David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

leilaboujnane

TinEye

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I am impressed with the progress that Leila, Paul and gang at Idée Inc. are making on TinEye. Yesterday, they released an IE browser plugin for TinEye. This follows their Firefox plugin and nicely rounds out the offering.

tineye-plugin

TinEye is a visual search solution. It allows you to find the web pages where an image appears.

tineye-ieOne example is you’re looking at purchasing a stock image to use on your homepage, and iStockPhoto.com says the image has been download 11,337 times, but you want to know where it appears online. You can use TinEye to find where the image has appeared. Check out what Rick has to say about the power of TinEye.

Lessons for you? Suck up to Leila and Paul. Check out the software they are building and run a check on the stock photography you are using; you never know who else is doing the same voodoo as you.

Voodoo! TinEye is like speculative fiction, that is, it meets Clarke’s Third Law.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Idee has built a great base technology for doing visual search in very large image collections. They have built a strong business around image and video monitoring. You can think of this services as a compliance and monitoring service. They help clients by providing right management and tracking. The monitoring reports provide clients a snapshot of where their images have appeared. The reports are used to automate editorial photo sales, perform competitive analysis, and copyright monitoring of collections.

Idée monitors and actively tracks millions of clients images and can identify where their clients images have been used in both print publications and the internet. They are the only company in the world to do this. Their image recognition system analyzes each client’s images and creates a digital fingerprint for each image and compares it to images scanned from publications and crawled from the Internet. The image matches found for their clients can be partial image matches as well. This means that a person appearing in one image, and then reappearing in another image but with a different background, will be found by Idée. – Jevon MacDonald on StarupNorth

TinEye is a diversification of the existing Idée technologies. Leila and Paul are trying to figure out the power of visual search.

MeshU – How to Demo like a Demon

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Leila and I are all done our presentation for MeshU. Unfortunately, we have a major FAIL for knock’em down TinEye demo, Leila and I just failed to manage the demo machine and the screen resolution. Not the best example. The basic take aways are pretty simple. Demoing is about telling a story to excite the audience about your company, solution, product. Very simply put demoing is about software. Tell me the problem you are solving then show me the damn software.

  1. What problem are you solving?
  2. Why do users want it?
  3. Remember to slow down and breathe.

We did not cover the differences between demos and pitches. A demo is not a pitch. A pitch may contain a demo. Let’s be honest, we’re all here to see the problem and how your software solves it. Once you’ve captured the attention of individuals, the conversation will naturally flow into details about the company, the team, the development environment, etc.

Many thanks to Ryan Feeley for the visual refresh.

Resources

Presentations

Pitching

Demoing

Example Demos

Business Plan

How to Demo like a Demon

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David Crow + Leila Boujnane W00t! Leila and I are part of the MeshU schedule. We are co-presenting a session titled “How to Demo Like a Demon“. The original title was Raise Money, Win Friends and Get Laid (aka How to Demo and Pitch for Fun and Profit). The idea, we need to teach entrepreneurs how to present and communicate their ideas. We’re really trying to help improve the quality of pitches, demos and presentations.

Raise Money, Win Friends and Get Laid  (aka How to Demo and Pitch for Fun and Profit)
Co-presented with Leila Boujnane, Idee, Inc.
Boring! Get off the stage!
How many times have you wished you could say this to a presenter at a conference? Or a demoer at DemoCamp? This workshop will help developers understand that doing demos is a marketing task because it generates demand for the software.
Technologists and designers need to be able to create demand for their ideas. They need to be able to tell compelling stories that convince audiences that there is ‘wow’ in what they are doing. Successful demoers are more likely to raise money, have friends, and get laid.

I’ve talked about my awe of the MeshU line up previously, and now that the line up includes me, no serious, the rest of the lineup is fantastic. The rest of the MeshU lineup includes a fantastic program. If you’re looking for a meaningful conference in Toronto, MeshU is only $239.