Munjal Shah is the CEO and co-founder of Riya, a new photo search engine that uses face recognition. Shah talks about developing Riya, its revolutionary technology, searching for images on the Web, and entrepreneurship.
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Episode 15: A Snapshot of Entrepreneurship
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"There really is no really good search technology for photos. That's what we want to be," says Munjal Shah, the CEO and co-founder of
Riya.
This video interview is really about two different things. In the first half, Shah goes into some detail about the technology behind Riya, a photo search engine that uses photo and text recognition to identify images. Later in the interview, he talks about entpreneurship and is (refreshingly) cynical about the Web 2.0 hoopla.
Most of the photos on your hard disk have names like IMG20030506.jpg. Shah wondered: What if I could find all the photos I wanted, whether the picture is of me or the Eiffel tower? If you take 600 pictures on a vacation, you probably won't take the time to label everything in them. Riya's key breakthrough it its contextual face-or person-recognition. For example, someone takes a picture of you at a party; you're wearing a green shirt. Three minutes later there's a less clear photo of you, still wearing the same shirt, but perhaps your face is turned away from the camera. Riya's context analysis figures out both photos because it knows the images are in the same time and place.
Or, at least, it will. Riya is in beta right now: "very beta beta," says Shah. Nonetheless, they already have seven million photos uploaded in the last seven weeks. "We reached a million photos in one day," he said.
A lot of people use Riya as a public search engine to look inside the photograph. Eventually, you might use it as part of a shared set of photos (Volker did promise to send me a copy of that picture, but he never did), or as part of a public search. Shah doesn't expect Riya to replace Flickr, photo-printing services or their competitors, which serve an existing need; they just want to help people search through the images and auto-tag them.
That's the business they're in — but many developers will be interested in how the company and technology are put together. "We have a pretty geeky cast of characters, and we're pretty proud of it," say Shah. Unlike a lot of sites, which could be built by any set of developers given the right idea, at Riya, Shah says that the world has "only a handlful of people with the right research background" to build this. His development team is spread out between California and India.
Shah has more to say about the Web 2.0 hype. With Web 1.0, there was nobody out there: "You could claim your piece of the land," says Shah. Now, the rush is over; to succeed you have to displace someone else. "Everybody is coming in with something just a little better than the last guy," he says. Maybe you'll get lucky, but that's not enough. Instead, go in with something a whole lot better, which people really need.
Today, Shah says, there's a lot of focus on how you can make money by launching something in 6 weeks — just as in 1999. "We're all just starting to count eyeballs again, when they're not equal."
If you've been thinking of hanging out an entrepreneureal shingle, or you're just interested in how innovation works, you'll really enjoy this video interview in our Great Minds in Development series.
To watch the video in Windows Media Player, click here.
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