

Ask HN: Please grill us on our YC idea - cjr

Hey, we're at Haus in SF right now and wondered if anyone out there would help us out and want to grill us on our YC idea adifyit.com, our interview is Monday.
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semisight
This is a very neat idea. A couple of questions come to mind:

Do you rely on an outside source for picture identification? If so, what's
your plan if/when it fails? If not, do you plan to build your own in-house
system?

Have you tested whether your code has any impact in page load speed (Y-Slow
and company)?

Related to Q1, if you have your own in-house system, will you have your own
database of pictures for feature extraction/matching, and how do you plan to
make it large enough (and grow it fast enough) to accomodate the wide variety
of pictures that people take and post?

I think that if you implement this well, you potentially have a real winner
here. Best of luck to you!

~~~
cjr
Thanks for your reply. We are building the picture identification in-house, we
have a crude working demo as a proof of concept that the tech is good enough.

We've used the Amazon product API to build our databsae, there are ~80m
products in there. We're starting one vertical at a time (the algo works best
for highly textured products such as watches/book/cd covers so we've started
there). We build an in-memory index of image-descriptors which is queried when
trying to match a product. As we start seeing other product type, we'll expand
beyond amazon.

As for scaling, the index is the one component that isn't trivial to
parallelise. Once we get to a stage where a single box can't store it in
memory, the first step would be to shard it, with different indexes per
product category. Query images will be run through a product-categorisation
algo to determine which indexes they need to be run against. This is how we
think we'll approach this, from previous experience, but will investigate
properly (if) we get large enough.

In terms of affecting page load, our plugin will load async, as will the
results returned from the image matching algorithm, so it should be fairly
negligible impact.

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hardik988
Great concept - could be the future in advertising.

But like any ad network, how do you guys plan on keeping up with splogs (spam
blogs) abusing your service ?

~~~
dmmalam
As our ads are affiliate links (CPA), it shouldn't be a problem as a user has
to actually buy something for payments to go through.

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tnorthcutt
_Adify.it links are only shown when users engage and mouse-over a product._

What about mobile?

~~~
cjr
For mobile as there's no concept of hover, we'd put an always-on button in a
user-specified corner of the image. When the button is tapped our ad overlay
would show.

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damoncali
The "Why trust us..." headline made me wonder if it works very well. Why
wouldn't I trust you?

~~~
cjr
Thanks for your feedback. There is an element of trust involved as we are
going to modify the look/feel of the host site. But if this causes potential
customers to wonder if it works well, then we should probably reword it.

~~~
damoncali
For what it's worth, here was my reaction: At first I was thinking "cool".
then I read that headline, and thought, "I hadn't thought of this as something
I need to trust people with. In fact, now that I think about it, I bet that's
really hard to pull off." Then I thought about the crazy non-contextual
intellisense stuff out there and was wondering if the whole mess is even
possible without turning the website into a spamfest.

~~~
cjr
That's good to know. We've changed it to 'Why _use_ adifyit...'. Right now if
we are not confident that we have found a product match, we just don't show
anything, so won't turn the site into a spamfest.

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igorsyl
Close but no cigar <http://taggify.net>

------
teem
<http://stippleit.com/>

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tonyjwang
Under "Get started in minutes" Its should be It's.

Cool idea.

~~~
cjr
Cool thanks, fixed.

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bkyan
How do you determine where the ad dot appears in the picture?

~~~
dmmalam
Our algos can work out where the product is in the image. Technically it's the
centre of the convex hull of the set of matched keypoints

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GoofyGewber
That's a really cool idea, good luck!

~~~
cjr
Thanks!

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Mz
If you haven't yet, you could try answering some of the questions here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896121>

Maybe answering them publically would get some feedback?

Best of luck.

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bkyan
How did your interview go?

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Mz
Oh, and clickable: <http://adifyit.com/>

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biopharma_guy
Go to this thread below and grill yourself with these 34 questions.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896121>

You perhaps will find yourself where you are in the application. By the way,
the idea is cool. But does your algorithms advanced enough to distinguish
between items that can be bought (commercials) compared to those can't (human
face, nature photographs etc to example a few)?

~~~
cjr
Thanks for your reply. Yes, the algorithm would match against product images,
so most likely faces and nature photographs wouldn't match any images in our
product database.

Here is an example of what the ads would look like on our site dump.ly:

<http://dump.ly/y3uyGE2hpn2j>

~~~
debacle
There's no link to buy Scarlett Johansson.

~~~
cjr
Yeah, if only...

