imprezzeo

I was invited to an Autonomy lunch / presentation yesterday on how, via their IDOL platform they can optimise SharePoint, especially in large distributed organisations. I can’t help but be impressed by the progress they’ve made and the resilience of Mike Lynch and his team. Deriving meaning from unstructured data might once have been seen as an esoteric search backwater but not now - its the foundation of a £3bn market cap business that looks set to enjoy continued growth. I remember tracking the stock not long after IPO and it took a beating for a while (poor IR programme?, understood but unloved?, a high value / low volume pipeline promising lumpy cash flow?). Look at its performance in the last 5 years v. the FTSE Techmark 100.

Of particular note is the trend-bucking trajectory in the last few months. With Interwoven now in the stable, a balance sheet that would make rivals blush and regulatory and governance imperatives driving strong demand in key markets (e.g. compliance and risk management, reputation management, e-discovery and legal disclosure), their challenges are enviable ones. It may not be the search brand de nos jours and some of that strong potential might already be priced into the stock, but if there’s a better “value stock” right now, I’ve yet to see it.

One of the unique aspects of Imprezzeo Image Search is the way it combines several aspects of visual search technology. There are three layers to the Imprezzeo application. The first layer is a general content search, where image features such as colour, shapes, textures are indexed in Imprezzeo's database and users can match reference images based on feature similarity. Next, Imprezzeo uses face detection to determine the presence of humans faces in an image. Lastly, Imprezzeo adds face recognition to allow a user to search for a specific “persona” using visual matching against Imprezzeo's database of recognised individuals, ie it knows who they are by face and name. Combining these visual search technolgies into an integrated and scalable enterprise search platform is what makes Imprezzeo so appealing to businesses with large image databases.
 

When we initially began talking to people about Imprezzeo, we had to explain these various aspects of visual search, especially the concept of facial recognition. However, with several major vendors beginning to offer various forms of visual search for consumers, the whole concept is becoming much more understood by the general public. Over the past year, Microsoft and Google have introduced rudimentary visual search options into their consumer photo applications. But, it has been Apple, with it's recently introduced iPhoto 09, which includes face recognition, that has caused the most excitement. Not so much because of what it does; its FR technology is just OK, but, in typical Apple fashion, they've developed a very slick user interface that makes it easy for anyone to use face recognition technology. As visual search is used by more and more consumers, we believe it's only a matter of time before it becomes a standard component of popular search engines, content management, ecommerce, and digital asset management systems.

Well, you can’t say the past couple of months haven’t been eventful. With new financial catastrophes happening it seems almost by the hour, a new President in the USA, and for us in the UK, a wildly fluctuating pound sterling that would make us feel like a banana republic if it wasn’t so cold in London at the moment. It’s not always easy to put a smile on your face when waking up on mornings like these.

Nevertheless, we have quite a lot to be thankful for in our daily lives, not the least of which is peoples’ realisation that we are all in the same boat- wherever it may take us. Is it my imagination or do people seem just a bit more helpful and tolerant of their fellow citizens these days? Not to worry, I’m sure it will pass soon enough.

At Imprezzeo, we’ve been staying very busy indeed. During the beta testing phase of Release I of Imprezzeo Image Search we’ve had the privilege of working with a number of image oriented companies during the testing period and they have helped us immensely to improve our product and have also helped us gain a better understanding of the businesses in which they operate. It’s been a real eye opener for us to hear our customers come up with creative uses for Imprezzeo and to see their enthusiasm for implementing image search.

We’ve also been able to start developing relationships with many complementary vendors in the asset management and enterprise search space and we’re very excited about working with them in 2009 to bring some really exciting integrated solutions to companies who manage large image collections. A typical implementation of Imprezzeo in the enterprise involves a tight integration with other image management and search systems, tied together through automated workflows. As an example, many companies have thousands of new images to deal with on a daily or weekly basis. Using Imprezzeo’s SDK, new images can be easily registered with Imprezzeo’s server as they are ingested into the customer’s DAM workflow and indexed by their text search engine. Thus, new images are almost immediately available to users for search on. The amount of work required to integrate Imprezzeo into an existing workflow is relatively minimal and ongoing maintenance is minimal. The difference for users in the amount of time it takes them to find the images they need is really amazing.

Stay tuned for some exciting developments in the early part of Q109, including an open API for developers, a browser add on for similarity search and much more.
 

Over the past ten days I’ve had the opportunity to attend industry events in New York and Amsterdam. The PACA (Photo Archive Council of America) conference in New York is one of the major annual events for stock photo agencies and IFRA in Amsterdam is a huge annual exhibition of technology for newspaper and magazine publishers.

