Riya Changes Focus

Munjal Shah, the CEO and founder of Riya/Ojos has been providing a riveting chronicle on his Blog of the launch of Riya.com this spring and their recent change of strategy and focus. Riya 2.0 as others like Mike Arringon at TechCrunch are calling this new strategy - is focused on visual search of pictures anywhere on the internet.

I've got to say that I'm a bit disappointed. The automation of capturing metadata with images is a horizontal capability that is a key element to enabling the next generation of digital photography applications and services (and effective photo search in my opinion). Riya had set out a bold vision of creating such an automated system for consumer's photos. Help me initially find and identify the people in MY photos then add even more intelligent tagging based on proximity, text recognition, etc. I still think this is a very worthwhile problem to solve.

The Riya 1.0 launch plan was built around face recognition and that people would share the "profiles" of the people that were identified in their photo collections with others. This may be one of the places where things when wrong. People can be very protective of their personal photos and the annotations/tags that go along with them. Those who participate in communities like Flickr or Facebook obviously have less anxiety about the public nature of their photos or they only post some of their photos to the community. Now, you let the masses do the identification of any content on anywhere on the web. There is a lot of tagging that is already happening on the sites hosting the images (like Flickr and Facebook) that can also be used as part of the search methods.

Visual Search of all of the content on the internet is a BHAG for sure. Google is already in the game. Ask.com just re-launched an image search that I've found to be quite effective. As Tara Hunt, Riya's recently departed marketing wiz, says in her comments on Riya's change in strategy - in the search game it is relevance that matters. Riya will need to do a better job of delivering more relevant results than their many competitors.