Digital Home Thoughts: Interview With Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya

"Riya is designed to help search photos. The world is awash in digital photos today. Some three hundred billion photos have been taken by consumers in the last five years and there is no way to search them. Most of us have from five to ten thousand photos saved on our computers that have hard to remember names such as DSC009.jpg, because that’s what the camera saves in the name, and we haven’t changed it. Riya started with the simple idea that it’s time to make photos truly searchable, and do that by looking inside the photo using face recognition and text recognition and other techniques to figure out what’s inside. We are currently focused on personal photos, but we do plan to enable searching of photos on the web as well."



I have been following Riya for several months now and have been quite impressed with their technology. It is amusing though to keep hearing of the on-again/off-again rumours of Microsoft and Google both vying to license (or buy?) their technology. Anyways, here is a fantastic interview with Munjal Singh, Riya's CEO which covers broad areas including their business model as well as their technology future.