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Riya.com - Facial Recognition for Family Photos

Written by Rich McComas

One of the darlings of the Demo conference this year was a small start-up company called Riya.com, named after the daughter of founder Munjal Shah. When I visited Munjal's personal website in early 2006, I found literally thousands of family photos. So, I would guess that Riya is his personal answer to organizing those photos, an answer to a problem every family photographer has.

Before the digital age, we stored photo prints in shoe-boxes, maybe organized by year, but that was about us. And now, with digital cameras, we organize by folders, usually by events (disneyland, christmas2005, etc), but it is a tedious an inflexible process. Riya gives us another layer of organization, by the people and text inside each picture.

Riya uses facial recognition technology to tag your photos with the names of each person in the frame, and text recognition to extract the text from the photo, such as a name badge or a sign (Now Entering Virginia).

We believe that Riya.com is the next great thing for digital photography after Picasa from Google, our favorite free software for organizing your image files. Named after Picasso, who was somewhat infamous for his abstract distorted faces, www.Picasa.com is limited to organizing images by folders. Riya adds another layer of tagging and automatically learns facial patterns either from your photos on your hard drive, photos tagged by friends and family members on their hard drives, or even from the paparazzi photos out on the web.

Riya recently received $15 million in venture capital financing and is currently in beta testing. To learn more, visit www.riya.com.

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TECH2 LAKE HOUSE

UPDATE - The exterior of the Technology Lake House is complete and we are now working on interior finishing and electronics. Last year, San Francisco's Channel 7 ABC News ran a special video report on the construction progress of the Technology Lake House, and we expect them back for a follow-up soon. Click HERE for a DLINK Live Video Feed with pan and zoom features (userid=user, no password, daylight hours only).

Ron Rosberg's current project home, the Technology Lake House, is currently under construction on the shores of Clearlake in Northern California. Even though the house is a wireless demo house, we have installed more than seven miles of wires in the walls for dozens of flat panel TVs, speakers, control panels, and sophisticated lighting. So far, more than a dozen technology and fixture manufacturers have agreed to sponsor this project, which has been simmering in Ron's head since he attended the first CES show in New York in 1967. The 7,500 square foot project (plus three existing rustic cabin guest houses) is being built on a five-acre Honeymoon Cove resort with 500 feet of beach directly across from Konocti Harbor Resort. This summer retreat will host technology gatherings annually, inviting Western states home builders, contractors, and technology consultants for a live open house showcasing the latest in home technologies. There is room to park plenty of boats, so plan on coming up for some lake fun after the project is complete. For more info, send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or call 707-995-2683. To see the latest photos, visit Ron's Flickr gallery.

We are currently looking for products to evaluate in these areas:

Home automation: lighting, security, and entertainment
A/V technology for the 500 SF home theater media demo room

Hot News on Cool New Features: The ENTIRE front of the home is made of 21 sliding NanaWall glass panels that fold into the walls, opening the entire home up to the lake during demo days.

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