- Business News Network (BNN) features TinEye
We were excited when Canada’s only all business specialty channel, the Business News Network (BNN), picked up the TinEye story and featured it on After Hours May 6th.We were even more excited when they asked us back to do another segment! Leila Boujnane, our CEO, was in studio with Kim Parlee and Andrew Bell on Friday, May 9th to talk about TinEye and the exciting things happening at Idée!
You can watch the five minute segment on Business News Network or pop by our website, we’ll have the link for you in the Press and Events section. Fast forward to 41:20 for the piece.
- Spring in Toronto means ‘mesh’ is in the air!
Interested in learning “How to Demo Like a Demon“? If your answer is yes, you should sign up for meshU this year!
Our CEO Leila Boujnane and David Crow, User Experience Evangelist at Microsoft, have teamed up for what is sure to be an exciting and informative session as part of three learning streams at the first ever meshU on Tuesday, May 20th.What is meshU?
meshU is a one-day event featuring small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network. The mesh organizers hope this addition to the mesh conference will meet a growing need in Toronto for practical, down-to-earth information about tools, knowledge and expertise for startups, web designers and developers of all kinds. meshU will be held the day before the mesh conference, and will be happening at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto.

As always, the team behind mesh, Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Mike McDerment, Rob Hyndman and Stuart MacDonald have brought together the best and brightest to present! With folks like Daniel Burka (Digg, Pownce), Kevin Hale (Infinity Box Inc, Wufoo) and Avi Bryant from Dabble DB, meshU is sure to be an amazing addition to the mesh experience.
Tickets are available online at eventbrite. The helpful folks at mesh are also available to answer questions or tell you a bit more about mesh and meshU. Mike McDerment is the right fellow for the job and he can be reached at mike[at]meshconference.com or call (647) 204-380.
Tickets to meshU ‘08 [May 20]
Tickets to mesh conference ‘08[May 21 & 22] Sold out
- Paul Bloore to present at Ruby on Rails Project Night, May 13th @ 6pm
The Idée team is busy this week! While our CEO is across the country in California speaking at Red Herring, our CTO is stepping in to present at tonight’s Ruby on Rails Project Night.Organized by Corina Newby from The System of Things (TSOT), the May Ruby on Rails Night will be held at the TSOT offices which will open at 5:45pm with presentations starting at 6pm. The interest has been high and with a crowd of about 40-50, a great venue and awesome presenters it will be a fun and informative night for all!
Tonight’s event will feature:
Steven Baker (quarter-turn.com), who will launch the evening by exploring “Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec”
Andrew Burke (shindigital.com), who returns to discuss ‘Using the “Command” Design Pattern Elegantly”
and our own Paul Bloore, co-founder and CTO of Idée Inc., feature presenter for the evening, who will demonstrate our highly successful image search APIs.
If you’d like to attend contact Corina to confirm your space. She can be reached at corina.newby@tsotinc.com or via the facebook event page.
- Leila Boujnane speaks on ‘Women CEOs in Tech’ panel at Red Herring on May 13th
Insightful roundtable sessions, VC and CEO key-note speakers and presentations by the most exciting start-ups in the region - sounds like just the place to find our CEO Leila Boujnane!Red Herring North America, which runs from May 12-14, is held in San Jose, California and offers the over 300 CEOs, venture investors, government officials and senior corporate business development executives an exciting three days of scheduled events and informal networking opportunities.
The Women CEOs in Tech roundtable is sure to be a lively and informative discussion and boasts an all-star list of participants from the tech sector. This Tuesday, May 13th, Lalee Sadighi, reporter for Red Herring, will moderate the panel which includes:
- FirstRain, Penny Herscher, President and CEO
- Infobright, Miriam Tuerk, President and CEO
- LogLogic, Patricia Sueltz, CEO
- Serus, Indu Navar, CEO
- Idée Inc., Leila Boujnane, CEO (that’s us!)
If you are in the area, drop by and say hello!
- Lunch 2.0 is back, mark your calendars for May 30th!
Join the great team at Wishingline for Toronto’s second Lunch 2.0 event happening Friday, May 30th, noon to 1:30 at the Wishingline studio in Toronto.Our hosts had this to say about the upcoming occasion:
“Come out and meet like-minded people from Toronto’s design and tech communities and help us inaugurate our new studio space, rock out on the finger drums, and check out the comings and goings of our strange neighbours across the street all while enjoying yummy pizza and fizzy or otherwise bubby beverages.”
Sounds like an event not to be missed! What’s also great is that lunch is totally free, just make sure you register soon as space is very limited. Directions, tickets and all the rest of the details are available at Eventbrite.

