On Tuesday, local tech startup Idée Inc. will publicly launch a search engine [TinEye] that its co-founders boldly say will do the same with images as what Google Inc. does with text. [...]
With a small, dedicated staff and several years of R&D work, Idée has managed to develop a set of algorithms that takes an image, compares it to about a half-billion indexed pictures, and returns a list of similar looking pictures along with their online URLs within milliseconds. [...]
The service could be a blessing for publishers, brand marketers and copyright compliance officers who want to track how products are being distributed on the Web. [...]
Idée's [other] existing service is used by about two dozen clients which tracks down publishers who use their copyrighted pictures and bills them accordingly. The service brings in about $15,000 to $75,000 per client and is growing at a rate of about 10 new customers per month.
Monitizing TinEye is Idée's next step. Within the next month, the company has plans to roll out a paid search revenue stream, affiliate fees for retailers which use the service to connect to customers and a corporate subscription service.
The potential behind TinEye has led a number of venture capitalists to inquire about investing into the company, but were rebuffed by Ms. Boujnane until now, who said she will begin looking for about $10-million to $12-million in funding for a small minority stake in the company.
"It has lots of business applications and I don't even think they've scratched the surface," said Rick Segal, a partner with private equity firm JLA Ventures. "It's the kind of stuff that gets greedy little suits like me excited."
Competition in the sector is swift. A recent scientific paper delivered by two Google engineers at a Beijing Web conference this past month suggests the company is looking to improve its own image recognition technology within its billion-dollar search engine. Riya, a Silicon Valley start-up that uses image recognition, was reported to turn down a US$40-million offer from Google in 2005 and is now rumoured to be worth at least five times that amount.
"For this kind of technology, there's a lot deep pockets already," said George Goodall, a senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group.
"I think [Idée] has a one-year window of opportunity to build the technology. If they fail to execute on that strategy in the next eight months, they could get swallowed up."
Quoted from the Financial Post/David George-Cosh.
