- Toronto GirlGeek: the algorithms edition!
I am really excited to be speaking at the next Toronto Girl Geek evening. I remember attending one of the first Girl Geek dinners in London in 2005. It was organized by Sarah Blow, the founder of Girl Geeks. That evening was pretty much magical: I met Robert Scobble and Maryam Scobble. I also met Hugh MacLeod, Ben Metcalfe, Henriette Weber Andersen and a lot of awesome attendees whose names I can no longer recall unfortunately! It was a surprising evening, full of technology discussions, blogging, changing the world conversations and great wine – I vaguely remember a wine sponsorship there! Next week the Toronto Girl Geek evening is all about Algorithms. And that’s of course something I am super excited about!
Not only am I speaking but we will be hosting in our offices. I would suggest that you get a ticket, but I hear it is sold out! Can’t believe that there are that many people interested in hearing about algorithms!
Inspire more women and girls into a career in science, engineering or technology by supporting Girl Geek Dinners. Perhaps your company could host the next one?
- Introducing TinEye Imagemaps
As our TinEye fans know: our TinEye index grew beyond 2 billion images as of a couple of weeks ago. Now it is time for us to focus on going beyond just crawling to grow our index, by involving you (our content partners) and adding your image collections to the TinEye index.
A goal of TinEye is to help you find the author of an image, where it came from, where it is being used, where you can find additional images from the same author, where you can license the image or any information that you will find useful about your search image. So being able to grow our TinEye index by accepting contributor imagemaps will get us closer to this goal.
We are also working on having contributor images shown at the top of TinEye result pages. This makes it much easier for our users to identify important sources for the images they are looking for.
Today we are introducing the TinEye imagemap. This is a beta release.
What is a TinEye Imagemap?
It is a file that a site’s webmaster creates to tell TinEye’s crawlers exactly where to find all the images on the site.
Today, image collections from iStockphoto, Getty Images, Photoshelter, Masterfile, F1 online, wikipedia and more have been included in the 2 billion TinEye image index. If you own or manage an image centric website, we would like to add your images as well. Become familiar with our TinEye imagemap requirements and complete the imagemap submission form for consideration.
Please note that for the duration of our TinEye imagemap beta, submission priority will be given to:
- stock photography and editorial image collections
- art and illustration collections available for licensing
- archival and historical image collections
- creative commons image collections
As this is a beta release, we appreciate your comments, questions and suggestions. Happy searching!
And no, we have not forgotten about all of our TinEye fans: once we get more feedback with this beta release of our imagemaps, we will start accepting your imagemap submissions and not just stock photography and large image collections.
- 2B. 2B. 2B.
I am sure that our TinEye fans already noticed that we crossed our 2 billion image goal. We have been so busy we did not see the numbers flip! We added close to 25 million images to the TinEye index, bringing our index to 2,013,406,246! We will be celebrating in the ideeplex with some awesome table tennis – the team is competitive – and great beers and tacos! But don’t worry, we will be planning a 2 billion TinEye image party very soon. And you are invited!
We are also working on our TinEye Image Contributor beta. This is an XML based protocol that will allow webmasters to create a TinEye readable XML imagemap for their content. Stay tuned for details on Monday. We are excited about this release as it will allow image centric websites to point us to their content to add to the TinEye index. Our goal as always is to make sure that each image out there is linked to its creator.
In the meantime: happy searching! And don’t forget to check out our TinEye product blog for the latest news.
[Photograph (c) Kevin Dooley]
- When is sharing a photograph stealing?
The Red Tape on MSNBC chronicles the (mis)adventures of Stefanie Gordon whom you may not know at all but whose picture you have very likely seen: she is the person who shot this incredible photograph of the Space Shuttle Endeavour last launch.
“Short on sleep and worried about the recent loss of her job, Stefanie Gordon boarded a Delta flight from New York to Palm Beach at 6:30 a.m. on May 16. Still miffed after a late-night Yankees loss to the Red Sox, she took a photo out the window of her airplane seat with an iPhone, tweeted it to friends when she landed, then headed off to spend the day with her father.
By the time she was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, her iPhone was practically buzzing out of her lap, teeming with messages of congratulation and requests for interviews. Gordon’s now-famous photo of the space shuttle Endeavour soaring through the clouds got her an overwhelming amount of attention — her 15 minutes of fame, Internet style. It also landed her smack in the middle of an ethical and legal debate that may be as important as the future of the Internet itself.” …continued
Although Stefanie Gordon’s image has yet to make it into our TinEye index (but it will very soon), it is nice to see TinEye mentioned:
After the photo has been published online, it’s up to you to watch for infringers. Software can help. A free tool called TinEye looks for digital signatures of images — a sort of alert service for pictures — and will report if a picture is being used.
