Riya, the photo-sharing website with facial recognition capability that I've obsessed over and written often about, is looking to sell their facial recognition technology. They transitioned over all of their efforts to a visual shopping search engine which is apparently very lucrative for them, although not nearly as exciting or fun. Apparently they never got over the hump in making the facial recognition software as accurate as they wanted, and any talks with buyers of Riya in that incarnation died long ago. Now they will officially rename their company Like.com, and sell off the Riya technology. I am hoping that Google or Yahoo purchases them and implements the technology immediately into Picasa or Flickr respectively - it would be an invaluable asset in tagging the thousands of photos I now have in each service (my wish list also includes those two companies allowing inter-operability & sync'ing). But now I'm thinking more likely someone like Facebook buys the technology and uses it to help its users tags the faces of their friends, a practice that Facebook users are already doing and are used to, and probably wouldn't mind the help.
