Riya Beta

I was invited to try out the beta release of Riya a few days back.. Obviously I was pretty excited about it (refer to my post titled ‘Riya’ )..
The invitation email was pretty lengthy and here are some things that caught my eye…

Riya.com isn’t just about face recognition. It is about search. It is about rethinking photosearch so that we are searching inside your photos, not around them.

The Riya uploader is PC only right now. Darn it, we know. If you are on a Mac and you can find a friend with a PC, you can upload there, then train, tag and search your photos on your Mac.

Speaking of the uploader, it is recommended that you run large sets overnight or while you are away from your PC for a length of time as it utilizes some processor memory and power. Sorry. Heh. Considering that it uploads an average of 4,000 photos in 24 hours, it’s not too bad. There is still room for improvement, but it’s faster than most uploaders you’ll encounter.

Bloggers are encouraged to post the good, bad and the ugly. (this is where i come in :p)

For those who wanna try it out, the link for the beta is http://www.riya.com/groundTruth

After signing up u need to download a photo uploader that basically processes each photo and then uploads it to the server. As mentioned above this client is painfully slow. It could take hours to upload a few hundred photos. The website even suggests you to keep large uploads running the whole night! (The installation screen for the uploader clearly mentions that the beta version can be expected to be buggy, slow and unstable.)

Once you upload the photos, Riya finds the faces in each photo. We can now tag these faces with the name of the person. After a few such uploads, Riya starts to show its real prowess . It starts guessing the names of people in any photo you upload. And damn, its right 90% of the time! (thats a very rough estimate btw :p)

Other features include the ability to recognize text on the photo. The pictures have a responsive AJAX-like feel to them. You can hover over a face, for example, and the name of the person pops up.

Once Riya learns how to identify a person, you can search for that person either in the entire public photo database or within your private collection. Riya comes up all the photos from its collection that have that person’s face in it.

Well, am I satisfied???
To tell you the truth, I expected something slightly different. For starters, I would have preferred an online uploader that leaves all the processing job to the Riya servers ..
Secondly, I would have liked it if I were able to do an Internet Image Search (like the Google Image Search) for all photos with my face, instead of just searching the Riya database. I know that would mean crawling through the net and painfully processing all the photos there (a task thats possibly impossible).. but yea, that would be awesome
I’ve heard rumors about Google’s plans to buy Riya.. but I dont know how true they are.. If they were true, then we could definitely look forward to a new dimension to online image searching

psycho.

the day the Google Maps almost screwed us!

March 11 had finally arrived.. RainMakers Live was just a few hours away.. and everything seemed to be going just fine.. after weeks of hardwork, there was nothing much left to do but sit back and watch the results unfold before our eyes..
and then came the unexpected..
Vinod and Gwen called me that morning.. and the moment i heard their voice, i knew there was bad news.. the Google and MapQuest maps for the venue were wrong! and they found out about this only when they actually went to the venue to set up stuff.. that was about 4 hours before the event.. too late to warn the invitees about this! i mailed all the guests about this just in case.. but i guess that didn’t really help.. many of them ended up going to the wrong location..
2 o’clock came and went.. and there were hardly any guests at the venue.. you could see the tension rising.. people were shouting on their phones, a few were trying to explain the cause for the delay to guests who had already arrived, and the rest were just walking around restlessly..
It wasn’t until Vinod sent Roy and Wenxiang to the other venue to redirect lost guests that a steady flow of guests started coming in..
the event finally started at 2:50 – 50 minutes late..
the turnout was less than expected (but not too bad either.. we had about 90 people finally)
but when the event did start.. it made up for everything.. everything fell in place.. the speeches were awesome, the panel discussion was interesting, and by the end of it, everyone seemed to have forgotten about the initial confusion.. the feedback we got from the guests and esp from Yu Ling (who called it the best NUSEA mixer to date) was simply great!
the networking session after the event was nice too.. there were lively conversations all around and people just didn’t wanna leave.. we really couldn’t hide our smiles of satisfaction
afterwards, we (the organizers) went out for dinner with 3 of the speakers (Gaurav of billmonk.com, Robert of licketyship.com, and Paul of meetro.com).. it was great talking to these young founders and CEOs.. these people could easily pass of as senior year students at University.. and yet here they were, proudly showcasing their companies and letting us in on their dreams..

among the things i learnt on that day was the fact that no matter how much work u put in to an event, u can never be too prepared.. there’s almost always gonna be something that u overlooked.. what it takes is the preparedness to handle such unexpected obstacles and make the day a success no matter what.

Riya

There are hundreds of new startups sprouting up around where i live. There’s everything from proximity based IM (Meetro) to 2 hour shipping (licketyship) to online ajax based desktops (netvibes, live, etc). After a point of time, the sheer number of these startups erodes the whole coolness associated with each idea. In these times, it is once in a blue moon, that u see an idea that really makes u go “WOW!”.. Riya is one of them.
I came across Riya a few weeks back.. It is started by a group of Indians and there are some really bright people on the team.. What they are basically doing is developing facial recognition technology.. hmmm… not that cool??
yea, facial recognition technology is a pretty old idea.. there has been a lot of research on this field, especially in universities and by some biggies in the industry (like fujifilm).. but the difference is that all that research has been focused on industrial and corporate applications of this technology.. stuff like biometrics and all.. and most of these technologies were half cooked, low on reliability, and shielded from the public..
Riya, on the other hand, is making this kitchen table technology.. It is bringing it to everyone on the internet.. it is making facial recognition technology another element of our day to day lives!
Riya basically can recognize a person in any photo which shows the person’s face.. think about the potential applications.. this could mean adding a whole new dimension to internet or desktop image searches! no more tagging required.. (i just had a short amusing discussion with ashwini about how this is a whole league ahead of tagging technology!).. i see this as something that google would jump at for its image search.. u can test drive their technology at their site.. on any photo, it automatically identifies all the faces and, if stored in the database, it recognizes the individuals..
another application would be to put this technology right into our digicams.. so every time u take a photo, they are automatically tagged with the names of the people in the photo!
the potential number of applications is huge.. i’m just waiting right now for riya to come out of beta..
oh, and another thing… hopefully they are able to work out a biz model to keep it free for us end users!

psycho.

box.net – free online storage (1GB!)

