Bellevue-based Eyealike recently introduced VisualAd, an image and video-based contextual ad platform--Eyealike VisualAd recognizes facial features, skin colour, gender, and age, and discerns logos or product images. This gives them a means to offer highly-targeted ads by indexing, filtering and classifying images and videos rather than using keywords for the targeting purposes. Admittedly, this concept makes me feel slightly uneasy, but posting pictures to social networking sites is done so at the expense of the user's privacy anyway.
Using this type of “dual serving” technology offers these sites twice the impact on ad relevancy. Eyealike President Greg Heuss calls the technology "dual serving"--he insists that social networking sites are interested in what types of images you post, what you look at, and what they tell the SNS about you. I was curious about how VisualAd will infer information about a user based on photos that will undoubtedly feature other people. CEO John Hafen argues that Eyealike first "tells" the technology what given photos are. Then the software "gets smarter with time and with more and more images to view. After a while, it becomes self aware"--learning and then self-teaching, presumably, as it learns to cluster images based on content.
Eyealike may have an early advantage through the accuracy of their recognition algorithms, which are apparently at 90% according to Hafen. VisualAd uses data from all of a user's profile on their user-generated content site. It extracts a certain probability that a target object is in each individual photo, and then if that target object (or objects) are in multiple photos the probability increases that the user has that object (or is at least in close proximity). This will work the same whether the object is a baby, a Golden Retriever, a Subaru, or Mount Rushmore.
Hafen attests that "What will put us ahead of the pack is our accuracy, how we apply it, and the basic scalability of the system. We built it from scratch with super-scalability in mind." Scalability will be important, because Eyealike is looking to market directly to social networking sites. Sites like Facebook and MySpace will likely be eager to monetize user-generated photos.
Eyealike, an innovator of visual-based search, fills a gap in the text-dominated search world, both for image intensive Web sites and enterprise... [more]
Vancouver's Brad Touesnard recently launched Vote Swap Canada, allowing voters to "connect with people across Canada who want to minimize vote splitting and increase the effectiveness of their vote." You can essentially trade votes with another Canadian in a different constituency if the party that you support is unlikely to win in your riding but likely to win in another. Each swapper agrees to support a different candidate in hopes of helping their own party in the long run.
The program is different than other vote-swapping sites, argues Touesnard, in that users send personal requests to other voters in different ridings matching their swap criteria, rather than being automatically paired. Potential swappers can accept or deny the resquest, and users can send as many requests as they need to in order to get a willing partner. Touesnard also encourages swappers "to open a dialog with [the other voter] to be on the safe side."
The concept is essentially a good one--significant downfalls of Canada's single-member plurality voting system are that a candidate can win without a majority, and that pre-election poll results can sway voters. Though the swapping is based on the honour system and it will be difficult to really map how effective it is, Vote Swap Canada remains an interesting idea--not at all what political parties likely had in mind when they considered how to use the web to their advantage.
Today Translink relaunched m.translink.ca, a mobile site providing bus schedules, now optimized for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It's so new that Translink hasn't announced it yet, but the dudes at Handi Mobility, who are behind it, pinged it Twitter today soliciting feedback.
The site lists data for Translink buses, the Skytrain, West Coast Express, and Seabus. Enter either a route or stop number, to retrieve real time schedule information. Commonly used stops can be saved for future use. As a special iPhone-y function, turning the phone sideways presents a list of maps.
In a message to the vanajax list, Igor Faletski of Handi writes...
Every second person coming to TransLink's mobile site uses the iPhone, so we had to create an amazing experience for these early adopters. Our goal is to make commuting even better - by providing complete schedule information, alerts, GMail-style favourites and transit maps.
The next release will provide additional features - we're going to add the Buzzer, rider feedback and location-based functionality (through a downloadable AppStore app).
