Owen Brunette

A new visual search engine has been launched by a Canadian company TinEye.

Instead of entering text describing an object such as the phrase “tiger jumping” you upload or provide the URL of a photo.

But this is far more than a simple file search. I tried with jpg and gif photos and it found both file types on the internet regardless of which I provided. It even found photos where they had been cropped or the colour and size changed.

Passing it a collage of several photos it was able to identify other photos containing one of the component photos.

Clearly it is performing a rapid search in its database for some kind of signature of the visual look of the image and this is allowing a range of images containing that pattern to be identified.

It would seem to be mainly useful for researching the origins and usage of a photo in order to obtain, or identify abuse of, the usage rights.

I was very impressed with the tests I performed.

If you would like to give it a go it is at http://tineye.com/

I would be intereseted in hearing where people find the limits are. I ran out of good tests without hitting a problem.

IP, Toys photo

Scott Shaffer has nicely written up a decision by the US Patent Office to reject 95 patents in the area of visual / bar code recognition. There are a large number of dubious patents in the field that have been successfully blocking a number of ventures (By causing liability concerns for funders), including one venture of mine, in the area of visual code recognition. Many things in the field have been too obvious for too long but not quite implementable outside the lab, due to other technical availability limitations, so companies have spent their time filing patents around the subject.

The decision is one less hurdle for the project which got as far as a prototype before we realized what the patent situation was. It seems that several other related patents should fall for the same reason which is going to allow progress in the field once more. The immediate beneficiaries are OEMs using UPC and other bar code scanning solutions and users of QR Codes which are a direct rival of a proprietary NeoMedia code pattern which has sold partly on the patent liability fears NeoMedia and others were able to point out.

IP

In a lecture by Professor Lord (Robert) May of Oxford he discusses the problems of co-operative association. How groups of people co-operate to manage shared resources and manage problems jointly. It offers some clues to the real challenges for unrelated groups managing common assets such as the environment, oil or water. The mp3 of the lecture can be found here.

Governance cooperation, global, Governance

Electronic news kiosk

The kind of project so many of us would love to get around to. Well, me at least.

It contains a Power Mac G3 which wirelessly receives news paper page images and runs a 3D display of them. It seems it would be very easy to do this with an Apple TV in HD. It has a built in screen saver that gracefully pulls photos from flickr and you could feed something suitable into the flickr account.

There are now several wi-fi digital picture frames from $150 to $170 on the market that would allow all kinds of kiosk options to be constructed in any container. Most of the frames seem to connect to a PC application over wi-fi rather than using RSS so far.

So what kind of a container would you put your kiosk display in?

Toys kiosk, makeit, projects

I just read again David Meerman Scott’s free e-book on Viral marketing. This and similar descriptions of the marketing process give one an understanding of how a successful viral marketing campaign, or now social marketing campaign, can be created but we know that most of these campaigns fail. To be fair Scott makes this point. I was also at a live webcast by Mike Volpe of Hubspot where he stated that your staff should be so excited about their product that they can make a viral campaign work for any product. These are all worthwhile presentations but I am still a skeptic about viral marketing of a lot of product lines because it assumes that the purchasing decision makers are also so excited about the purchase that they are connecting with the network mavens. While this is true of Harry Potter fans is it true of electrical component purchasers? People read when they buy a car and even a car wax but not before they stop at a car wash or buy a chamois. People do refer to their networks but only for some unusual purchases. I am convinced that most products and services still need a blend of active outbound promotion as well as influencing the key communicators and their networks. With some products such as hubspot’s products this may be so far to one side that influencing bloggers is all that is needed. What I have no doubt about is that if you are in the words of Mike Volpe, able to identify something in your product which is “exceptional, cool or remarkable” in your business you should be taking your passion for it and sharing that as viral content with social networks.

Thinking about the very average business, such as the five dry cleaners within three blocks of my New York apartment it is clear that they need outbound marketing, printed door hangers, coat hangers and window offers as well as word of mouth and are unlikely to benefit from, let alone survive, by relying upon contacting nearby bloggers.

Marketing ebooks, Marketing, social, viral