After The Dot Net

Riya, the Silicon Valley photo recognition start-up, was launched officially in the summer of 2006. Riya original plan was to recognize individual people in photos: After seeing several pictures of your daughter, for example, it started recognizing her in other photos, and thus auto tag them — helping you organize. Riya can also recognize other similar patterns, such as writing in signs. Within seven weeks of launch, Riya users had uploaded seven million photos — that’s compared to the two years it took for people to upload 10 million photos to Flickr. Chief Executive Munjal Shah said Riya is not perfect, comparing Riya with the smarts of a two year old. But it worked “good enough” he said.

Soon, though, he and his team noticed something unexpected: For every person who used Riya to search for their own photograph, twenty others were using it to search images on the public web. “They wanted a new public search engine that was smarter than the Google image search engine,” he said. “Our usage numbers kept going up,” he said.He realized he should respond to this feedback and shift Riya’s direction, even if it wasn’t in the company’s original plans.

So how will it work? Say you find a bathroom rug on eBay with a two-inch border with a favorite cross-stitch pattern. Riya will analyze the rug image, process its pixel structure for a histogram of color and shapes, and so on, and then match it against the database of images it has collected from the entire Web. Riya will show you the other places it has found the image, for example on Amazon.com where it selling for ten dollars cheaper. Riya gets a referral fee when you buy the Amazon.com rug. The uses are endless all it requires is imagination example trying to find a date who looks like Angelina Jolie!

Building its database isn’t trivial — images which will be collected and processed over the next three months, Munjal said. “It takes a lot of horse power. We’re building a massive data center.”

Venture firm Bay Partners pumped $15 million into Riya, a round announced in January.

The company plans to go after various markets, such as products, travel, vacation and landscape. He believes there may be a $100- to $200 million advertising and referral market in any one of these verticals.

The company employs 50 people, 44 of them engineers, and 14 of those Stanford PhDs. Every time we talk with Munjal, he brings up these engineering stats. It’s probably because he doesn’t want to end up like the dozens of online video sharing sites that YouTube is taking the cleaners. Deep technology is important, he said. “I think Riya’s got a better shot than most at really creating a billion dollar market,” he said.

All this was used to evolve a product called like.com. The search engine at like.com uses contents of photos to search and retrieve similar items. Riya, which employs 50 people, 44 of them engineers, and 14 of those Stanford PhDs, managed by professionals who are very motivated and want to make sure that this venture does not end up like dozens of online video and image sharing sites.

So the next time you see someone wearing something take a picture and look for similar products on like.com and you will not be disappointed.