PACA is not a big event as measured by attendance - probably 400 delegates or so, but they are the movers and shakers in their industry and they came from all over the world to network and assess the state of business as the global economy continues to wobble on its axis. The stock photo business isn’t likely to be described as a high growth. In fact, some reports say this $2 billion industry may shrink over the next couple of years. There was a fair amount of chatter about how difficult it is to gain online exposure to buyers, typically advertising agencies, designers, and publishers, as there are so many buying choices available these days. There was also much discussion about the perceived consolidation of the industry, with Getty Images and Corbis being the two big boys out to further assert their dominance.

However, I also met many delegates who were optimistic about their businesses and looking forward to introducing new products and services. They were keen to embrace new technologies that will allow them to implement their business plans. And, of course, there were plenty of tech vendors on hand (like us) eager to help them do so. It struck me that, as in other mature industries these days, there is always opportunity for those who embrace change. It’s the companies that spend most of their creative and financial energies trying to protect their franchises that are bound to end up with the short of the stick.

IFRA was a much different sort of affair. Held in the giant RAI exhibition centre and dominated by massive multi-million Euro exhibits of the big technology vendors, there were thousands of visitors. However, attendance was off sharply compared with the past couple of years. Interestingly though, most of the companies that I met with (to discuss partnering deals with Imprezzeo) seemed very pleased with their investment in the exhibition. They told me that, although attendance was down significantly, they didn’t feel they had wasted their money as the quality of the meetings they had was higher and the buyers, despite the economy, were eager to hear about new technology that would allow them to compete.

The big publishing companies who attend IFRA are no doubt fighting for their survival. Nevertheless, they can still reach into their piggy banks to invest in technology that they think will allow them to compete in the new media environment. Mostly this seems to mean products that will allow them to cut internal operational costs, such as Imprezzeo’s Image Search suite, or products that will enable them to publish in a multi-channel mode in real time across print, internet, audio and video.

There is a real revolution underway for old line news organisations, and IFRA provided an interesting peek at the armoury of new weapons at their disposal.

Welcome to Imprezzeo, a new image-based search company. We started this blog to give you an insight into the thoughts of the executives behind the company, and as an outlet for your feedback. My colleagues, Kurt Dressel, our VP of Sales, and Peter Chin, our CTO, will also be contributing in this space, where we will talk not only about our company and technology (as wonderful as they are), but about image search and digital photo markets in general, and other topics that touch on our reason for being here.

So what is our reason for being here?

The 'about' section of the site leads with the phrase "we use text to find text, why not images to find images" and that pretty much explains why we are here. Not using images for the sake of it but because they are more suited to the task of finding 'more like this' than text alone. What better way to search for an image than to provide an example of what you are looking for?

Imagine the art director looking for a particular image for a campaign, a picture desk editor seeking one for a publication or a parent searching for an illustration for a party invitation. Each has a picture in their mind's eye but how do they go about accurately articulating what they are after. More often than not they put a simple search term into whichever source they use and settle in for an afternoon sat in front of a computer screen, wading through page after page of results. Far better we think to search using an example, either from an initial result set, an uploaded picture or indeed your own illustration. That way, the user gets what they want quicker and the search service gets a satisfied user. I expect to revisit this simple yet apparently elusive duality in more detail in future posts.

This is not to say that Imprezzeo's agenda is to eradicate text tagging completely – there is a place for them, for example in describing an emotion in an image. Anger might 'look' very different in images tagged as such. But there is a very real risk that as the corpus of digital images grows and tagging, the currency of pick-up, becomes 'richer' (for that read 'over-tagged'), the search experience deteriorates. I caught up with photo industry analyst Dan Heller while in NYC recently and he suggests that "keyword pollution" as he calls it is directly linked to user exasperation and abandoned search sessions.

Likewise, our message to those in the business of serving up photos, for commercial gain or otherwise, is; check your search logs and the percentage of searches that result in a transaction / download (whatever constitutes a successful search outcome). And what would be the financial impact if you managed to increase that percentage by a few points, bearing in mind there is negligible variable cost here? Check also the search terms used in those abandoned sessions and assess the likelihood of you having that content, and now consider the depressing probability that you had that content the user wanted, its just that they weren't able to find it, or weren't prepared to waste time trying to find it.

Successful retailers obsess about maximizing sales from footfall. Perhaps photo search sites need to be similarly fixated on how they use leading edge technology to improve their user's search experience to then benefit from the upside that site loyalty generates.

Anyway, more on subjects like that to follow. Besides this blog, we have also joined Twitter and will be engaging with the community in many other places as well. Please stay tuned for more links and projects, and we will see you on many of your blogs and groups!

Now, I would like to turn this blog over to you. What are your thoughts on image search as it stands today and what would you like to see from image search technology?

Dinner with some of the guys in NYC	Dermot and Dan with new hardware, post PhotoPlus Expo