Riya - Face Recognition for Photo Search 2006/04/15

Another TechCruch tipoff - Check out Riya which launched March 21. It’s like Flickr - so you can upload, organize, and share your photos - but it has state of the art face recognition software that allows you to search your photos by who’s in them. It also scans for any readable text in the photos to add additional meta data. It will be interesting to see who ends up acquiring this startup - besides the obvious benefit for online photo albums - this could revolutionize image search for one of the players. So if you did a Google image search for oh, let’s say: “Britney Spears” - it could actually return all photos with the pop star in them - regardless of whether or not they had traditionally search engine baffling names like: “image_07.jpg”, “brit at the beach.jpg”, or “my-future-wife.gif”.