on his blog, stating flatly that Riya continues as an independent company:

For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn’t and still can’t directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality.

Robert Scoble just wrote about this as well, admitting that Microsoft took a look at Riya (passing on the price), and expressing his hope that they’ll take another look now that the Google deal has fallen through.

Either way, I’m just looking forward to the product finally shipping. Munjal says that will be at Demo in February.

And as an interesting side discussion, Peter Rip, a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying “Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had.”

Ouch. But this can’t be entirely correct - Robert has confirmed in his blog that Microsoft met with Riya and passed on the deal. So at the very least, acquisition discussions were taking place.

We reached a new milestone in our ongoing experiment to see how many people can fit inside my house before the police come and arrest me: over 250 last night (previous record was 200ish) at the Riya Launch Party.

The thing I liked best about this party was that Tara Hunt from Riya and Andrea Reinhardt from Just Starting Up took care of everything - Fifty something pizzas, 20 or more cases of beer, wine and champagne, bags and bags of ice, the A/V system for the demo and tons of tshirts and stickers. Tom Conrad from Pandora chipped in with a complete music system.

And it was a great crowd. My pictures from the event are here. Here’s everyone’s tagged “TechcrunchMeetup4“.

The rumors about a Google acquistion were neither confimed nor denied by anyone in the know…but there sure is a lot of buzz around this company right now.

Things I loved about the event:

• Riya rocks and now even more people know about it
• My Dad flew in for the party and saw what this web 2.0 stuff is all about (on left in picture)
• My dog Laguna is still alive
• As far as I know, Dorrian didn’t park in my yard this time
• Lots of cool companies besides Riya came and showed their stuff in the demo room

Things that weren’t as great about the event:

• Fifty something empty pizza boxes and 20 something cases of empty beer and wine bottles scattered around my lawn this morning
• Somebody drank all of my scotch again
• The Atherton police set up a sobriety checkpoint around the corner from my house
• Gabe, Richard, Fred and others were out of town and couldn’t make it

That’s it for parties this year. The next one should be in January or February. I can’t say what it is yet but I will say that it involves a launch party again…this time for a book.

Other mentions of the party (send me an email or trackback to this post):

Jack Arrington
Shel Israel
Robert Scoble
Scott Beale
Jeff Clavier
Joseph di Paolantonio
Clarise Z. Doval Santos
the egoist
Expert Texture
Christian Sepulveda

UPDATE 11/24/05: Enric has a video of Tara’s Riya demo up on his site.

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.

Riya (formerly Ojos) will be opening its doors to 10 or so lucky alpha testers tomorrow morning.

Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web).

We previously profiled Riya (then Ojos) on August 31, 2005

I went by Riya’s offices today and met with the team to get a look at their product. According to Munjal Shah, Riya’s CEO, I am the first outsider to get a chance to bang on the live product. Given how hot Riya is right now, I consider that a huge honor.

The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.

Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable.

It’s an easy step to allow friends to also tag and search your photos (if you choose), and even allow full public search.

Linking these two features - massively automated tagging of everything in photos, with search, is compelling to say the least. The folks at Riya call it “tag locally, search globally”.

Riya is going to be successful. They have real technology. And, as people use it to tag photos, Riya will create a database of unique attributes of people. Once enough people start using the service, Riya will be able to auto-tag people’s names with less and less training by the user. At that point, why would anyone try a competing service? Riya will have technology (protected by patents) and an incredible network effect as well.

Riya plans on having a destination site that will be free, and will OEM their service to other photo services. Sites like flickr can certainly try to duplicate Riya’s service, but unless they move very quickly Riya’s network effect Riya will be insurmountable.

In fact, Riya could become so ubiquitous as to actually cause real privacy concerns. One question I asked the team today was - “what if you get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd?” Apparently, their technology is not that powerful - yet. Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to.

To fully appreciate Riya you have to see it visually. I’ve posted a few screen shots below of my experience using it earlier today.

Get in to the Riya alpha if you can. It’s going to be a popular service.

Ojos, which never owned ojos.com (they used ojos-inc.com) has found a permanent name - Riya. More on this on the Munjal Shah’s blog and Tara Hunt’s blog.

Riya has a facial and text recognition technology that automatically tags photos with who’s in them. We profiled them earlier.

Riya is preparing to start their private alpha and will hopefull launch within a couple of months. If you are interested in participating in the alpha, email alpha@riya.com. During the alpha they will only support IE6.

Company: Ojos
Launched: Pre-Alpha
Status: Angels include Peter Rip and John Malley
Location: Palo Alto

Overview

Ojos hasn’t launched yet, and may even change it’s name. But a bit of buzz has started about them already, stoked by a post by Rob Hof at Businessweek and followed by Ho John Lee.

The company’s founders include Burak Gokturk, a Stanford Ph.D. who holds 15 patents in facial recognition (according to Rob Hof) (other team members below), which gives us some idea of what they are up to. The idea behind Ojos is that they will take the photos stored on your hard drive and apply face and text recognition technologies to guess who and what is included in a photo. Tag one photo including a person, and Ojos can automatically tag all other pictures that include that person with the same tags. It sounds simple, but the the technology needed to do this is not.

The way I am thinking of this is that Ojos solves the long tail problem with my thousands of unnamed, untagged photos. Sure, I put the occasional picture up on flickr and buzznet and go to the trouble of tagging them, but the vast majority are simply filed away on my hard drive under a general topic and month the picture was taken. This could fix that.

One of the co-founders, Munjal Shah, has started a blog and has posted occasionally on Ojos with additional information.

Ojos has also hired Tara Hunt, who I’ve been bugging daily for an invite to the alpha (no luck yet).

She did send me a very small screen shot of some pictures that have been processed with Ojos - see image to left. I’m pretty sure she gave me permission to post this. The image includes pictures of Tara over the years, identified and organized by Ojos. It recognized her even through hair color changes.

Tara has also posted a few hints about Ojos.

If you’d like to get in line for the beta, send an email to “beta at ojos-inc.com”. I’m looking forward to trying this out.

Team

Munjal Shah
Burak Gokturk
Azhar Khan
Tara Hunt
Ben Lee
Kuang-chih Lee
Vincent Vanhoucke
Dan Chiao
Danny Yang
Neelesh Vaikhary
Sandeep Gain
Sowmya Karnad
Ginto Mathew
Piyush Partani
Nikhil Pal Singh
Nitin Agarwal
Vineet Bhardwaj
Drago Anguelov