- TinEye Mobile
What could possibly have us more excited than the release of our image search engine TinEye 4 months ago? It’s our killer new TinEye Mobile application.
The idea is very simple: Using our TinEye Mobile application installed on your smartphone take a photograph of a product (a CD, DVD, book or game etc.) you would like more information about, we’ll identify the item using our image recognition algorithms and then send you on to read reviews, sample music or do price comparisons.
Let’s take a real example: our first mobile release is TinEye Music. This is mobile searching for music on your iPhone. Take a photograph of an album cover and we will compare your image to over a million album covers we have indexed and send you to the iTunes page where you can preview or buy the songs from the album. TinEye Music will be released shorty – pending QA and App Store approval – but you get the idea! And all of this is done using our image recognition technology. No typing, no barcodes. Shoot and search.
I made a little video, very rough but that should give you an idea of what we are talking about!
- TinEye still down
TinEye fans, we were hoping to get TinEye back online this evening but TinEye is fighting us. Our index upgrade has been completed but we are now battling servers and there is a lot of them and only a few of us. We will get things back online and appreciate your patience.
- TinEye: down and up!
TinEye is down for a bit of maintenance. TinEye is getting a 1 billion image index and he will be back shortly after his oil change. Stay tuned. We expect to bring him back online this evening. In the meantime if you have never visited the Idée labs, this is your chance to play with in the multicolr lab where you can search 10 million creative commons images by multicolour. Stay tuned!
- Vive la différence!
I never thought that I would see TinEye and Jacques Derrida mentioned in the same sentence. This is awesome! I still remember late night conversations about Derrida’s work… his books are still on my bookshelves but I have to admit that I have not pulled them out in years! Nonetheless Alejandro in Amsterdam has a little write up about TinEye and how TinEye is really an image search engine to spot the differences in images or photographs. Correct! TinEye spots the difference.
I need to bring up a couple of corrections to Alejandro’s post: TinEye has now indexed 901 million images and not 487 million images it also does not directly compete with text search engines such as Google, AltaVista or Yahoo. It is in a category of its own: the image search category using image identification (or recognition) technologies. Of course you can use Google, Yahoo or any other search engine to search for images but what TinEye really answers are two simple questions: where has an image appeared and how has it been used; and it does that using image recognition. TinEye does not replace keyword searching, it actually enhances it and is an additional search method that can yield better results than text searching because TinEye can index an image even when there are no keywords associated with the image or no keywords in the proximity of the image.
So back to work, because TinEye is not going to get better by itself!
- Search Flickr for Multicolrful Images
Our Multicolr Search Lab is the first tool on the web that enables searching by colour through 10 million creative commons images from Flickr.
Idée’s Piximilar is the technology behind the Multicolr Search Lab. While most colour search tools can only identify the dominant colour in an image, our technology allows you to choose up to 10 colours from a palette of 120 different shades (thought it can handle any colour palette imaginable).
Cameron Parkins from creativecommons.org says our Multicolr Search “is a ton of fun and a great way to find some really beautiful CC-licensed images” and Website magazine calls it “a must for bloggers, or anyone else who wants to get photos with a specific color scheme.”
Here’s an example search by blogger Aditi
You can adjust your search results by adding more of certain colours and less of others to feature your favourite colours more prominently in the images returned. Abhijeet shared our colour search tool with the readers over at makeuseof.com and demonstrated how you can dynamically search with just a few clicks.
From a selection of orange-based images…
…to the ‘pop’ and interest of oranges, greens and browns.
As you pick and choose your colours the search results automatically refresh with images that represent your new colour selections. When you click on any image it directs you to that photo on Flickr so you can learn more.
Looking for images of buildings? Try a grey-blue search combo, pulling in the colours of stone and sky.
Bryan Lee who blogs on OriginalProgram.Intermissions has a really great example of Multicolr in action with his black and purple search, below. His thoughts? “Here’s a great resource for finding color coordinated photos through Flickr. Whether you are designing and need it for storyboards, or simply want to mess around on the web, this makes for a great little web app.”
Here’s another search idea. Using bright colours and plenty of white I created a “comic book and cartoon characters” inspired search:
The combinations are endless.
- Lunch 2.0 and HAL 9000
What does HAL have to do with Lunch 2.0?Well, it turns out that HAL 9000 (“the computer I wished I had”, said Don Millman) was the winning response to the question “My first computer was a…”. This question appeared on each of the Lunch 2.0 name tags at last week’s event.
Lest you think nametags a silly affair, not only did it encourage a lively conversation amongst all the attendees about their childhood computers (the Apple II and Vic-20 were the most popular by far) but there was also a prize for the most inventive answer.
Hosted by the folks at Codesta and scanR and attended by a diverse group of locals interested in the Toronto tech scene, the latest installment of Lunch 2.0 was a delicious success.
Many thanks to Dan Bowman and Pat McCarten from Codesta who organized and hosted (you can read their post about the event over on Codesta’s blog). The lunch was phenomenal (no end of raves about those chocolate cookies!) and there was plenty of time for chatting and learning about what the other attendees were involved in or just excited to talk about.
Thanks again Dan and Pat and all the others who came by to say hello and grab a bite.
We Idéalists are already looking forward to the next event!
- Toronto AWS Start-Up Tour
Last week we gave you a heads up about the upcoming AWS Start-Up Tour. Here are a few more details about the Toronto stop.The team from Amazon will be in town on September 15th (that’s been changed from the 16th) and our CEO and CTO will be speaking at the half-day meet and learn event showcasing companies and technologies that use AWS services.
