According to Riya there are 300 billion digital photographs stored in various places today, and they want to help us organise them. Riya is a photo sharing and search site that will tag and index your photos automatically using intelligent recognition. Riya took the web by storm when it launched it’s beta last year and amongst the hype, rumors of an acquisition, and $15M Series B round of funding has managed to build a great service. Riya released their public beta 2 weeks ago and since has seen great uptake of the service - living up to many expectations.
In the fifth episode of Talkcrunch we are joined by founder and CEO of Riya, Munjal Shah, and Riya’s online marketing and blogging head Tara Hunt. We talk about the launch, how Riya was developed, the challenges they faced in developing the application and other topics.
During the podcast we learn that Riya is more than just web-based photo sharing in many ways, it makes it easier to find images and to access the metadata associated with your photos. Munjal and Tara take us through some of the plans that they have for the future of Riya now that they are a public service.
TechCrunch posts on Riya are here.
Download size: 18.2MB
Duration: 39:20
Update: There was a small problem with the original file which has been updated now. Apologies.
The audio is messed up on this guys. There are huge silent gaps in both the flash player version and the mp3 version..
Mark, I apologize, we (meaning Nik) uploaded the wrong file. It’s fixed now.
Thanks Nik, this is a great insight in to Riya.
It seems that they aren’t quite sure where they are going to go with the company (in terms of a desktop app etc). I also find it hard to imagine quite how a Riya “Site Search” would work. But we’ll see.
Mike, I like your new TechCrunch service offering an audio review of the latest technology. Look forward to more.
Will Riya combine this “photo naming” service with the ability to create photo albums and share them over the net ? I believe this is the beginning of a very marketable product.
Rich, nice to see you hanging out here.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but at the very least I hope to see Riya built in to other services that already allow this. Also, you will be able to download this descriptive meta data to you original photos, and then upload them to other services down the road. So the short answer is, yes.
For instance, the new Yahoo Photos allows dynamic album creation on the fly based on tags associated with pictures. So you could create an album with certain tags of people’s names, and then have it printed up at Target, or a CD delivered to you. Easy. Cool.
[...] Dans les deux premiers jours de son ouverture, le 21 mars dernier, Riya la compagnie qui propose un service de recherche faciale, reçut plus d’un million de photos. Nous nous sommes entretenus avec le PDG de la startup, Munjal Shah et son directeur marketing Tara Hunt, afin d’analyser les futurs projets de la compagnie. Ecoutez cette interview (en anglais) sur TalkCrunch. Tags: talkcrunch, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, podcast Catégories : Sociétés et produits | Bookmark this post with del.icio.us [...]
Hi,
I’ve been following Riya for quite some time.
Even though their software does suffer from childhood issues, It is by far the best photo album i’ve encountered (not to mention the amazing photo recognition).
[...] And the best of this all, is that it’s free. Unlike many other photo sharing services, Riya has an no limits to upload bandwith or storage space, and photos are stored at full size. Currently, there are no ads, but on the TalkCrunch podcast about Riya, Munjal Shah, the CEO or Riya, said they may generate revenue from contextual ads in the future (minute 31). [...]
Hi,
I’m a college student and so I’m a total Facebook whore. They have photo uploading features on their site now and one of the interesting features, similar to Flickr, is the ability to tag specific areas within a photo. The way this is implemented is when a user uploads photos they can tag people’s faces and associate them with one of their Facebook friends. It is different from Flickr because it is meant for faces, not just any area of the photo.
So, what this means is I can click on my (or anyone else’s) profile at any time and with one click be able to see all the photos that contain me (assuming every photo has tagged faces in it). In practice, Facebook has made this so easy to do that most people do it. Check out some screenshots of this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skaplan/tags/facebook/
This is a great and unique feature that I hadn’t really seen much of before until I checked out Riya. Perhaps Facebook would be a great place to start with integrating technologies. There is a great training set of data that can be leveraged and a community of users that have already embraced
“people-tagging.”
props to Arrington (or whomever) for keeping asking the tough questions to Riya. the last thing we need is another rah-rah nonsense propaganda tech outfit like Wired or News.com or whatever. These CEO’s are playing with big dollars - let them answer the tough questions.
Just downloaded my first ever podcast and it was your’s on the Amazon S3 webservice … fantastic! Will be a solid weekly subscriber now
Only question is, can I subscribe to these through iTunes so that I can get them downloaded automatically as soon as you publish them !?
Thanks
Mic
[...] Photo search and facial recognition site Riya (a TechCrunch sponsor) had a million photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and seven million photos uploaded in the first seven weeks. For details on the core service, see this post and listen this podcast interview with Riya founder and CEO Munjal Shah. [...]
[...] Le site de recherche de Photos et de reconnaissance faciale Riya (qui est aussi un sponsor de TechCrunch US) affichait un million de photos téléchargées après 2 jours et 7 millions avec 7 semaines. Pour les détails sur ce service lisez ce billet ou écoutez ce podcast pour l’interview de son CEO Munjal Shah.. [...]
[...] Photo search and facial recognition site Riya (a TechCrunch sponsor) had a million photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and seven million photos uploaded in the first seven weeks. For details on the core service, see this post and listen this podcast interview with Riya founder and CEO Munjal Shah. [...]
[...] Photo search and facial recognition site Riya (a TechCrunch sponsor) had a million photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and seven million photos uploaded in the first seven weeks. For details on the core service, see this post and listen this podcast interview with Riya founder and CEO Munjal Shah. [...]
[...] Photosearch and facial recognition site Riya (a TechCrunch sponsor) had amillion photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and sevenmillion photos uploaded in the first seven weeks. For details on thecore service, see this post and listen this podcast interview with Riya founder and CEO Munjal Shah. [...]
[...] And the best of this all, is that it’s free. Unlike the other photo sharing services, Riya has an no limits to upload bandwith or storage space, and photos are stored at full size. Currently, there are no ads, but on the TalkCrunch podcast about Riya, Munjal Shah, the CEO or Riya, said they may generate revenue from contextual ads in the future (minute 31). [...]