VentureBeat

Fresh from its launch a week ago, the new Chinese social network City!N is launching today one of the features that it hopes will differentiate it: face detection.

The tool draws a box around any faces it finds in pictures uploaded to the site. Users can then tag the face by typing identifying information into a database. They can then automatically share a photo with that friend’s face, since the social network can dispatch an alert to the friend saying a photo of them has been uploaded, said Simon Chan, co-founder of City!N.

“We are showing the world what an intelligent social networking service means,” Chan said.

At some point, users will be able to search for that same facial image across the network. They can thus find all of the pictures associated with that face on the site. The tool raises privacy concerns, since many users might not want their wild and crazy pictures found by distant friends. But Chan says that users are free to set their own photos to “private” settings so that they can’t be shared or discovered.

This new kind of social discovery tool is what Chan says will set the company apart. Eventually, the tool will be used to find people who might be a good match for the user because they meet certain facial characteristics.

There are other face-detection search engines available. Polar Rose of Sweden has a beta version of its face detection search engine. Polar Rose tries to avoid heavy computational requirements with a unique design. It takes the faces in pictures and converts the characteristics in them into 3-D animations. Those 3-D constructions are much easier to use in recognition tasks, since there is far less data to be computed, in contrast to the data associated with processing a photo of a face. Read the rest of this entry »

Google and Yahoo have image and video search, but they’ve kept things to themselves, oddly not syndicating these for other sites to use like they have with their text search engines.

No doubt, they will do so soon. Meantime, a host of specialized image search and recognition companies has sprouted up. Here are the latest ones:

Pixsy of San Francisco, may be the company to watch. They’re the only ones offering to license image and video search to any Web site, from large shopping sites to news sites. The logic for these sites is as follows: Why not have image search on your own Web site, instead of sending people on to Google? That way, the sites can enjoy advertising revenue (sharing some with Pixsy, which powers it), instead of give it all to Google. If a topic-based image search is wanted, Pixsy can do that too.

It has signed 50 different deals since launching its product in June, chief executive Chase Norlin tells us. For one, Pixsy powers Mamma, the Mark Cuban-backed search site that launched two weeks ago. Pixsy crawls the Web, and also crawling blog RSS feeds to get fresh user-generated images and video (Google has started doing this recently). Pixsy is generating revenue, and could continue to grow organically, but Norlin says he’s considering raising venture capital to make sure he can grab as much land as possible before Google hits. Today, Pixsy launched something called Pixsy Power, which lets any site use Pixsy’s search. It has 12 employees. Blinkx is Pixsy’s main competitor, but offers only video search.

Polar Rose, which we’ve mentioned before, has provided more details on its facial recognition technology.

The Malmo, Sweden-based company gave us an overview yesterday, but didn’t let us actually try it out — so proof will be in the pudding.

It appears to provide cutting-edge technology (based on creating 3D images from 2D images of photos), based on research at the University of Malmo. It mixes this with social networking — it looks for other photos around the Web with the same visual characteristics and that are tagged with similar names, thereby helping you detect who someone is. Polar Image has developed a pop up window that lets you tell it who it is, and to share and borrow from others using the technology (see image below.) The challenge will be for Polar Rose to find a real use beyond being a cool feature built into, say Apple or Adobe’s photo software.

It works by via Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-ins to be released early next year. It will also open its APIs for developers to work with its technology.

Chief executive Nikolaj Nyholm said he wants to develop similar technology for video. The company has raised $5.1 million from Nordic Venture Partners. Few other companies focus on facial recognition. Riya appears to have moved away from this area.

Ookles, the SF company that got funded in Om Malik’s loo, is apparently doing image recognition, but there are fewer details available on that (Techcrunch has some). Its founder described it eight months ago as a Flickr+Riya+YouTube, which sounded fun at the time, but eight months later, the idea is losing its freshness.

Finally, Snap just released its image search. And we mentioned Cognisign a few days ago.

