http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005170
JULY 24, 2007
Still waiting for a market leader.
eMarketer projects that by 2011, mobile search will account for around $715 million, or almost 15% of a total mobile advertising market worth nearly $4.7 billion.
Granted, a $715 million mobile search market is not a foregone conclusion, but many of the behavioral factors are in place in the US market to push mobile search forward. For one, there is already a strong correlation between mobile Internet use and accessing mobile search services.
In April 2007, iCrossing reported that three-quarters of mobile Internet subscribers access mobile search services. This is in contrast to the little more than 20% of general mobile phone users in the US who access mobile search.
The US mobile search market can be expected to suffer some growing pains over the next two to three years as the tug of war between the major operators, the major portal players, major media and a gaggle of mobile search start-ups compete for the title of mobile search leader.
eMarketer Senior Analyst John du Pre Gauntt said, "Mobile search in the US has all the right parts on the table: a huge online advertising ecosystem, the world's leading content industry, massive portal players, major league mobile operators and a host of VC-backed start-ups.
"In other words, it'll be a bloody mess over the next few years sorting out the center of gravity for mobile search, as each player tries to convince the others to follow its lead. The good news for marketers is that there's enough of a prize for the winner(s) that resolution will come."
Find out who's who in the mobile search food chain. Read the eMarketer Mobile Search: Clash of the Titans report.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
What’s Next – Mobile Visual Search
http://www.promotionworld.com/news/editors/080317MobileVisualSearch.html
What is the future of mobile internet usage?
March 17, 2008
The world of Mobile search is evolving extremely fast. Beginning with keyword-based search, going through the next step - voice search, now the end user is offered to send a photo by his cell phone in order to find relevant to his photo’s query information in Internet.
Mobile Search is a developing branch that allows users to find mobile content interactively on mobile websites. With the years, mobile content has changed its media direction towards mobile multimedia. Nevertheless, mobile search is not just a simple shift of PC web search to mobile equipment, but it is connected to specialized segments of mobile broadband and mobile content, both of which have been fast-paced evolving recently.
The major search engines are aggressively trying to create applications and relationships in order to take advantage of a mobile ad market. According to a leading market research firm eMarketer, strong competition for the US mobile search market might be anticipated, having in mind the large US online ad market and strong pushes by portals. By 2011, mobile search is expected to account for around $715 million.
The Mobile directory search industry is almost as old as the telecom and offers services that enable people by entering a word or phrase on their phone to find local services based on their current location. An example of usage would be a person looking for a local hotel after a tiring journey or taxi company after a night out. The services can also come with a map and directions to facilitate the user.
What was the next step? GOOG-411. This is another but this time voice-activated mobile search. The free service allows callers to access Google’s local information through voice search. There is no doubt, that mobile voice search is simpler and more convenient for the callers than typing on the phone’s buttons.
“I’d have to be a visionary to be vindicated, and I’m making no such claim. It’s just hard to ignore that most people prefer talking in their phones to typing on them, and a mobile search engine that made voice search possible might have an easier time finding an audience”, said Bryson Meunier, Product Champion, Natural Search in a posting at http://www.findresolution.com/. For the same reasons Meunier believes that mobile visual search could be bigger than voice search.
How do the searchers initiate a visual query? Simply by snapping a photo of something with their phone, which the mobile search engine processes with algorithms and returns relevant digital content based on its interpretation of the user’s visual query.
Visual Search is now gathering popularity. At the Cebit trade show in Germany, Vodafone demonstrated Otello, a search engine that uses images as input. Users send pictures via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) from their mobile phones. Otello then returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone, just like a normal search engine. There are other examples of companies like SnapNow and Mobot that have actually been offering this service for a few years. Google has its own Mobile Visual Search engines in the face of Never Vision.
Of course, the audience for mobile visual search is currently not so large, but it might be just a matter of time, predicted Meunier.
Evolution Robotics
Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes Off Big in Japan
Design and Development Industry Headlines Posted: 05/20/2008
Evolution Robotics, a provider of vision, autonomous navigation and intelligence technology has partnered with Bandai Networks to provide its ‘ER Search’ visual search engine on the Spring 2008 ‘au’ line of camera phones, allowing consumers in Japan to do online searches by taking pictures of objects with their camera phone.
Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan’s leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation is including the “ER Search” visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 “au™” line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior “au” camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.
The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source: ABI Research)
ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they’re interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.
As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they’d like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.
“ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies,” said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. “Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they’re interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before.”
“We are very pleased to be working with Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the Japanese market,” said Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. “Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike.”
Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.
About ViPR The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access. (A video demonstration of Evolution Robotics’ visual search technology running on Apple’s iPhone can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/user/EvolutionRobotics)
ER Search’s versatility rests in Evolution Robotics’ breakthrough ViPR visual recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant, ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor.
For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000 music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming video or images from live TV can be supported.
About Evolution Robotics Evolution Robotics, Inc. is based in Pasadena, CA, and partners with brand leaders to make their products smarter by providing solutions for vision, autonomous navigation and intelligence. From toys to cell phones and vacuum cleaners to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) the company has over 2 million products on the market through partners such as Sony, Bandai and Sharper Image. Evolution Robotics is an operating company of Idealab, a creator and operator of technology businesses.
