Google buys photo recognition software for Picassa

I skipped over this when it first happened, but since it effects my love affair with Riya, I want to come back to it. Google purchased a company called Neven Vision, a company which focuses on "automatically extracting information from a photo...it could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects." Basically this means that the great things about Riya - facial recognition in particular - could be rolled out into Picasa relatively soon. The big peave with photo applications is that they don't share information; I tag photos on Flickr and I let Riya do it for me, but Picasa falls by the wayside, though its a powerful and capable desktop photo organization tool. If it gains the ability to intelligently tag, and Google improves on its Picasa direct to web albums, this could be a really strong offering that ultimately trumps Flickr. At least for me, I like having photos on both my home computer and the web, and if Picasa's the only option to share information between those two platforms, it does it well, and it assists me in tagging, that becomes very convincing.

Related Tags: flickr, riya, nevenvision, facialrecognition, photorecognition, picasa, google, desktop, photo, sharing