Thirty-five years ago the KGB developed facial recognition algorithms to aid in its security efforts. But with the end of the Soviet Union, funding for the project dried up, until the Ukrainian government revived it in 2000. Then in 2006, someone came up with the idea that maybe the technology would pay for itself and decided to form a company around it: Viewdle.
Would you ever have guessed such a tacky web 2.0-compliant name came out of that backstory?
“It’s a name that came after four bottles of vodka,” admitted Viewdle CEO Yuri Frayman, speaking today at the TechCrunch40 conference, where the company launched. Regardless, Viewdle impressed the crowd with its facial recognition demo, showing it could pinpoint the second in which a celebrity appeared in a piece of video. And it’s not just a demo anymore; a partnership with Reuters (RTRSY) went live today in which Viewdle has indexes of more than 600 hours of news video. Reuters pays Viewdle an hourly fee for each video plus an additional fee for licensing metadata.
And it’s not just about celebrities. Viewdle will soon launch a http://myhomevideos.viewdle.com site where users can upload their own vacation clips and break down which kid appears in which minute.
Frayman claimed Viewdle can recognize a face after seeing it just once, and can index hours of video nearly instantaneously. He says it’s 85 percent accurate. The company also offers speech recognition technology. “Did you build all of this yourself, or did you license any of it from anyone else?” I asked. “Nothing, zero. It’s all in house,” Frayman replied.
This all sounds too good to be true. Frayman admitted that such technology is hard to justify with words; you’ve just got to see it work. But if Viewdle can get it right, plenty of business models await — white-labeling it for footage archives as the company has done with Reuters, or also indexing news as it comes out, selling vanity feeds to marketing firms, or placing contextual advertising.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/09\/17\/viewdle-gets-in-your-face\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_888718a1437e47344212f778ff3a2dc3","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}