About Bandai Networks Established as a subsidiary of Bandai Co., Ltd. in September of 2000, Bandai Networks is a member of the company, Bandai Namco group. Bandai Networks builds on Bandai Namco group’s strength in character merchandising and adds an expertise in server management and applications, innovative concepts, and strategic business partnering to operate a wide variety of mobile phone and Internet content services. Bandai Networks currently boasts 3.6 million subscribers to its domestic pay mobile phone services. For more information about Bandai Networks, please visit http://www.bandai-net.com/.
Visual Search: See your results in a new light
Thursday, August 28 2008
TJ McCue
http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/marketing-advertising/11493645-1.html
Visual search, cloud search, tag search, and a host of other names for relatively new search technologies that let you see your results and terms differently than your average search engine.
I use them to brainstorm, to find new terms easily, to see if any one place (not possible) can bring in focused results that match what my brain is asking of me. That’s why I’m really gungho about search, but more gungho about the human mind and its potential. We’re not going the way of human power plant in The Matrix any time soon… Thankfully.
The bigger or bolder the keyword/term that appears in the cloud, the more relevant it is to your query (in principle). Then the terms that are also larger have, supposedly, a stronger relationship to that term you typed in. If you click on another term it becomes the dominant term or takes you to that search result page. Each engine works just a bit differently, of course.
I’ve listed out my favorites here. There are others and I’d love to hear from you about which ones you love and why. You can email me at q4sales at gmail dot com or you can use the contact button above.
To be clear, I’m not talking about image search with these visual search engines – I’m talking about search with results displayed visually, in a cloud, or in tags, or in some cases as an image or snapshot of the website home page itself. Searchme is a powerful example of this last idea. It is almost too much information if you let the thing scroll quickly. It is unbelievable to me.
Clusty search is cool, but in their Clusty Labs they offer a visual search tool. It brings back the terms in a box. We’re toying with embedding this in some of the private pages we create for clients as a way to put all the cool tools in one place.
All of these have potential to change the way you research ideas and concepts for your business and marketing efforts.
ujiko
Keotag - tag search
Clusty search
oskope
search.twitter.com
SearchMe
Kartoo
Quintura
TJ McCue
http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/marketing-advertising/11493645-1.html
Visual search, cloud search, tag search, and a host of other names for relatively new search technologies that let you see your results and terms differently than your average search engine.
I use them to brainstorm, to find new terms easily, to see if any one place (not possible) can bring in focused results that match what my brain is asking of me. That’s why I’m really gungho about search, but more gungho about the human mind and its potential. We’re not going the way of human power plant in The Matrix any time soon… Thankfully.
The bigger or bolder the keyword/term that appears in the cloud, the more relevant it is to your query (in principle). Then the terms that are also larger have, supposedly, a stronger relationship to that term you typed in. If you click on another term it becomes the dominant term or takes you to that search result page. Each engine works just a bit differently, of course.
I’ve listed out my favorites here. There are others and I’d love to hear from you about which ones you love and why. You can email me at q4sales at gmail dot com or you can use the contact button above.
To be clear, I’m not talking about image search with these visual search engines – I’m talking about search with results displayed visually, in a cloud, or in tags, or in some cases as an image or snapshot of the website home page itself. Searchme is a powerful example of this last idea. It is almost too much information if you let the thing scroll quickly. It is unbelievable to me.
Clusty search is cool, but in their Clusty Labs they offer a visual search tool. It brings back the terms in a box. We’re toying with embedding this in some of the private pages we create for clients as a way to put all the cool tools in one place.
All of these have potential to change the way you research ideas and concepts for your business and marketing efforts.
ujiko
Keotag - tag search
Clusty search
oskope
search.twitter.com
SearchMe
Kartoo
Quintura
SearchMe
View Internet search results through a new lens at SearchMe, an engine that displays results not in the usual text-list format (that's so Google), but as a slick image gallery of actual Web pages you can flip through and filter results by topic. A query on Montana, for example, lets you narrow results into categories like real estate, lodgings, weather and fishing. SearchMe isn't the only visual search engine — rivals include the meta-search site KartOO and newcomer Viewzi (which was still in private beta as of June 2008) — but its clean, intuitive interface sets it apart.
It was ranked as one of the best 50 websites.
The Mountain View, Calif. company with high-profile investors and a warchest of nearly $40 million, including a $12.6 million round in May from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Deepfork Capital and Lehman Brothers Venture Capital.
Silobreaker
Launched in January 2008, Silobreaker.com is an online search service providing content on global issues, technology, and business from more than 10,000 news, blog, research, and multimedia sources. Instead of just returning a list of articles matching the search query, it finds people, companies, keywords, and related topics. Moreover, it understands the relationship between these fields, puts them in context for the user, and delivers results through interactive graphs.
Silobreaker is the result of five years’ hard work by a team of two entrepreneurs and seven developers that started working on the intelligent search technology in 2003. Per Lindh, Chief Technology Officer at Silobreaker, says: “Traditional search engines provide keyword-related results but not all are relevant to the user—creating information overload. We wanted to provide a smarter tool that used both statistics and semantics to offer context to search results, improve information relevancy as per users’ preferences, and intelligently combine data—be it textual, numerical, or rich multimedia.”
The company’s key strength is its team of expert developers. In 2003, its Chief System Architect won the Google Code Jam—a worldwide coding competition. He was also a finalist in the TopCoder Open competition in 2008. Silobreaker also employs skilled developers that add value to user-facing features such as the interface.
