I was in the Portland airport recently and I saw an image of a happy, professionally smiling face welcome me as I logged into the free wifi there. The image is at left.
It was very, very familiar. I felt like I had seen it, or rather, her, hundreds of times. Then it hit me. Once we can search by image, I mean, really by image, we’ll be able to find ALL the instances of this gal, all over the web. Imagine what happens once we can find every single stock image of glad handing corporate models? It’ll be just like it used to be, searching for “copyright (insert date here)” or “about us” back in the early days of text search. Ah, nostalgia!
Sounds like Riya. I believe this type of image search is what they’re aiming for over there.
John, nice post. It hits right home. That’s exactly what we are currently doing: we do image searching, true image searching! We find instances of our client images on the Internet and print publications. You submit an image and using our image recognition technology we can tell you where it has appeared see here http://www.ideeinc.com/ems-print-video.php. There are obviously many applications for this but this is not a pitch post, just wanted to drop you a line. Meant to get in touch a billion years ago but this is as good a time as any.
I actually have a post about the “everywhere girl” that will be going up on my blog later today and I will ping you then. This is a fun post about a particular photograph that keeps getting used by everyone (from financial services firms to you name it).
Leila
Imagine what that will do to the royalties market? If I know that my image is popular (as either model, photographer, or media pimp), requests for funds are sure to follow. 🙂
Though ‘Image Search’ has been coming for some time and had many fals starts, it is really going to come soon. Technology has been progressing and based on my knolwedge of current state as well as past experiences (failures), I think it is going to make some good impact in the next two years.
I’m a longtime reader of yours but an even longer-time user of the Portland airport (as a resident). I travel a lot for work and must say that I love the place. The free wifi, the good food (Stanford’s happy hour is a perfect place to kill an hour before a flight), the playthings for the kids.
But the latest great thing about the Portland airport is the parking garage. I’m not sure if you had occasion to go in it, but we now have a light over every parking spot that turns green if it’s unoccupied or red if there’s a car parked in it. And these lights link to a green/red light at the end of a row, and then another one at the entrance to a level of the structure. So you can find a spot effortlessly. Very impressive.
Just another thing that makes this techie traveler happy to be from Portland.