

Polar Rose releases photo sharing site - tll
http://www.polarrose.com

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wallflower
There was a company called Riya that had some similar, advanced face detection
technology. It launched in 2006 as a photo sharing site with face detection.
However, relatively soon it shifted direction. It may not bode well for
PolarRose that Riya relaunched as Like.com after deciding that licensing its
face-detection algorithms would not be as good a business path as allowing
people to search (and shop) visually.

<http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/06/technology/riyastartup.biz2>

Riya received funding of $4M (Series A) and $15M (Series B) and their
Bangalore and SV-based teams (mostly computer vision Ph.D's) developed the
technology over a period of 2 years. $5.2M for PolarRose is impressive, if
they have developed equivalent technology.

It is possible that Riya's technology is behind iPhoto's face recognition. Or
maybe Apple developed its own technology. Either way, face recognition now
seems to be on it's way to a commodity technology and feature.

"Worked with the US team of 14 Stanford Computer Vision PhDs, and 6
Engineering and Management members from Cornell and Stanford - led and grew
the team at Bangalore from a one-man-army to 30 engineers and 4 researchers."

<http://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepgain>

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ktharavaad
Their face detection/recognition technology isn't even that great from my
informal tests, I think any graduate student + openCV can come close. the
pittpatt one is much better.

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swombat
That's a pretty editorialised headline! Why not just "Polar Rose releases
photo sharing site"?

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jemmons
When I think "Polar Rose", I think "A service that encumbers photos with
hovering icons that in no way indicate their purpose while obscuring my
picture."

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pclark
$5M doesn't seem a crazy amount for 2.5 years -- I think there is some pretty
hardcore technology powering this site.