Handi Mobility has had an interesting relationship with Translink. Last year Handi Mobility was the first to bring bus schedules to mobiles with their MyBus Facebook application and SMS service. That app was created with no cooperation from Translink and relied on scraped data. Not long after Translink released their own SMS service, but later commissioned Handi to adapt MyBus into Next Bus as an official, Translink-branded Facebook app.
Coming soon... [more]
I had breakfast again yesterday at Inglewood's Eat Eat's in Calgary with my friend, Derek Ball, CEO and Founder of Tynt. Tynt's been mentioned in the Calgary Techvibes blog for some time as the newest, latest, greatest and kewlest technology up and coming, but "we can't talk about it yet." Until today.
Derek was kind enough to give me first blogging dibs on Tynt's public unveiling, so without further ado, announcing www.Tynt.com.
So, what is it? Tynt allows you to draw on web pages, graffiti style... on a layer laid on top of a web page. Kind of like old school Hockey Night in Canada when the guy draws on the screen in the video replay's between periods. Anybody you've shared your Tynt with will (optionally) see what you've drawn on the web page.
Example:
www.opticfrog.com as seen normally.
www.opticfrog.com as seen with a Tynt layer I put on it. "Tynt'd" as they say.
(yah, that's my music site... self-promotion never goes out of style!).
Back to the Tynt story. In essence, Tynt allows you to share your thoughts/perceptions/highlights with your closest friends.
And, in that thought, lies the power of Tynt. In this wired world of expanding and limitless information, we rely more and more on people we know and trust to give us the straight dope. We pay attention to recommendations and thoughts from our friends. For those that have read "The Tipping Point," Tynt is evangelism on steroids.
For example, Guy Kawasaki, noted technology evangelist, Twitters to 18,000 followers. Guy is going to start using Tynt to put some thoughts on a web page and then send out a tweet with a link to his Tynt. That's part of Tynt's release yesterday; Tynt for Twitter ... Tynt gives Twitter context. Another big name that's going to start using Tynt for Twitter is Mark Silva from Realbranding.com.
Think of the power of Tynt for social networks, where you already connect with many of your friends ... being able to give each other context with your surfing would be, like, way awesome (Or, maybe you just want to put funny glasses and a bowtie on your buddy's Facebook page picture for giggles). Tynt for bloggers (yes, you'll see Tynt's in my future blogs). For people doing market and industry research. Digg users could really use Tynt. Google's new Chrome browser's weak bookmarking could adopt Tynt for contextual bookmarks.
Communication from a corporate website to a surfer is usually controlled and one-way. You read the words that the marketer or the public relations person want you to read. Now all that stuff you find in blogs, forums and communities about a company can be read directly on the website, in the context it's meant to be in. Click here to see what I think of the Canon FS 100 Camcorder:
(if that doesn't make CMO's shake in their boots, I don't know what will!)
Tynt is officially in public Beta as Derek and his team continue to press forward on this ground breaking technology. There's still some glitches, for sure (especially on my Mac Firefox browser), and I can imagine they're going to have some scaling issues as they become more popular, but it's already a great "Wow" experience. Tynt comes as a browser plug-in, or as a web browser app ... to find out more, check out their blog: http://tynt.wordpress.com/.
Or, better yet ... try it for yourself. Go to www.tynt.com, Tynt a website and share it with your friends. And tell them about your experience.
Share the web as YOU see it! You can add notes, drop speech bubbles, place stickers and more on top of any web page and share your Tynt with... [more]
The second annual Facebook Developers Conference happened this week. There were a number of interesting developments (read about Facebook Connect, if you haven't already), though none as game-changing as last year's announcement of Facebook Platform. Instead, we saw a more mature Facebook, working to tame their mostly-controllable beast and further attract developers.
Among the announcements were winners of fbFund, a fund set up by Facebook to encourage application development. Waterloo start-up J2Play came out big, recieving $250,000 from the fund. J2Play offers a wrapper for social games, allowing games to work across sites (Facebook, OpenSocial), and even beyond the PC to mobile devices. The wrapper encorporates features such as friends lists, leaderboards, chat, profiles, and an ad network, and the games themselves can be written for Java, Flash, or HTML.
