I like Flickr for storing and sharing my online photos (I like Zooomr too, but Flickr is my current home). Works great, easy to upload, easy to use, easy to share. I’ve made my sets, tagged some pictures, and organized the majority of my pictures there. I’ve even taken the time, for reasons yet to be clear even to myself, to “geotag” many of my photos. Geotagging is cool, but until it’s built-into more cameras, it’s mostly a waste of time. Why do I say that? Because, in my opinion, to gain true mass adoption of advanced organizational tools, they need automation. Enter Polar Rose.
Polar Rose has something in common with my old couch and some shelves in my kitchen – it’s from Sweden. The company has technology that allows for automatic facial recognition in digital photos. A more techie version of this can be found here:
Collective intelligence is a key part of the Polar Rose technology. It will be used to improve search for photos and search algorithms, according to the company’s founder and CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Jan Erik Solem.
This all translates to something like this: the more people who positively identify faces in pictures, the better the whole system works. This creates a nice rosy image (ugh, what an awful awful pun) of the future for better organization of pictures. Don’t get it yet?
Imagine you and your friends take a bunch of pictures on your road trip. Now your well-organized, almost-OCD-like friend takes the time to tag all the pictures. Then you upload yours, and every picture you are in is automatically labeled with your names. You never have to touch them. Ever again.
They received $5 million Kroner US in funding, and if they can even pull off a rudimentary version of what they are promising, I can only envision a… yes… it’s coming… again… wait for it… rosy future! More on the funding news today at Red Herring, StartupSquad, and Digital Media Wire.
I wanted to get some kind of pun pertaining to the polar part, but it’s not as easy to roll in as rosy was. One could call it, in fact, the polar opposite.