- Happy Thanksgiving
Here in Canada we are celebrating Thanksgiving today so our offices are closed.
[via wikipedia]: The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. Frobisher’s Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming. He had safely returned from a search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. The feast was one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations by Europeans in North America. Frobisher was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him — Frobisher Bay.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
- Google + colour searching
Well it is about time that the Google folks mimicked the Canadian search giants – yes, that’s us! Google introduced colour search to image searching. Nice. Of course it will be awesome! Still no multicolour on Google but you can try a simple hack to get the poor man’s multicolour on Google: search for a colour using a keyword (for example blue sky) and pick a different colour from the drop down. Voila! No great image search results but hey it is a start…
Now if you want the play with the real deal in multicolour searching head over to the Idée lab!
Love how a blog post on LifeHacker about Google’s colour search moves into a full discussion of Idée’s technologies namely: TinEye and Multicolor search. Fun times in the Ideeplex!
- Passion at work
From Mavericks at work
“.. in business, as in basket ball, the smart take from the strong – that the best way to outperform the competition is to outthink the competition.. ” and it’s the “..mavericks do the work that matters most – the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation..” totally driven by passion!
Which makes me really excited about the sold out Refesh event on Monday: where passion meets ignite presentations!
We will start the evening with a passion presentation by Peter Flaschner followed by 6 Ignite presentations and since I am the last one that evening (and it is Monday too!), I will make my TinEye Ignite presentation extra tasty!
StayFresh: 7 PM – 10 PM, Centre for Social Innovation @ 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120 (Map)
Ignite Speakers:
- Erin Bury, RedWire
- Rachel Azagury, CreatingABuzz
- Saul Colt, Freshbooks
- Kieran Huggins, MyTTC
- Noah Godfrey, GigPark
- Leila Boujnane, Idée Inc.
Photograph (c) marfis75
- Open TinEye! And other stuff…
Well folks we’ve heard you loud and clear: “We don’t want to log in to use TinEye“. Good news! TinEye is now open for anyone and everyone to use, without the need to log in or register. Our registered friends – and there are almost 200,000 of you – however, will enjoy some great perks.
And there have been some other changes too!
- Registered users of TinEye will get the opportunity to try out new features first, and provide feedback. You will also be able to link to and share your search results with friends. You will also have the option to keep a search history, including a gallery of images with search dates and the number of results found. And don’t forget that registered users can subscribe to the TinEye newsletter to stay in the loop. Now would you just go and register?!
- We introduced automatic discard of search images after one hour. If you are unregistered–or if you are registered and have disabled search history in your profile–anything you upload to TinEye for search is discarded after an hour.
- We updated the TinEye plugin for FireFox to version 0.5. This update includes a bug fix where if text is highlighted with a background image beneath it, the plugin is not activated.
- The little business of ads appearing on TinEye. Well, they have arrived because little TinEye wants some fluids (especially Robot Oil and Bourbon). You want a free reverse image search engine right?
- We made improvements to search speed and you should be able to play with a faster and sharper TinEye.
Just for the new folks: TinEye is still only searching a 1 billion image index which means if you don’t find a match for your image search it is not the image recognition technology, it is the index! But now that we have this release out the door we will go back to working on the little things: like growing our index!
We appreciate your feedback so keep the kudos and love coming.
So what should you be searching for this morning? Well how about the Obama Hope image that is all the rage this morning? or the little angry baby? Happy searching folks and welcome to the future of image search brought to you by the good folks at Idée.
- Will the real Obama Hope photograph stand up?
I am sure you are wondering what does image recognition have to do with Obama? Me too! A couple of days ago – this is super old news for the blogosphere! – James Danziger posted about how he spent months searching for the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used to create his Obama Hope image. I am sure you have all seen the Obama Hope work?Reading James’ post (which I linked to a couple of days ago) I thought boy if only he had access to the image recognition we take for granted within the Ideeplex walls, his months of research could have been shortened to minutes (James, meet TinEye. TinEye meet James. Now be nice)! But I digress: upon hitting publish on my short post, I received a comment from Waldir who pointed me to a series of Flickr photograph where Stevesimula identifies another photograph as the original. Bam! Would the real Obama Hope photograph please please stand up? No really! Sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that escape you: well, champion how about using our image recognition technology and comparing all the contenders? I mean we can surely spot the fakers? That’s what we ended up doing yesterday but unfortunately I did not have time to post about it. So the results are in and the winner is: Mannie Garcia who shot Obama for the Associated Press.
Stevesimula was the first one to complete his own analysis and came to the above conclusion before we did, we basically took our sophisticated image recognition technology and confirmed his finding.
Tom over at Phillynews did an awesome detective job to locate the original Obama photograph. Read his sleuthing!
Here is what we did: we took the Obama Hope poster and matched it against the two potential source candidate images. For this we used the image comparison engine of TinEye’s bigger, more powerful brother: PixID. If you thought TinEye can compare images, you should see what PixID can do! PixID takes a detailed look at the patterns of the pixels images, creating digital fingerprints of the source and target images. It can find a small partial match in the fingerprints, even if the images have been heavily transformed. Edits can include crops, flips, rotation, skews or as in this case – literal posterization of the image.