Check this out.. pretty cool.
Box.net
1 GB free online storage. AJAX based interface.

I have been using the GSpace Firefox extension earlier for storing stuff online. But this is much faster than Gmail… i uploaded 25MB of photos in 2 mins!

Sign up using this link.. its free.. and I get a space upgrade for referring people!

psycho.

Update: i referred 5 friends… and it got upgraded to 5GB! with 20GB of transfer per month..

Farzad pulls out…

Bad News:
Farzad Naimi mailed us saying that he wont be able to make it to RainMakers Live… In spite of this being a last minute change, the speakers committee has been able to get a new Keynote speaker – John De Santis, CEO, Sygate… Kudos to them for being able to get him down in such short notice!
Right now, the focus of the mixer is the Web 2.0 showcase, where we’ve got 6 people from various Web 2.0 startups to discuss this new and emerging technology wave. So I guess this change isn’t too bad after all.. We’ve come a long way from the point where we had just Farzad on our list of speakers.

psycho.

Defense and Offense!

Offense is the same as defense except that it’s exactly the opposite

- Al Ries, Marketing Warfare

RainMakers Live!

The last one month has been hectic for the people from NUSEA and ASES. Now, with our bi-annual mixer RainMakers Live! just a week away, all that hard work seems to be paying off!
For starters, the number of people confirming their attendance seems to be increasing by the day. As far as speakers are concerned, I still remember the committee getting worried about not being able to get enough of them down for the mixer. But now, they are worried about whether the 3 hours would be sufficient for all the speakers coming down! We’ve got people writing about RML on their blogs! To me, it looks like its going to be a great evening.
Well, for those who haven’t heard about it yet, RainMakers Live! is a mixer you just cannot afford to miss! With really distinguished people like Farzad Naimi and Tom Kosnik as the speakers, this event is definitely going to be a crowd puller! And yes, how can I forget! We have a Web 2.0 showcase to whet the appetites of the techies! This showcase will be presented by the people behind some of today’s most promising web startups like billmonk.com and licketyship.com. More details are available at the RML website.

RainMakers Live!
Venue: Sherman Fairchild Auditorium, Stanford University
Date: March 11th 2006
Time: 2pm

Admission is FREE. Refreshments will be provided.

You cannot afford to miss this one. Go ahead and register for free right here.

psycho.

changes…

it surprises me when i look at the things that have changed over such a short period of time..

i’m in a whole new place.. a new set of “friends”.. a new objective.. leading a totally different life here…

just a coupla months back i was busy studying and fooling around at NUS.. where thinking about the future meant planning a thanni party or deciding which canteen to go to for lunch and at most it meant preparing for the next exam.. and i liked things that way.. a lot..

right now.. i work! (i ‘drive’ to work, but that doesnt negate the fact that i have to work), i program, read blogs and books on technology and business, attend seminars, network (or atleast try to), organize mixers, write business plans, etc.. and yea i have a page long to-do list at any point of time..

its not just the things i do.. but the way i think that has changed.. the place that joe satriani or jimmy page used to occupy in my mind is now slowly getting filled up with names like larry page, farzad naimi and don valentine.. the ‘cool’ stuff that i gossip about is not the next metallica album.. but the next high-tech, patent pending, paradigm shifting technology based startup.. zzzzz

and the funny part is i’m not really sure if all this is for the better.. there are a lot of things i am losing out on.. the NUS life that I did actually love (believe me when i say that!).. my ‘real’ friends back at college.. my guitar (i haven’t played one for months now.. ).. and most importantly.. that amazing sense of piece of mind that accompanies ignorance.. yes, the bliss of ignorance.. i miss it.

anyways, here i am.. and there’s nothing i can do but make the best of it.. i’m working on it.. its hard.. but i know for sure that every minute of this life out here is gonna be beneficial to me in the long run.. as an entrepreneur or otherwise.. the experience is definitely worth it..

psycho

a new world…

its been months since my last post.. and i’m not gonna put a backlog of what i’ve been through all this while..
right now, i’m in the silicon valley on the NOC program from NUS (yea, i got in .
i’m staying with two of my batchmates (yang bin and guang chen) in a nice 2 bedroom apartment at sunnyvale.. i get one br to myself
i’m working at this semiconductor company called excelics.. in the IT dept.. working on the ERP system.. my fellow NOC interns here are ashwini and chengyi..
hmm.. my classes at Stanford haven’t started yet.. but i’m doing a course called New Venture Creation, organized by NOC at UCSC.. my prof is John Nesheim.. pretty cool guy.. he’s a veteran of the whole startup scene in silicon valley..
my groupmates for NVC are gc, yb and liu chang.. and our biz plan is something about an online 3d shopping game.. something like an online meeting place plus shopping mall.. its liu chang’s idea.. i was pretty sceptical about it first but then john’s feedback after our executive summary was quite good.. and so we are sticking to this…
i just came bak from a snowboarding trip at tahoe.. was great fun.. my first time snowboarding.. my body’s aching like crazy now!