- Toronto is heading to Calgary!
Our next hacking event as part of HackDays is happening in Calgary. We just wrapped up our Waterloo Hackathon and are looking forward to meeting Calgary developers in June. If you are not familiar with our hackathons: we organize monthly hacking events that bring together the brightest developers across Canada. We work together in a day, in a space to hack and create awesome applications using local APIs. We select local APIs, make them available to participating developers with expert guidance from the API providers and an environment where you are going to be excited about hacking and creating! The hack day is also a competition: as a developer you will compete for great prizes and glory! And this is all done in a day! So if this is up your alley, join us in Calgary:
Date: Saturday June 4th, 2011 in Calgary!
Time: 9 AM to 6 PM
Registration: All developers are welcome to register. Registration fee is $10.00. Your registration includes breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks + the chance to meet other awesome developers and companies.
APIs: If you know of a local company with a fantastic API you would like to work with, please let them know about HackCGY drop us an email would love to hear from you.
Sponsors: HackCGY is brought to you by our incredible sponsors including: Freshbooks, iStockPhoto, TinEye and YellowPages. We are of course still looking for additional sponsors to make HackCGY the best it can be, so please drop us an email if you are interested in being a sponsor.
We have held HackDays in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Waterloo but if this is your first time attending our hack events, here is what to expect and how to prepare. We are looking forward to welcoming you all in Calgary.
- HackWaterloo: ready? set? go!
Did you know that we organize monthly hack events across Canada? We just wrapped up our latest hackathon in Ottawa and it was a blast. Developers from Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto built some great applications. We had an awesome time so when Ilya Grigorik, PostRank’s CTO, offered to host the next hackathon, we glady accepted! So hackers, developers and awesome people: join us in Waterloo on Saturday April 9th, 2011 for HackWaterloo.
When: Saturday April 9th, 2011
Where: PostRank’s Headquarters (uptown Waterloo)
Time: 9 AM to 6 PM
The format is pretty much our usual hackathon format so consider this your call to register and secure a spot!
- TinEye update
A small TinEye update for you fans: 12 million images added to the TinEye index. Bringing our database image index to 1,894,458,529.
[Photograph (c) Umberto Salvagin]
- Copyright Reform: yes, let’s go!
Copyright Reform
I am looking forward to seeing some of the copyright reform recommendations rolled out soon. If like me, you have tried to use the search functions to find copyright information for a photograph or any works, you know what I mean. You – like most of the Copyright Office users probably still have forehead bruises resulting from your head hitting a nearby concrete wall (or handy hard surface).
On all seriousness: it is about time to bring the Copyright Office forward. So if you are in Washington, join us for an afternoon conference: Toward a Copyright Office for the 21st Century, a Public Knowledge Conference discussing the future of the Copyright Office. This conference will build off of the ideas put forth in Public Knowledge’s recent whitepaper, “A Copyright Office for the 21st Century: Recommendations to the New Register of Copyrights”.
This is incredibly timely as the Librarian of Congress will be appointing the first new Register of Copyright since 1994. The new Register will be the first appointed in the Internet era, and will have an opportunity to shape the Copyright Office for the 21st Century.
I am excited to be joining the conversation and participating in a panel presentation this afternoon along side:
- Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, Copyright Clearance Center
- James Cavanaugh, National Director and Treasurer, American Society of Media Photographers
- Jule Sigall, Associate General Counsel – Copyright, Microsoft
- Respondent: Maria Pallante, Acting Register of Copyrights
- Moderator: Michael Weinberg, Public Knowledge
With the advances made in image search and image recognition based search, perhaps the next Copyright Office Database is simply the web!
- HackDay at the TinEye HQ
Did you know that we organize HackDays across Canada? Where awesome developers meet and build new application using APIs that we provide? Did you know that our hack events are the best hacking events ever? That the developers who join us kick ass? And the applications they build awesome? I bet you didn’t know. Join us next time.
Today we are eating our own dog food in the TinEye HQ and building a feature for a client. And I am looking forward to seeing it roll out at the end of the day so stay tuned. We are working hard, unlike our TinEye HQ dog:
Zazie
Zazie is totally chillin’. ah that’s what we will be doing at the end of the day when we hit deploy!
- TinEye is back online
And we are unbelievably happy about that! Happy searching!
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