Polar Rose releases photo sharing site

There was a company called Riya that had some similar, advanced face detection technology. It launched in 2006 as a photo sharing site with face detection. However, relatively soon it shifted direction. It may not bode well for PolarRose that Riya relaunched as Like.com after deciding that licensing its face-detection algorithms would not be as good a business path as allowing people to search (and shop) visually.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/06/technology/riyastartup.biz2

Riya received funding of $4M (Series A) and $15M (Series B) and their Bangalore and SV-based teams (mostly computer vision Ph.D's) developed the technology over a period of 2 years. $5.2M for PolarRose is impressive, if they have developed equivalent technology.

It is possible that Riya's technology is behind iPhoto's face recognition. Or maybe Apple developed its own technology. Either way, face recognition now seems to be on it's way to a commodity technology and feature.

"Worked with the US team of 14 Stanford Computer Vision PhDs, and 6 Engineering and Management members from Cornell and Stanford - led and grew the team at Bangalore from a one-man-army to 30 engineers and 4 researchers."

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepgain

Their face detection/recognition technology isn't even that great from my informal tests, I think any graduate student + openCV can come close. the pittpatt one is much better.

That's a pretty editorialised headline! Why not just "Polar Rose releases photo sharing site"?

When I think "Polar Rose", I think "A service that encumbers photos with hovering icons that in no way indicate their purpose while obscuring my picture."

$5M doesn't seem a crazy amount for 2.5 years -- I think there is some pretty hardcore technology powering this site.