Silobreaker is the result of five years’ hard work by a team of two entrepreneurs and seven developers that started working on the intelligent search technology in 2003. Per Lindh, Chief Technology Officer at Silobreaker, says: “Traditional search engines provide keyword-related results but not all are relevant to the user—creating information overload. We wanted to provide a smarter tool that used both statistics and semantics to offer context to search results, improve information relevancy as per users’ preferences, and intelligently combine data—be it textual, numerical, or rich multimedia.”
The company’s key strength is its team of expert developers. In 2003, its Chief System Architect won the Google Code Jam—a worldwide coding competition. He was also a finalist in the TopCoder Open competition in 2008. Silobreaker also employs skilled developers that add value to user-facing features such as the interface.
Visual search and shopping collide
Commentary: Like.com enhances buying experience
By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EST Nov. 9, 2006
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B3F0564EB-5993-42EE-859A-7BE5D88FF2D9%7D
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Artificial intelligence that can detect faces and images is typically used for security systems. Now, similar technology is being applied to the most practical situations: How to find that piece of jewelry or shoe that's hard to describe.
Like.com, the first visual search engine for products, launched this week. It's a service that helps shoppers find products based on images, rather than rely on SKUs (stock keeping units). It's akin to showing a photo to a salesperson at a store and saying, "Show me all the products that look like this." It sure beats poor attempts at describing the ideal item to a salesperson.
Basically, Like.com is the next evolution of comparison-shopping engines, such as Google's Froogle, eBay's, Shopping.com, EW Scripps' Shopzilla or Become.com and the next evolution in image search offered by the portals and search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live and InterActiveCorp's Ask.com.
Like.com is a product offering from Riya.com, a startup whose CTO and co-founder, Burak Goturk, specialized in computer vision technology and has filed for two dozen facial-recognition patents.
"For the first time you can say, 'I want something to look like that,'" said Riya's other co-founder, Munjal Shah, who is also CEO of the two-year-old company. "Like.com looks at all these other items and compares, shape, color and texture."
For now, Like.com helps you find jewelry, watches, handbags, and shoes. The engine crawls the Web for images, and will soon crawl eBay's merchandise as well. Additionally, Riya has some merchant partner deals. All told, Riya compares 2 million products offered by 200 merchants, including Amazon.com.
The service works this way. The homepage has photos of celebrities. You can highlight their shoes or jewelry and tell the Like.com search engine to find a similar item.
In the boot example, Tyra Banks is shown wearing some slick brown boots. You'll note the "likeness search" box in the image I've captured. A shopper would then click that box to conduct a "likeness" search across Like.com's inventory. The search found 2,207 similar boots. The results are presented in the most similar to least similar order. But even the last page, which supposedly showcases the least similar boots, offered up pretty good matches.
If I buy a product from one of the merchants on Like.com's site, Riya gets paid about 10% of the order. Riya also has some deals whereby the company gets paid a buck or so for leads. Shah said that the four categories - jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches - represent $15 billion in sales in the U.S., with $4 billion worth of shoes sold online.
Search evolution
It's about time we started seeing some advancement in visual search. As Shah sees it, none of the big search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live, and InterActiveCorp's Ask.com have made any significant improvements to searching images.
Like.com uses "similarity technology," said Shah. Basically, the technology looks insides images and calculates the pixels and converts the picture into a mathematical equation. The math equation - which represents the photo - is what is used to make comparisons. Similar math equations end up on the same page.
Indeed, most search engines organize images based on the text used to describe the image. It's useful if you're searching for a particular branded product, say Nike running shoes or Callaway Big Bertha golf clubs. It's not so helpful when you're indifferent toward the designer but care only about the shape, pattern or color.
Soon enough Like.com will expand to household goods, such as rugs, and clothing, which I'm extremely excited about since in the past 12 months or so, I've wanted to find this particular white-collared blouse I saw my neighbor wear last year. My neighbor, Heather, said she bought it from a boutique in Paris, but didn't have the name. I'm sure we all have had similar experiences.
At the time, I tried my luck with the comparison-shopping engines. I wasn't successful. I shared my white-blouse search story with Lorrie Norrington, who at the time was head of eBay's comparison-shopping service Shopping.com. Norrington said a service like that would probably be available at Shopping.com soon. No such luck. I guess eBay's got too many other challenges, such as figuring out how to capitalize on the growth opportunities in China.
Of course, I'm not able to find that blouse on Riya just yet. But in about a month, I just might. That is, of course, if a celebrity ended up wearing such a blouse. Soon enough, however, I'm sure I'll be able to upload a photo of that blouse and then conduct a "likeness" search using Riya.
Why startups iterate
I'm always fascinated with the stories that founders share about their original business model and product, and the iterations on top of it.
Riya's first product was a visual search engine that helped people organize photos by essentially sorting them based on images. For example, photos of bridges would be filed in one category. Shah said that the Riya visual search service is still around and has about 10 million photos uploaded. The service, however, isn't a priority any longer, Shah admitted, conceding that he and his team couldn't figure out how to make money off such a service.
Basically, Riya's initial customers preferred a search engine to make sense of the Web - a large fast-growing, disorganized library of digital photos - rather than their own smaller, also growing, very-much disorganized library of digital photos.