In their demo video, they demonstrate gameplay between a user on Facebook and a user on Hi5...
Sun and Joyent are announcing today a program to offer 12 months of free hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial applications. Using Sun's servers running OpenSolaris, powering Joyent Accelerators virtual servers, a social application can be prepared to cope with rapid scaling if they become an overnight success. Free hosting is quite compatible with the monetization difficulty of Facebook applications; quite hard. Hopefully within 12 months, you'll either figure out how to monetize the app, or have convinced your Grandma to fund you.
Sun's business model has traditionally been selling servers, so it's good to see them supporting cloud hosting. Increasingly, "the cloud" is proving itself more cost effective and efficient alternative to server ownership. Further, their recent open sourcing of Solaris into OpenSolaris makes it a viable option for developers who would normally pass on it for a free, capable Linux distribution.
In support of this program, Sun and Joyent are holding a training tour that will hit San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver, among others. Er, they don't seem to have dates posted yet, but I'll update this post when I see them, and post to the Techvibes event calendar.
It's been a while since I've written about a Facebook app, but this one, designed by two interaction design students, caught my eye. Via itbusiness.ca, GreeNet is the project of Simon Fraser University students Kevin Muse and Jin Fan. It won second place and $4000 in the Interface Design category at this year's Imagine Cup, a student technology/programming competition put on by Microsoft. Environmental awareness is a hot topic, and everything is more fun with high score lists, so GreeNet visualizes your energy savings in the form of virtual plants. The plants or tree grow inversely proportional to your energy usage, and are displayed beside your friends for comparison.
In the video, they theorized cooperation with BC Hydro, whereby a user inputs their Hydro account number and consumption data is obtained from power company data. While power companies may be reluctant to provide such data to third parties, BC Hydro has already had some experience in the Facebook application space with the Green Gifts application, built by Vancouver's Social Signal. Kevin and Jin, pitch your idea to them, if you haven't already, they have the resources to make it happen.
GreeNet isn't live on Facebook, but you can watch their demo video.
The Canadian Press is reporting that a Toronto-based Internet porn company has agreed to pay Facebook $500K after it allegedly hacked the popular social networking website's computers. The lawsuit against the numbered Ontario company, which does business online under the name SlickCash (NSFW), has been settled in a US court. In addition to the cash payout, SlickCash and several people associated with the site also agreed not to become members of Facebook for 10 years - which is a very, very long time in the Internet world.
According to court documents recently entered into an online legal database, the suit was settled in April. Facebook alleged that over a two week period in June of 2007, the defendants attempted to access Facebook's servers at least 200,000 times and gain unauthorized access to Facebook's friend-finder functionality.
A few hundred people attended the last FacebookCamp in Toronto last week, but what was missing was the excitement, the buzz in the audience, which was a hallmark of previous such events. Is the Facebook platform on a downswing ? The organizers and the folks from Facebook thought otherwise. Facebook platform had 30,000 applications by February of this year, compared to 5500 in Oct '07 and continues to grow, according to the stats.
Rebecca Sawyer, who leads the monetization group at Facebook Inc, gave a presentation on advertising on Facebook. She went through on how to create an ad and target an exact audience. For example, on Facebook you can advertise based on criteria such as a user's location, major, college, and gasp...even relationship status ! All that is there on a user's profile can be targeted for advertising.
In a following talk, the upcoming re-design of users profile page was showcased. Most of the info from a user's profile will be divided in separate tabs for: personal info, mini-feed, applications (called boxes), photos, among others. While it makes the user profile page more cleaner, I think it actually hurts developers as it puts their applications behind another button (in the boxes tab). It would be interesting to see if / how the users accept the new design.
The DemoCamp in Toronto tonight promises to be a bit more interesting.