PixID can also calculate a sub-pixel accurate transformation matrix that shows how the images best align to each other. We used that to produce the images shown below. Basically Mannie Garcia’s photograph was the best match.
Below you can view the results. As you mouse over each poster, it will swap to the best possible alignment of the source image we compared it to. If you toggle the images back and forth, you can see the real winner is obvious.
This is the Reuters images which was initially identified by James as the correct match for the Obama Hope poster.
As you mouse over the image to the right, to toggle between the poster and the aligned photograph, you will see that the alignment seems a bit off. Clearly Obama’s head and ears do not line up well at all! So what’s going on? It turns out that the mathematically best alignment possible was to have the lips and nose line up properly (take a look and you will see that they do). If you force the head and ears to line up, then the nose and mouth will be way off. Either way this is not looking like a good match to us.
Now mousing over this image shows a different story. The alignment is near perfect. No question this is a better match. Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Unless of course there is an even better match out there!
- TinEye: the ‘go to’ search engine for images
TinEye fan Jeff left us a quick note to let us know that he spied TinEye in action over on Digg. The post in question – Awesome Spaghetti Junction, what city is this? – included the image below and the simple question:
What city is this?
How can you find out more about an image such as this one when the image is all you have? Simple. Use TinEye.com. TinEye is the only search engine able to find your exact image in over a billion images crawled from the web.
Digg user ka9dgx used TinEye to find the image in a National Geographic Traveler story about Bangkok, Thailand. TinEye also located the original image titled “The Veins of Bangkok” on Flickr, just one of the 26 different instances of this image found on the web.
And who took this shot? Trey Ratcliff, a part-time photographer that I first learned about back in August when I wrote this post about Copyright and Creative Commons. You can see more of Trey’s amazing images by visiting his blog Stuck in Customs.
Click the image below to try the TinEye search yourself and discovery where else Trey’s image has travelled online. Still need to get your TinEye account? Grab one here.
Image: Trey Ratcliff
- To pose, perchance to sleeveface…
As we mentioned last week, the sleeveface contest at the idéeplex during our TinEye Music beta release party was a ton of fun. Now it’s time to select the winners of our sleeveface-off.
To // Sleeveface // : one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.
Here’s the official “How to Sleeveface” video:
As we told our friends at the iParty, the best of the sleeveface snapshots will win a prize. Jen Dodd clearly pulled off a winning sleeveface with her Nina Hagen look below, so she’s queued up for a prize for sure.
Who else do you think deserves a little something for their sleevefacing efforts? Leave us your comments with your top two picks from the photos below and we’ll tally up the votes and award two more prizes.
Steve Jobs says “there’s one more thing…”
Alannah Myles looking fierce
Superman at the idéeplex (looking a little blurry!)
Bob Marley contemplates image search
J.Lo poses (FYI, it’s Amber!)
Sarah Palin is pro-Heineken, gosh darn it!
Okay, so those are our contestants for the prizes. But wait! I have a few more snaps for you – here are the idéalists avoiding work on a Friday afternoon by sleevefacing:
Prince gives idée the thumbs up
Lennon gets serious about image search
Lookin’ fine Barry…
Having a Sheryl Crow moment
Uhm, Leila… that’s not *quite* right!
- That’s better!
If you are diggin’ the sleeveface you can see more on Flickr and Facebook. Even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is into sleeveface (kind of anyway).
Happy sleevefacing friends! If you try it out remember to post a link to your photos in the comments, we’d love to see them.
- They came, they saw, they installed TinEye Music…
Last night we hosted a little event here at the idéeplex to share the latest toy we are working on. We were lucky to have a great group of folks from the Toronto tech community join us to ‘kick the tires’ of our soon-to-be-released beta app for iPhone.
Thanks to everyone who came by and made the night a smashing success. It was really exciting for the team here at Idée to see TinEye Music, the first iPhone application of our visual search technology, out the door for beta testing.
With TinEye Music you use your iPhone to take a photo of any album cover. Almost instantly that snapshot gets compared to our index of over a million album covers and the app sends you right to the iTunes page for that artist where you can preview songs, buy tracks or even purchase the entire album right from your iPhone.
You can learn more about our app by watching our quick little video or reading today’s posts by Mathew Ingram and Adam Schwabe. Jevon from StartupNorth beat all of us all to the punch, however, with his TinEye Music review posted during the party.
On top of the great conversations and lots of music searching with our TinEye iPhone app, we also did a little “sleevefacing” last night. If you aren’t familiar with the term “sleeveface“, take a look at some of our guests demonstrating it here and here. Amber MacArthur channelled her inner J.Lo, Libin Pan did his best Steve Jobs pose and Jen Dodd rocked on as Nina Hagen (Jen, you win sleeveface of the night, we’ll send you your prize!). It was a lively night for all.
We have a ton of photos to share. For even more, Ben Lucier has shots of the party over on Flickr and photographer Rannie Turingan posted lots of great pics too.
This photo Rannie took of Jevon performing “the TinEye maneuver” with his iPhone is one of my favourites, followed closely by Alice’s snapshot of the other Beta at the party last night.
Well, the fun might be over but the work is not. This is just the beginning of bringing visual search to the world of mobile technology and we have a lot more in store for you, stay tuned!
** Photo: Jevon strikes a pose – Rannie Turingan
- 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!
- 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!
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