I never thought organizing photos would be that big of a market, actually. After all, organizing photos isn't exactly a priority for most people. Many people - like me - didn't do it in the offline world; why would they do it in the online world? And, for the few who do want to organize their photos, they typically wouldn't organize photos based on every bridge they stood in front of, or every photo with a mountain background. People typically categorize their photos based on event, occasion or year. Moreover, homegrown pictures have become commodities. If you lost one, you could just take another.
To that end, Riya's setting its site on something far more useful and in demand. Like.com is addressing a real pain point.
I remember in 2004, when it was painful to share my digital videos with others. In order to share them, I had to make a number of CDs. Two years later, one video of my nephew Bubba snowboarding has been shared more than 500 times on YouTube.
Since last year, I wanted a visual comparison shopping engine to find that white blouse. Maybe next year, I'll find it. In fact, maybe by next Christmas, I'll be doing most of my shopping that way.
Editor's note: Next week, I'll be looking at video search. I'll be touching on the differences among Nexidia, CastTV, Dabble, Pixsy, Blinkx, Optevi.net, Quintura and Truveo. I'm also on the lookout for other video search engines.
Sound off: Who's a winner in the video search world? And, what do you think of Riya? Comment on Bambi Francisco's blog.
By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EST Nov. 9, 2006
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B3F0564EB-5993-42EE-859A-7BE5D88FF2D9%7D
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Artificial intelligence that can detect faces and images is typically used for security systems. Now, similar technology is being applied to the most practical situations: How to find that piece of jewelry or shoe that's hard to describe.
Like.com, the first visual search engine for products, launched this week. It's a service that helps shoppers find products based on images, rather than rely on SKUs (stock keeping units). It's akin to showing a photo to a salesperson at a store and saying, "Show me all the products that look like this." It sure beats poor attempts at describing the ideal item to a salesperson.
Basically, Like.com is the next evolution of comparison-shopping engines, such as Google's Froogle, eBay's, Shopping.com, EW Scripps' Shopzilla or Become.com and the next evolution in image search offered by the portals and search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live and InterActiveCorp's Ask.com.
Like.com is a product offering from Riya.com, a startup whose CTO and co-founder, Burak Goturk, specialized in computer vision technology and has filed for two dozen facial-recognition patents.
"For the first time you can say, 'I want something to look like that,'" said Riya's other co-founder, Munjal Shah, who is also CEO of the two-year-old company. "Like.com looks at all these other items and compares, shape, color and texture."
For now, Like.com helps you find jewelry, watches, handbags, and shoes. The engine crawls the Web for images, and will soon crawl eBay's merchandise as well. Additionally, Riya has some merchant partner deals. All told, Riya compares 2 million products offered by 200 merchants, including Amazon.com.
The service works this way. The homepage has photos of celebrities. You can highlight their shoes or jewelry and tell the Like.com search engine to find a similar item.
In the boot example, Tyra Banks is shown wearing some slick brown boots. You'll note the "likeness search" box in the image I've captured. A shopper would then click that box to conduct a "likeness" search across Like.com's inventory. The search found 2,207 similar boots. The results are presented in the most similar to least similar order. But even the last page, which supposedly showcases the least similar boots, offered up pretty good matches.
If I buy a product from one of the merchants on Like.com's site, Riya gets paid about 10% of the order. Riya also has some deals whereby the company gets paid a buck or so for leads. Shah said that the four categories - jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches - represent $15 billion in sales in the U.S., with $4 billion worth of shoes sold online.
Search evolution
It's about time we started seeing some advancement in visual search. As Shah sees it, none of the big search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live, and InterActiveCorp's Ask.com have made any significant improvements to searching images.
Like.com uses "similarity technology," said Shah. Basically, the technology looks insides images and calculates the pixels and converts the picture into a mathematical equation. The math equation - which represents the photo - is what is used to make comparisons. Similar math equations end up on the same page.
Indeed, most search engines organize images based on the text used to describe the image. It's useful if you're searching for a particular branded product, say Nike running shoes or Callaway Big Bertha golf clubs. It's not so helpful when you're indifferent toward the designer but care only about the shape, pattern or color.
Soon enough Like.com will expand to household goods, such as rugs, and clothing, which I'm extremely excited about since in the past 12 months or so, I've wanted to find this particular white-collared blouse I saw my neighbor wear last year. My neighbor, Heather, said she bought it from a boutique in Paris, but didn't have the name. I'm sure we all have had similar experiences.
At the time, I tried my luck with the comparison-shopping engines. I wasn't successful. I shared my white-blouse search story with Lorrie Norrington, who at the time was head of eBay's comparison-shopping service Shopping.com. Norrington said a service like that would probably be available at Shopping.com soon. No such luck. I guess eBay's got too many other challenges, such as figuring out how to capitalize on the growth opportunities in China.
Of course, I'm not able to find that blouse on Riya just yet. But in about a month, I just might. That is, of course, if a celebrity ended up wearing such a blouse. Soon enough, however, I'm sure I'll be able to upload a photo of that blouse and then conduct a "likeness" search using Riya.
Why startups iterate
I'm always fascinated with the stories that founders share about their original business model and product, and the iterations on top of it.
Riya's first product was a visual search engine that helped people organize photos by essentially sorting them based on images. For example, photos of bridges would be filed in one category. Shah said that the Riya visual search service is still around and has about 10 million photos uploaded. The service, however, isn't a priority any longer, Shah admitted, conceding that he and his team couldn't figure out how to make money off such a service.