What’s Lunch 2.0 you ask? Check the official Canadian Lunch 2.0 website to find out.We look forward to see everyone at the Wishingline offices May 30th!
- Spot the iPhone!
Over a year ago Jason Kottke photoshopped a Windows desktop onto an iPhone and posted it on his very popular blog. Yesterday it was spotted on an Australian TV news show. Today, I used TinEye to see if indeed this wonderful photoshopped iPhone (I mean who would not want an iPhone running Windows XP) could be spotted anywhere else. And you guessed it: this little image is famous!The iPhone running Windows XP is even on eBay for sale!
- Big Index! Getting Bigger…
Indices…That’s what dreams are made of! Our TinEye search index is approaching 500,000,000 images; that’s half a billion folks!

Killer Kitten on TinEye. View full size.Half a billion may sound like a lot, doesn’t it? Well it is really just the beginning and that’s a tiny portion of all the images online today.
We are officially launching TinEye, our image identification based search engine, in a closed beta. What does this mean? You can request an invitation and servers permitting we will provide one! And you will get to play and experiment with the world’s first image identification search engine.
TinEye has been garnering great reviews already, from “the next frontier for web search” from the National Post to “indistiguishable from magic” from Jeff Barr, Amazon Evangelist to “image-recognition company that is second to none” Mathew Ingram.
You are all familiar with the Google or text based approach to searching: insert keywords in the search field and retrieve search results. TinEye uses an image as input instead. Rather than entering text, you upload an image to TinEye or you give it an image URL. It’s that simple! TinEye then uses our search index to retrieve where your search image has appeared in all the websites that we have indexed. No small feat.
And for your viewing eyes the TinEye video:
- Idée CEO Leila Boujnane participating on the CIX Innovation Success Stories panel!
The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) conference is being held in Toronto April 29-30th and brings together Canada’s hottest new and innovative technology companies with the who’s who of North American investors. As part of the two-day innovation conference and showcase, key industry experts (including our own Leila Boujnane!) will share inspiring insights, ideas and success stories.
This event is a great opportunity to network with funders, pitch your story, learn from other entrepreneurs by watching their pitches and check out the innovation and entrepreneurship landscape in Toronto!
Want to attend? Register here. Want to see our CEO in action? Panel details below:
Canadian Innovation Success Stories
Meet the leader of an innovative company that has made it happen! What are the key reasons for their success? What adversity did they need to overcome to succeed and how did they do it? What did they learn along the way?
Tuesday April 29th
2:50 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
Carlu Concert Hall, 444 Yonge Street, TorontoIan Portsmouth, Editor & Associate Publisher of PROFIT Magazine, will host the panel which also includes Justin Belobaba (Founder & CEO, Medical Telcom Group), Ron Neumann (Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Communitech) and Jeremy Wright (CEO, b5media).
The phenomenal “Top 20” hottest Canadian innovators selected to present this year include Brainpark, Akoha, Redwood Technologies and HomeZilla, to name a few!
Redwood Technologies was recently profiled by the CBC, learn about their story here.
For more information on the Canadian Innovation Exchange conference and a complete list of presenters and participants please visit CIX.
- Leila Boujnane to Keynote StartupCamp II in Toronto!
I will be keynoting StartupCamp II in Toronto next week. If you are not familiar with StartupCamp, the setup is simple: 5 start ups get to present to an (eager) audience. Their respective pitches are 5 minutes. The audience gets 10 minutes to pepper them with questions. StartupCamp is organized by StartupNorth and the event has been so popular that tickets sold out weeks ago! So if you are not holding your StartupCamp ticket you will be looking forward to StartupCamp III. I am looking forward to a great evening and now off to thinking about my keynote!
Startup Camp II Toronto
When: Tuesday April 29th, 2008
Where: Canadian Innovation Exchange - The Carlu at 444 Yonge Street
Time: 7PM - 10 PM
- Project Codename TinEye Launched in Private Beta
We not-so-quietly launched our internet-wide image search engine codenamed TinEye to our private beta testers today.
TinEye does for images what Google does for text.
Just as you are familiar with entering text in Google to find web pages that contain that text, using TinEye, you enter an image to find pages where that particular image (and modified versions of it) appears.
It’s a big step for us because our algorithms are now thousands of times more efficient than they were just a few years back. Uploading an image, and looking for matches in an index of over 487,000,000 images in real time is now a possibility. It’s something we’ve dreamed of doing for a long time, and now our beta testers are all over it.
Here are some of our favourite search results. The top image is the query image, and beneath it is the results.
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