Visual search engine Superfish nets $5.3M
Superfish, a stealthy startup that will eventually let users search by sight, reeled in $5.3 million in second-round financing. The Palo Alto, Calif. company has been in research mode for a couple of years and plans to launch the service in the next several months.
Very little is known about the actual product, though the firm is able to maintain another office in Israel. Paid Content has compared it to Russian visual search engine Quintura, which… Continue Reading
China’s City!N social network launches face detection app
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… Continue Reading
Image search race: Polar Rose, Pixsy, Snap, Ookles, Riya — list is getting long
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… Continue Reading
Xcavator joins race in visual search
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… Continue Reading
Yahoo acquires online contest site, Bix
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… Continue Reading