Basically, Riya's initial customers preferred a search engine to make sense of the Web - a large fast-growing, disorganized library of digital photos - rather than their own smaller, also growing, very-much disorganized library of digital photos.
I never thought organizing photos would be that big of a market, actually. After all, organizing photos isn't exactly a priority for most people. Many people - like me - didn't do it in the offline world; why would they do it in the online world? And, for the few who do want to organize their photos, they typically wouldn't organize photos based on every bridge they stood in front of, or every photo with a mountain background. People typically categorize their photos based on event, occasion or year. Moreover, homegrown pictures have become commodities. If you lost one, you could just take another.
To that end, Riya's setting its site on something far more useful and in demand. Like.com is addressing a real pain point.
I remember in 2004, when it was painful to share my digital videos with others. In order to share them, I had to make a number of CDs. Two years later, one video of my nephew Bubba snowboarding has been shared more than 500 times on YouTube.
Since last year, I wanted a visual comparison shopping engine to find that white blouse. Maybe next year, I'll find it. In fact, maybe by next Christmas, I'll be doing most of my shopping that way.
Editor's note: Next week, I'll be looking at video search. I'll be touching on the differences among Nexidia, CastTV, Dabble, Pixsy, Blinkx, Optevi.net, Quintura and Truveo. I'm also on the lookout for other video search engines.
Sound off: Who's a winner in the video search world? And, what do you think of Riya? Comment on Bambi Francisco's blog.
Quintura’s visual search
Quintura’s visual search: ‘iPhone for the search market’
Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.
Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.
The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?
Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”
That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.
Written on March 8, 2008 – 12:16 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura, a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search launched its search engine for search on individual web-sites and blogs. When entering a search term, Quintura shows a cloud with related tags. Search blog AltSearchEngines already installed the engine their sidebar. After trying it for a while, I definitely see the use of this visual search option. Time for an interview with the co-founder, President and CEO of Quintura Yakov Sadchikov.
Of course, I asked him why visual search is the future. “The visual-based search is more intuitive and easy to use. Making a parallel here, iPhone is an example of a visual-based user interface that is taking smart phone market by storm. Look at Quintura as an iPhone for the search market.” That’s quite statement, as there are more visual search engines appearing, like ManagedQ.
The search experience it totally different though. ManagedQ loads full screen and shows screenshots combined with tags in a sidebar. Quintura however keeps it simple and just shows tags. Smart move, since the clouds of Quintura can be easily installed on blogs and sites. That has two major advantages: the chance that Quintera will get viral is bigger and it makes a pretty good business model. Right?
Sadchikov: “We can educate the market about new search experience that Quintura brings and start creating a web index and monetizing it straight away. We now have 1,000 web-sites and blogs that joined our site search program. It includes portals with a monthly traffic of several million users. All those sites and blogs that embed Quintura site search widget are actually Quintura advertising network since we plan to start selling graphical ads in the widget’s search cloud. We expect a number of affiliates to grow to 10,000 by the end of 2008.”
That sure sounds good, yet I doubt whether Quintura will be successful in non English-speaking countries. The problem with the visual search engine is it doesn’t handle other languages than English*. When I search in either French of German, tags like ‘through’ or ‘the’ are popping up. So, just like the iPhone, we’ll have to wait a while before Quintura gets really useful in Europe.
Viewzi Visual Search Engine
Viewzi is a new visual search engine that attempts to deliver a fun and interactive way to find online content. Recently out of beta (although the Web site still displays the beta tag), Viewzi focuses on the user experience by offering different "views" to organize the results. A view is an interactive display, uniquely designed for a specific type of data such as music, video, photos, news and shopping.
While Viewzi is really a search aggregation tool that uses, but doesn't compete with, Google (NSDQ:GOOG), it does show a nifty approach to search. The company, Viewzi, is based in Richardson, Texas.
http://www.crn.com/software/208801094
While Viewzi is really a search aggregation tool that uses, but doesn't compete with, Google (NSDQ:GOOG), it does show a nifty approach to search. The company, Viewzi, is based in Richardson, Texas.
http://www.crn.com/software/208801094
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Outlook of Search In China
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/china_search_outlook.php
Written by Aydin Senkut, an ex-Google senior manager who is currently an angel investor for his company Felicis Ventures. During Aydin's 6 years with Google, he managed their international expansion - including launching Google's first 10 international sites.
Today China boasts over 105 million Internet users, not to mention 350M mobile users (growing by 57 million every year). By 2010, Chinese Internet users will outnumber US Internet users by 25%. Currently, 87% of the Chinese Internet audience uses search. And given Internet search’s dominance of monetization and audience rankings globally, the competition for the top spot in the Chinese search market is pretty intense.
Baidu, Google, Yahoo, Sohu and Sina are battling each other to be the leading provider of search in China. Currently the two largest search players, Baidu and Google, account for almost 90% of the searches (source: CNNIC Search Survey, 2006), per the latest local search market share depicted in the pie chart below.
Chinese Search Market
Though it doesn’t show up in the main search rankings, Tencent - the leading Chinese Instant Messaging (IM) platform with over 220M active users - has been making significant in-roads into this market by licensing Google’s search in 2005.
