Hello, fellow nerds and geeks! If you:

a) looooove technology

b) are a STUDENT (proof required)

and

c) live in the Greater Toronto Area

Then you’re in luck! Because we’ve got two student tickets to meshU burning a hole in our collective pocket, and they’re up for grabs!

For those out of the loop, meshU is “…a one-day event of focused workshops on design, development and team management given by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game”. You will get to hear from–and hang out with–some pretty cool peeps in the technology arena.

The TinEye team is all about technology love, and the execution of great ideas. So if you’re interested in scoring a ticket for the big day on May 17th, drop us a line and tell us why you want to go. What tools and technologies are you into? What cool projects are you working on? What are your plans for world domination?

The two most interesting responses (as judged by our staff of robots) will each receive one ticket. We will be accepting entries until Wednesday May 5th at midnight, EST. Winners will be announced the following day! Remember, you must be a student to use these tickets, and meshU will ask for identification.

Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but meshU is a small event and tickets sold out… so if you won’t be able to make it to Toronto for the 17th yourself, please be a dear and wait for the next TinEye giveaway. Thanks!

Last month Yahoo! Search BOSS launched and since then there have been plenty of folks taking advantage of the BOSS APIs & services to product some very interesting search products. The team at Yahoo! say:

By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search’s investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences. We are very excited to see the diversity in products that many of you have already created.

I came across a few apps today that you might also enjoy, 123People.com is a lot of fun and I was quite impressed with their results (have a look). Vik Singh’s BOSSy Q&A is also pretty snazzy and quite amusing too, and oh yes, made with just 50 lines of code. Singh’s insider’s view on BOSS is an interesting read as well.

Yahoo! recently listed some of the most exciting apps that have been built on the BOSS search platform, here are a few of their picks below.

NewsLine — As part of the Daylife Developer Challenge, the folks from Dipity built a mashup using their timeline API, Daylife’s news API and the BOSS API. The result is a really interesting way to visualize news for any topic. Congrats to the Dipity team on winning the BOSS mashup prize!

Tianamo — Tianamo is a 3D search visualization early prototype built by Lachlan James. It maps the relationships between the search results from the BOSS API and displays them visually. To check it out, you’ll need to be running Windows with Java 1.6+.

PlayerSearch — Ted Kasten and team are building a sports search engine that pulls in content from a host of sources, including BOSS. Fantasy sports fanatics, check it out here.

You can check out more BOSS mashups here.

Check out the more than 100 presentations from O’Reilly’s recent open source convention. We are big users of open source software here at Idée and think it’s great that the good folks at O’Reilly are sharing the bulk of the presentations from July’s event.

Some topics that piqued our interest:

- Alex Martelli from Google talks Code Reviews for Fun and Profit

- People for Geeks presented by the team of Michael Schwern (Schwerniverse), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL Project), Brian Fitzpatrick (Google), Ben Collins-Sussman (Google Inc.), Andy Lester (Perlbuzz.com), Kirrily Robert (Metaweb)

- Mozilla’s Clint Talbert and Carsten Book present Fixing Hard Problems Through Iterative QA and Development

- Steven Ellis (OpenMedia Limited) on Trac: Project and Process Management for Developers and Sys Admins

The S3 outages over the weekend reminded me Sarah’s Fail Whale Story on ReadWriteWeb and Avatar’s story a few weeks earlier. How an unknown artist becomes a superstar pretty much sums it up!

The always popular DemoCamp is again sold out, hopefully you grabbed a spot before all the tickets were gone! The big night is tonight and it has shaped up to be a fantastic event yet again. At the helm of DemoCamp are the DemoCamp Stewards, namely David Crow, Greg Wilson, Jay Goldman, Joey deVilla and our very own Leila Boujnane.

What is DemoCamp you ask?

DemoCamp is a great, free (!) social event for entrepreneurs, designers, developers and technology enthusiasts where participants sign up to demonstrate software they have been working on, or to give a presentation with the goal to inspire, educate or challenge the audience.

DemoCamp is also trial by fire with five minutes on the hot seat for the lucky folks selected to demo to a room full of eager techies ready to pepper the presenters with tons of questions and feedback. And that’s just a demo! If you’ve got the moxie to give it a go, the “ignite” presentation is 5 minutes of presenting with 20 power-point slides x 15/seconds per slide and the presenter does not have control over the slide advancement. Go, go gadget brain!

The action happens Tuesday, July 15th at a great spot called Supermarket, located at 268 Augusta Ave here in good ol’ Toronto.

What’s this about free?

Indeed! Thanks to the generous sponsorship from the folks below, and excellent organization by the team behind DemoCamp, it is entirely free! Who helped make DemoCamp possible?

• Rob Hyndman, Hyndman Law
• Derek Szeto, Redflagdeals
• John MacRitchie, OCE Ontario
• Sarah Baird & Michele Perras , Interactive Ontario
• Derek Smyth, Edgestone Capital Partners

Don’t forget to check back later in the week for photos!

You can’t have my latest copy of Wired but if you forgot how great Wired Magazine could be, check out issue 16.07. The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More – More Is Different with a series of awesome articles about what happens when you start analyzing massive amounts of data or visualizing it.

“I’ve seen my fair share of image search demos, and they usually promise far more than they deliver. But last week, I finally saw one that deserves the name. It is called TinEye.” wrote Erick Schonfeld of, you got it, TechCrunch.

In the wee hours of the morning the folks at TechCrunch posted their review of TinEye…I bet you know what happened next!

We’ve been so busy today answering emails and inviting users to our awesome beta image search engine that we are just now getting to blogging about it!

If you missed out on the 500 invitations they were giving out not to worry! You can still sign up for our nifty beta via the TinEye website. We will grant additional invitations as soon as we can.

Thank you TechCrunch! This is just the beginning for TinEye.

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.

Search Image

Results

Search Image

Results

Search Image

Results

On Canadian newsstands now is a Canadian Business magazine article and photospread revealing the juicy past, present and future of the good folks at Idée. Lots of interesting tidbits in the article which is not presently available online.

Yes. Via Silicon Alley Insider: CNN acquired ireport.com for a wooping $750,000. ireport.com will support CNN’s amateur or user contributed video submissions of current events.