Icogna.com, founded by Kris Woodbeck (a graduate of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Engineering and a winner of the 2007 Telfer School of Management’s Business Model Competition) is a new, image search engine that: a) appears to be the best of its type and b) has a great (i.e., simple and effective) GUI.
It can also find images that are similar to the ones it initially found. So, let’s say you are looking for images of ‘surfing’; you type in the word ‘surfing’ in the search box like you would in any search tool. The resulting images, based on word descriptions or titles of images given to them by folks who originally put those images on the Internet (i.e., their text-based meta-data), are then found and displayed for you. Some of those images are bound to be spurious. Many people try to fool search engines by giving their websites, images, what have you, deceiving names (a favorite of porn sites and virus laden sites designed to hijack your computer, steal your data or both).
But here is the interesting part. By clicking on the image that you feel is closet to the one you are looking for (say, you have found an image of someone surfing a monster wave and maybe what you really wanted were images of monster waves), Kris’ search tool (which is based on his patent-pending proprietary algorithm developed while he was studying at U of O) will efficiently find images on the web that are similar, not by searching by the names given to each image but through his image recognition software.
Computers are very inefficient when it comes to image recognition—which is why major search companies don’t do this. Using shape recognition to find other images to match the image of a surfer on a monster wave would normally require computing resources on the order of that available only through quantum computing. Kris solves this in two ways—first, by using parallel processing and second, by building a huge visual index of the Internet’s images that is searchable based on shapes.
BTW, it is believed that Google’s spiders have made three complete copies of the Internet including a complete history of the web. The whole thing has been indexed (using text based meta-tags), which is one of the reasons why Google’s search engine is so fast and usually so accurate.) Kris has done this for images.
That is a technological leap forward. I hope Kris makes a ton of dough…
But Kris needs to remember (and I am sure he will) that having a great technology is not enough—excellent execution counts for a lot too.
Dr. Bruce
Postscript: Here is a nice comment from Kris (frankly, a plug for the Telfer School of Management’s Entrepreneurs’ Club and our Business Model Competition that I shamelessly quote here):
Bruce,
“I wanted to let you know that the Elevator Pitch in 2007 and your Business Model Competition were a big part of what inspired me to actually go out and start Incogna.com. Otherwise, I’d probably have just “gotten a JOB” when I graduated. But this is way more fun!”
Kris Woodbeck, Founder, Incogna.com
December 2008