More than 3 out of every 4 Internet searchers in China use multiple search engines (source: CNNIC Search Survey, 2006). Therein lies one of the more interesting dynamics of this market: Baidu and Google clearly lead the field in all aspects of search, through the variety of searches they offer and the quality of their results. Sohu features more prominently in MP3 and video search, compared to its lagging ranking in web search. Yahoo, on the other hand, has been struggling with its local partnering strategy - as it failed to take advantage of large acquisitions locally, including 3721 and the much publicized Ali Baba. Indeed Yahoo's brand seems weaker in China compared to Google’s and other local players - as a result of its lack of focus (and differentiation).
Search Type
Google progressing in China
Even though Google is trailing Baidu in market share, it has made some significant progress in the last 2 years in China. It started to comply with local laws in China by filtering its results (and it’s the only one that informs users when it does so). Google also introduced its first music search - though its results point to music sites and not to downloadable music links, like its competitors.
Google recently managed to outflank Baidu in terms of perceived quality. Recent research by Keynote Systems shows that among 1200 Internet users in China, Google outperformed all other competitors in 11 out of 13 factors measured. Moreover, most participants that ranked Google highest were actually using another search engine as their primary site for search. Google’s excellent scores were not surprising, given that the 3 most important criteria for ranking search engines in users minds were: clean home page design, quality of web search results, and quality of image search results (all of which play strongly to Google’s hand). This trend speaks strongly for Google in terms of catching up to Baidu in the market share.
However, ‚Äúboth Google and Yahoo could still further improve their government relations in China‚Ä?, quipped Janelle Wu, who was formerly Senior VP at NetEase.
Baidu, the market leader
Janelle Wu also mentioned that one of Baidu’s great strategic moves was hiring R&D experts from the US, while recruiting locally for sales talent.
Baidu is currently enjoying virtually double the market share in all types of search over Google. A 2006 Study by CNNIC cites other reasons for Baidu attracting a large user base, including Baidu’s well-liked Bulletin Boards and its responsiveness. Baidu also benefits from its wildly popular MP3 search, which takes users directly to downloadable music. This could be a major headache for Baidu in the future if China decides to tighten its enforcement of IP laws, with respect to illegal music.
Sohu, Sina and Yahoo all draw significant numbers of users to their search sites through their popular free email offerings, but that’s still not enough to help them break into the upper echelon of search - currently occupied by Baidu and Google.
In terms of brand awareness, Baidu once again stands out with 87% - while Google and Yahoo trail with 64% and 39% respectively (source: CNNIC Search Survey, 2006).
Furthermore, more than 50% of Baidu’s users are under 23 years old. Since 80% of people under 24 years old use the Internet in China (source: the CASS China Internet Survey, 2006)compared to a much lower ratio for older age groups, Baidu’s momentum is bound to continue. Maybe it’s for this reason, and lack of further explosive growth opportunity at home, that Baidu decided to launch its first international search in Japan last week.
The future of the China search market
While Google’s perception has improved considerably among Internet users in China, its refusal to offer its Gmail and Blogger services locally (due to privacy concerns) will probably slow its efforts to boost its user base. However Google continues to invest in the Chinese Internet market, with a minority stake in P2P player Xunlei - which is aimed at the local online video market. This move might have other benefits for Google, as Xunlei doesn’t support Baidu downloads for instance.
Among all the players, the one to watch is Tencent. Given its dominance in IM and success in entering new markets such as casual games, mobile chat and virtual goods - it has the strengths to make a decent entry into the Chinese search market.
The Chinese search market is bound to hold a few surprises in the next year or two, as most Chinese Internet users claim that factors such as duplication of results, freshness and quality of the way results are ranked, could use further improvement.
Speaking of improvement, Google apparently needs to pay more attention to the quality of its image search, as it returns virtually no images for the Chinese name of former president Deng Xiaoping. Baidu, on the other hand, could be leveraging its new Japanese office to offer a better service to its users searching for adult terms like ‚Äúsex‚Ä?. Baidu apparently returns only 3 results for ‚Äúsex‚Ä? in its Chinese site, whereas its new Japanese site returns 107,000 images for the same search term.
Q4 2008 Search Advertising Data
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/090113-131707
January 13, 2009
AdGooroo Releases Q4 2008 Search Advertising Data
AdGooroo has released data for search engine advertising in the fourth quarter of 2008. Google's first page advertisers grew by 58%, and Live Search grew by 42.3%. Yahoo only grew by 8.8%.
More interesting tidbits from Q4:
- A combined Microsoft/Yahoo! entity would increase large advertiser counts on the Live Search network by 157 percent, making a strong case for Microsoft acquiring Yahoo!
- Microsoft continued to close the gap in advertiser share with Yahoo: In Q3, Yahoo! led by 17.6 percent, but this lead has narrowed to 3.0 percent at the end of Q4
“Ad coverage on the search engines continues to provide a reliable indicator of advertising activity and is the focus of increased industry chatter,” said AdGooroo Founder and Chief Gooroo Rich Stokes in the new report. “The Q4 report shows that we measured large increases in ad coverage on Google. Microsoft ad coverage fell, on the other hand, likely indicative of their continuing focus on ad quality control and holistic search. Yahoo! showed little change in ad coverage from other 2008 reports.”
Related Reading:
Paid Search Spend up 12% in Q4 2008
Retail Search Ad Spend Up 33% So Far in Q4 2008
Posted by Nathania Johnson at January 13, 2009 1:17 PM
Paid Search Spend up 12% in Q4 2008
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/090107-093413
January 7, 2009
Paid Search Spend up 12% in Q4 2008
Paid search spending was up 12% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same quarter in 2007, according to SearchIgnite.