Last year’s AWS Start-Up Tour featured AideRSS, Geezeo, Renkoo, SmugMug, Slideshare, Animoto, Ooyala and more. You can check out a number of their presentations from the 2007 tour over on slideshare.
If you are interested in attending this year’s event here in Toronto, head on over to the Start-Up Tour site to learn a bit more or register today.
Where: MaRS Discovery Centre
Who: Local CEOs, CTOs, founders of start-ups and investors
When: 2pm-5pm, followed by a networking reception
Event Schedule:
2:00-2:20 Opening Statements by Adam Selipsky, VP, Amazon Web Services
2:20-3:00 AWS Presentation by Mike Culver, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
3:15-4:05 Presentations:
Carlos Barrettara, Co-Founder, Polar Mobile
Ilya Grigorik, Co-Founder, AideRSS
Chris Thiessen, Founder, Zoomii
Leila Boujnane, Chief Executive Officer, Idee Inc. (that’s us!)
Farhan Thawar, Chief Software Architect, I Love Rewards4:05-4:35 Q&A
4:35-5:00 Closing Statements by Adam Selipsky, VP, Amazon Web Services
5:00-7:00 Cocktail/Networking Reception
If that doesn’t sound like a slam-dunk of an event for start-ups in the early stages of a project that might benefit from the AWS offerings, I don’t know what would. See you there!
- Multicolr Search: now 100% pure Creative Commons
What’s even better than a Multicolr search lab with 3 million interesting images?
One with 10 million Creative Commons images!
That’s right, the Flickr Multicolr search lab just received a facelift and now it works with 10 millions Creative Commons images from Flickr.
Search based on your favourite colour combinations, find fantastic images, discover new photographers and all the images you find will be Creative Commons photographs! How cool is that?
Let’s give it a whirl.
Here I’ve picked just black and white, you can see my search colours on the right side of the images, below the colour picker grid. As we go through some examples you can even try them out by clicking on any of the screenshots.
Let’s add some *pop* to that last image search by adding in a vibrant pink. You can see on the right, I’ve just selected the colour from the palette and added it to my search. To delete any colour you just click on the tiny trash can shown with the colour selection.
Interested in images with water or sky? By picking just blue tones our search lab will lead you to lovely images of the sea and air interspersed with other great finds.
Love black and whites? Key up a grey-scale set of images with just a few clicks.
And remember, you can adjust your search results by adding more of certain colours and less of others.
Here are two searches for yellow and purple images, the first is heavily weighted to the yellows, the other has much more purple. Take a quick look on the right hand side and you’ll see how it works – the more I added a specific colour, the more prominently it is represented in the images returned.
Click on any image while you are searching and it will take you right to the Flickr page for that image. It’s that simple.
Still not sure what this is all about?
The Flickr Multicolr search is just one of the Idée Labs. Idée Labs is Idée’s technology playground for visual search and image recognition. You can experiment and play with various implementations of Idée’s visual search technologies.
In addition to the newly updated Flickr Multicolr Search, you can also try out our other labs including the Alamy Multicolour Search, Visual Search and even a BYO Image (that’s bring your own) Search. Go ahead, give them all a try (they’re free)!
- The AWS Start-Up Tour comes to Toronto
Amazon’s Web Services Start-Up Tour will be stopping in Toronto this month for a half-day meet, greet and learn event. Idée’s CTO Paul Bloore and CEO Leila Boujnane have been tapped to present to entrepreneurs and developers interested in learning more about how local startups have been innovating on the AWS platform.
From Amazon:
What does every tech start-up need, besides a great idea? The ability to scale their business and their infrastructure – on demand. Amazon Web Services provides entrepreneurs access to Amazon’s robust infrastructure and technological resources via services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Amazon Web Services is holding several half-day events, in start-up “hot spots” around the country. Come learn how Amazon Web Services empowers entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainable growth.
The AWS Start-Up Tour is a great opportunity for founders and leaders of start-up/early-stage companies and VCs to find out more about Amazon Web Services through the real-world experiences of others who have developed unique and creative ideas that incorporate the AWS platform (like our recently released image search engine, TinEye).
The event will be held on September 15th from 2-5pm and ends with a cocktail/networking reception from 5-7pm.
Involved with or thinking about a project that might benefit from the AWS offerings? This event might be for you. Learn more or RSVP. Don’t forget to say hello to our CEO and CTO while you’re there!
- TinEye: now searching 900 million images!
That’s right folks, we just added another 200 million images to TinEye (give or take a few million). Now you can search over 900,000,000 images in real time, comparing any image against our index of almost one billion images crawled from the web.
What does this mean for you, TinEye searcher? More matches!
Let’s try out a few example searches using the same images I used in an earlier blog post. Just a little over a month ago (when the index was a tad over 700 million images) we took a look at some well known pictures from across the web to see how many of them TinEye could find. Now we can try those searches again to see what kind of results will we get after adding almost a quarter of a billion more images to the index.
For starters, let’s try Gerard Butler and his well know shot from the movie 300. Originally we found 526 results, with our bigger index TinEye locates 672 results with some interesting new edits. Try the TinEye search.
The very popular Creation of Adam came in at 635 results last time. Now? 756. Try the TinEye search.
Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez was also a popular image, coming in at 277 results. With our updated index of over 901 million images, the Las Meninas search turns up 313 results now. Try the TinEye search.
To learn more about TinEye, the world’s first image search engine, you can read the TinEye FAQ or head over to TinEye.com and register your account to start searching right away. Don’t forget to let us know what you think.
Happy searching!
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