Visual search technology is still in its infancy, but a number of new start-ups are pushing the possibilities forward — the latest being Xcavator.

Riya’s Like launched recently (see our coverage), giving users a way of highlighting a shoe, or part of a shoe, and then look for similar shoes within its database of retail items — and so is helping with comparison shopping. You’ll notice, though, that Like operates in a controlled environment, allowing search within limited categories (bags, watches, shoes). Similarly, Swedish company, Polar Rose, just raised $5.1 million to help it launch its facial recognition, apparently due to be unveiled within the next couple of weeks.

Enter San Francisco’s Xcavator, which attacks visual search differently. It’s not open for general use yet, but VentureBeat got an early look. It will launch next year. Compared to other players, Xcavator lets you drill down further into a picture to find similar features. It claims it is getting closer to what the human eye/brain does. For example, if you’re looking for pictures with attributes similar to the Asian woman’s face (see above), Xcavator lets you circle it, and ignore her white shirt, arms and white background. See the YouTube demo below a demo of the technology. It finds pictures with other faces of Asian women (homing in on skin tone, hair color, and dark eyes and hair (it works for blondes too).

It also lets you click on unique points on a picture, like a butterfly’s wings, or petals of a daisy to find those specific features (see image at bottom, and related tour, which explains more).

The big question, though, is who will want to use this technology. We all have a favorite shirt or blouse that is getting old, and so we might upload a picture of it in an effort to find something that looks exactly the same. That seems like a lot of effort and its probably rare. It’s early days for this company, and its unclear how it can become a stand-alone company earning real revenue. Unlike Like, Xcavator is not crawling the entire Web to index pictures with the goal of becoming a destination site. Rather, it intends to liscense its technology to other companies, even to competitors, such as retail and fashion sites, but also to Riya, Yahoo, Google, or to companies with image software like Apple or Adobe. It’s also working with military agencies for intelligence work. It may work with professional photography sites like Getty Images to scan ad placements across the Web to check for copyright infringement.

The company has been self-funded for three years, and is based on technology built by Russian Lenny Kontsevich, PhD, who has researched his area for a decade. The total team is 10 people, split between SF and Moscow. It is looking to raise a round of venture capital.

The strength of this company is its ability to search vectors within a picture. If you select the entire picture of the Asian girl, for example, it will look for pictures with the white background, with dark hair, arms in similar positions. But it also allow for rotation of such vectors — finding picures with arms in slightly different angles, for example.

Xcavator’s parent company, Cognisign, has various projects up its sleeve. One site will focus on a younger demographic (girls aged 14 to 25) than Riya, because of the viral marketing possible with that age group. [Update: Xcavator has a placeholder name for site, but wants us to keep it confidential for now, for competitive reasons; we've removed screenshot too]. It will let users search, rank, and comment on images, and do it from their mobile phone. The seed/A round would be used to launch this project, says chief executive Bryan Calkins. We aren’t quite sure what would attract girls to this particular offering, but who are we to know.

Yahoo has acquired Bix, the Palo Alto start-up that lets people compete in online karaoke, hot or not and other contests.

The amount was undisclosed, but this acquisition was fast; Bix launched barely three months ago.

It is the latest sign of focus by Yahoo in its acquisition strategy. Its purchases have slowed to a trickle, but the deals it has completed concern community, user-generated sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org and Jumpcut), which stands in contrast with Google, which has focused on applications.

Bix raised $6.77 million in a first round of funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Stanford. It is yet another win for angel investor Amidzad, the separate venture fund created by the Palo Alto rug merchants who, aside from various international investments, also own lots of office property in Palo Alto. They invested in Bix when it moved into their property on Florence Street, and saw a nice profit on this investment, we’re told.

The idea behind Bix was to let companies sponsor the competitions online, handing out gifts to the winners. Bix is also planning to let users embed a widget on their own Web sites featuring the Bix contests.

We note the rather overt reference to its mature content on its home page (see below).