We've been hearing that advertising dollars were being shifted online, with the strategy accelerated by the rough economy. But is that trend slowing?
SearchIgnite says October's spend was up by 15% and November was up by 43% year-over-year. But December's spend dropped 14% from the previous year.
It could be a reaction to consumer behavior. Conversion rates increased by 11% in October, but dropped 2% in November. They went back up in December but just by a 4% increase.
Still, Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite, suggests that in all the confusion there is opportunity for the technologically innovative.
“Retailers were more aggressive with their paid search spend in the first half of the quarter compared with the year earlier in an effort to capture more consumer dollars ahead of the holidays.” said Barnette. “This is evidence that the challenging and changing economic environment is requiring retail marketers to adjust their online marketing strategies accordingly. As such, tools for testing and understanding how both search and other online media are performing together will become increasingly important for retailers as they look to make more nimble, data-driven decisions about where to allocate their media spend.”
Related Reading:
59% of Small Businesses Don't Do Paid Search Marketing
Yahoo Gives Itself Permission to Change Your Search Marketing Campaigns
Posted by Nathania Johnson at January 7, 2009 9:34 AM
eMarketer's Predictions for 2009
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006813
DECEMBER 16, 2008
What lies ahead in the new year?
David Hallerman, Senior Analyst
Online Ad Spending: Still Solid Choice
Video ad spending will run counter to overall economic developments, rising by 45% in 2009 to reach $850 million. Two key factors support this trend.
First, the sharp escalation of professional video content on the Web—mainly from TV networks—is creating a viable base for brand marketers.
Second, even though most advertisers are increasingly cautious with their budgets, they still need to reach online audiences and woo their shrinking wallets with messages that reach their hearts and minds—hence, more video.
Search marketing spending will grow by 14.9% in 2009, to $12.3 billion. Search marketing is not recession-proof, but it is recession-resistant. Two basic assumptions support this eMarketer projection. Search is highly measurable, so it will maintain its place in many budgets and increase in some others, as advertisers look for secure and effective methods to combat fear in an economic meltdown.
Also, consumers—who monetize search ads by deciding whether or not to click—will take money off the table by shopping less, and put money back on by searching for deals. Although search advertising will grow less in 2009 than in any previous year, its inherent strength will mean greater spending gains than for any other major form of advertising, whether online or offline.
Total US Internet ad spending will increase to $25.7 billion in 2009, an 8.9% growth rate. That will be the lowest year-over-year increase for online advertising ever. Yet it will still be a robust increase compared with nearly all other media.
Lisa E. Phillips, Senior Analyst
Demographics: Multicultural Ads Ascend
Multicultural marketing will gain intensity online. Although white Americans make up about 70% of the US Internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online, through their PCs and their mobile phones. Marketers will follow, targeting these segments with language- and culture-specific messages that evolve from their general-market campaigns.
Ageism is out, online. Some 55% of US adult Internet users are over age 40, according to Harris Interactive.
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Although Internet penetration within the 40-and-over crowd is lower than among younger demographic groups, boomers and seniors outnumber younger adults in the general population—so that lower Internet penetration still translates into greater numbers of older Internet users, according tocomScore Media Metrix.
While younger Internet users go online for entertainment, older users are more practical in their online usage. Smart marketers will target older Internet users with special offers, uncluttered Websites and ad messages, and lots of product information.
Jeffrey Grau, Senior Analyst
Retail E-Commerce: Record-Setting Declines
Online retail sales (excluding travel) will grow by only 4% in 2009—the first full year to feel the impact of the economic crisis.
Over the long term, online sales growth has been on a downward slope as the number of online buyers approaches saturation. So, the economy accentuates an existing trend. Most retail e-commerce sales growth in the future will come from increased spending by consumers who have long been online buyers.
Debra Aho Williamson, Senior Analyst
Social Networking: E-Commerce a Revenue Stream
E-commerce will be a growing revenue stream for social network sites. Expect both MySpace and Facebook to enhance their self-serve advertising systems to allow consumers and businesses to buy and sell real-world goods and services.
With US ad revenue growth slowing, smaller and niche social networks will have a tough time gaining traction and several may close up shop or be acquired by larger players. In addition, marketers that have built standalone social networks tied to their brands will either close them or migrate them to existing social network platforms where they can reach a broader audience.
Facebook, already a de facto business networking site because of the number of businesspeople who use it, will develop ad programs aimed at B2B companies. This will directly affect LinkedIn.
Twitter may have turned down Facebook’s all-stock offering in late 2008, but it will still end up being acquired. The company that buys it will use the Twitter infrastructure to offer targeted marketing and analytics to advertisers.
Carol Krol, Senior Analyst
Traditional Media: Continues Hurting
Newspaper advertising will continue to decline in the new year more than any other medium. Industry-wide cutbacks will continue, and there will be some consolidation. The industry was limping before the recession; expect more newspaper companies to become casualties.
In October, the venerable Christian Science Monitor became the first national newspaper to announce its move to a Web-only daily strategy beginning in April 2009. It won’t be the last. Some newspapers will also reduce their publishing frequency.
eMarketer estimates that US TV ad spending will decline 4.2% to $66.9 billion in 2009. This drop in spending reflects not only expectations of a continued poor economy but a seismic shift in the way TV ads are bought and sold.
Fragmentation on TV and declines in viewership have made it more difficult for advertisers to reach audiences. Broadcasters will be pressed to redefine their businesses in an increasingly digital world. They will focus on expanding programming to the online realm and will continue to test business models.
The 800-lb. online video gorilla, YouTube, announced in Q4 2008 that it would carry full-length television programs supported by ads. Expect to see similar properties compete with it in 2009.
Agencies and brands from all verticals rely on eMarketer Total Access for analysis and data. Daily articles are just the tip of the iceberg. Find out what you are missing. Learn more about Total Access today.
Pixsy signs partnership with Veoh Networks
October 4, 2007
Pixsy Corp., the upstart video and image search company that's taking on larger rivals such as Blinkx and Truveo, said today that online video-sharing channel Veoh Networks will start using its technology in return for an undisclosed sum.
With the deal, which is exclusive on the image-search side but not on the video-search side, Pixsy adds Veoh to its list of paying customers, which also includes Travelocity, Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin told Vator.tv in a phone interview.
The video search market got a high-profile boost in May when Blinkx went public on London's Alternative Investment Market in an IPO that raised $50 million and valued the company at $225 million. The fact that Blinkx achieved that valuation despite being unprofitable raised a lot of eyebrows, but it helps illustrate the enthusiasm investors have for the technology.
"It's tough to swallow whenever you see a rival raise that much cash," Norlin said, "but it validates the market we're in."
It's also a reminder that startups should be looking at overseas funding opportunities. Read another story on that same topic here.
Now that Pixsy's technology will be available to Veoh's 18 million unique visitors per month, this seems like a good time to roll out our one-on-one interview between Norlin and Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco, filmed in late September. In it, Norlin explains how video search has evolved recently and how his company works to build partnerships with small as well as top-tier publishers.
Chase also talks about Blinkx’s IPO , the financial/business partnerships Pixsy is currently exploring and the future growth of the video search market. To see Chase’s pitch for Pixsy click here. To see Chase sharing the lessons he learned in his life as an entrepreneur, click here. For an interview with Pixsy competitor Truveo’s CEO Tim Tuttle, click here.
Monday, January 19, 2009
SES London 2007: A Review
http://www.interactivereturn.com/ses-london-2007-review.htm
Recent statistics relating to Search Engine market share from Hitwisereported that in the UK, Google powered 78% of the market; Yahoo 8%; MSN (+live) 6% while Ask held 5%. What was most interesting is subsequent year-on-year figures reported which does not spell good reading for MSN. Google was up 6% year on year, Yahoo was up 12%; Ask was up 12% in last 6 months while MSN (+live) was down 15%.
Other interesting facts included:
- Of UK internet visits, the market share of search engines has now taken over that of adult websites and this market along with gambling is beginning to fall
- Google and Yahoo users tend to show preference for social networking websites such as Myspace and Bebo while Ask users tend to prefer Bebo and FriendsReunited
- People tend go further (past page 1) for organic results
- Around 85% of clicks are from organic search
- Google has a higher CTR past page 1
- Users go deeper for image searches
- Mobile and video search are growing
- 62% of advertisers’ plans to increase spend in search.
LTU engine
http://www.ltutech.com/en/products/ltu-engine
LTU engine is a software platform designed to implement a wide variety of image and video applications in a wide range of different user, hardware and software environments. Please see technologies and solutions pages for more information on what technologies LTU engine includes and what solutions it can solve.
Match photos with their edited versions to find copyright infringements or search your stock for a specific image |  |
Search law enforcement image and video databases to investigate child abuse cases or stolen art cases |  |
Enable intuitive search on e-commerce catalogs orphotobanks to ease the shopping experience |  |
Quickly match a bootleg video with its original movie to detect copyright infringements. |  |
Hitachi Similarity Based Image Retrieval System
With the volume of data already at unprecedented levels and expected to continue to increase rampantly, technology enabling quick searches of still and video images is much in demand. In response, Hitachi has developed a Similarity-Based Image Retrieval technology, a search engine for just such large-scale image and video archives. Similarity-Based Image Retrieval technology automatically extracts quantified information intrinsic to the image — such as color, shapes and forms — and runs searches to locate a match. This innovative search technique can be used for something as basic as searching for a movie scene or image on a camcorder to something as complex as searching for facial imagery in security, video surveillance or law enforcement applications.
MEDICO
The Intelligent Image Search Engines of MEDICO will
- Develop and apply innovative and formal concepts for generic image vocabularies, image syntax and semantics,
- Investigate new scalable and hierarchical information representations that generalize across applications and Develop new architectures that support semantic image search and scalable searching solutions.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Viper
http://viper.unige.ch/doku.php
The Viper group deals with the processing and management of multimedia. In particular, multimedia information retrieval and mining are focused. The current research interests include:
- Multimedia information Retrieval: Image and video (including audio)
- Multimedia information mining with our novative concept of Collection Guiding and also our efforts for large multimedia collection management
- Multimedia processing as a need to design efficient features
Content-Based Image Retrieval Papers
Some old papers before 2000 can be found @
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~beechung/docs/papers.htmlThe following site lists papers about Content-Based Image Retrieval from large Medical Image Databases
Helsinki University of Technology has some works on Content-Based Image and Information Retrieval
Fourier Descriptor can be used to for content-based medical image retrieval
JPEG compression domain (DCT) info can be used for image retrieval
A good aricle related to video search and its market
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