Today, I proudly donned by Hotdocs volunteer shirt and did  a volunteer shift.  In volunteer training, we were warned that you can't assume you will get to see the doc screening so I didn't expect it.  But I did get to watch two films!  Volunteering was really fun.

My Grandmother's House
I didn't see this full doc.  As I missed the beginning and left before the end.  It is about a grandmother who is taking care of her young granddaughter.  Meanwhile she is being evicted from her house as new apartments are being built in her block.  I loved the film makers' shooting style and the colours she used.  I found the doc didn't do enough to connect me to her her subject but maybe it was because I missed the beginning?

Arctic Son
Highly recommended.  Beautifully shot documentary of a son who returns from city living to the traditional lifestyle of his father in the Arctic.  The doc shows the father teaching the son the techniques of living off the land.  The son gradually finds himself through this and moves away from his destructive habits (drinking, drugs etc.).  This film really portrays the stark differences between the lifestyle of the Inuit with the southern Whites while leaving you with hope for the future.

Country
Country was made by a Quebec film maker about the phenomena of country festivals in Quebec during the summer.  People who enjoy country music and the country culture (rodeos, shirts with tassles) drive around to each festival all through the summer.  It is a warm environment and the people who participate in the country fair find it lifts their spirits.  This was a beautifully shot documentary that illustrates that even in our mass communication people still are drawn to very personal cultural experiences.

I missed the most recent DemoCamp event because I had another event that night.  I read a review of it by the AccordionGuy and I wished I had been there to hear a comment by a frustrated Java developer.  As the AccordionGuy describes it

I feel for those Java developers.  In the late 1990's they were really king of their game.  I recall a colleague from Nortel who got sent to a Sun sponsored Java conference for developers.  We all gathered round him to hear what it was like. 

When he arrived to register at the conference, in addition to the usual questions, he was asked what kind of coffee he liked (regular, latte, americano etc) and what he took in it (milk, two sugars etc).  His response was programmed into a small Sun branded key chain.  When he went to the coffee machine, his key chain could fit in a small receptacle, it would read it and make him the coffee he had specified at registration.  I don't think I need to say it but ...... fancy-schmancy.


 



Java, it seems to me, was one of the first languages to be heavily marketed.  It was no coincidence that the Java conference organizers choose to illustrate the power of the programming language through a coffee machine.  Java, coffee, get it? Get it? 

According to Wikipedia, the name Java could be an acronym or could stand for nothing but was most likely chosen because the developers met at a coffee shop.  Either way, it was fortunate that they chose Java and that at the same time the coffee culture was rising.  That really made it easy for the marketing people. 

It was not a good day for programmers when marketing people got a hold of their languages.  In general, programming languages are developed by programmers to solve a problem that can't be overcome with what eventually becomes the predecessor language. 

In the '90's, corporates started to realize that programmers with an expertise in a language would become some of the 'stickiest' customers you could create.  And so the linguists were born.  When Kernighan and Ritchie developed C they certainly weren't thinking about the million dollar industry that would develop from Microsoft C++ courses.

I am often dismayed when I hear programmers act like linguists.  I speak 'C or Perl or PHP or Java or Ruby'.  And they put down the other languages.  I have no interest in that type of discussion.  As a product manager, I am most impressed with programmers who can listen to my business or customer problem, develop a solution and then prototype the solution for me (so I can see it).  If they wrote it in Lisp, I'm happy if it solves my customers problem.

So Java developer, be comforted.  If it solves a customer problem or saves your company money then you don't have to worry about what those Ruby guys are up to.  But if you are just there to defend 'Java' your language, the way acadamie-francais defends French then you have problem.

Badal & Inshallah
Inshallah is a Danish doc about a Dane who is Muslim, choses to wear a headscarf and so can't get a job.  It was extremely well done.  I hope it is widely shown in Denmark.  The doc really illustrates how the 'foreigners' in Denmark really live like Danes - they speak Danish in the privacy of their own home, they eat Danish style meals, they use candles to create hygge.  But they chose to practice their faith in secular Denmark.  It was an excellent examination of a challenge in Danish society to truly include immigrants into the country without requiring assimilation.


Badal was about a marriage tradition in Palestine of marrying sisters and brothers in one family to those in another family.  As the doc develops, its clear that badal is used to marry off girls by leveraging the inherent value of the 'boy' child.  It also showed the contradictions of a country like Palestine where those with progressive and traditional beliefs live side by side.

Heavy Metal Jr & Beyond Beats: A HipHop Head Weighs In On Manhood in the HipHop Culture
Highly recommended. Both docs are good.  Heavy Metal Jr. follows a young heavy metal band trying to make it in Scotland.  Losing a bass player is tough but the band pulls together for their big act. 

Beyond Beats was a great examination of hip hop culture.  I am tired of having conversations with people who say they don't like hip hop or rap except they listen to music that uses elements from both.  Beyond Beats looks at hip hop from the perspective of someone who identifies it as their own music but is tired of the gangsta image.  The doc becomes really interesting when it starts to look at how much hip hop is consumed by White audiences and how it became more and more gangsta when the small labels (ie. Def Jam Records) got bought by the big labels (CBS Records).  After watching Rize and now this doc, I am more convinced than ever that we are in a peak of hip hop and something new is about to emerge.


The Duckling
I was unsure of this doc but I wanted to see at least one from Japan, one of this year's featured countries.  At times The Duckling seemed like the video diary of a typical 20 year old, slightly lost and largely self absorbed.  However, at other times it was a brilliant investigation into self-discovery.  It is sometimes brave as well as the film maker decides to confront each of her family members with their emotional affect on her as she grew up.  Her parents for example sent her at 5 years old to a kindergarten for one year where she had to live away from home in a rural and natural environment.  It came out during the Q&A that this was a trend in Japanese society when it went through its rapid economic growth in the '80's. 

Last week, I witnessed the grand socio-technological experiment of our times.  Can a Windows user switch to Mac?  My colleague here at Tucows, Kim Phelan got a new laptop and bravely said, 'Sure, a Mac is fine'. 

Switching laptops is no easy feat.  If you have to move over your mission-critical email and files, unless you are extremely careful on where you have put things over the years, you will always be concerned about missing a file. 

Like me, Kim is a 10 year + Windows user.  But how hard could it be to switch over to a Mac laptop?  First, when the LAN admin at Tucows dropped it off, he made a kind of friendly disclaimer that was a cross between, 'good luck and we don't support these'.  Fortunately, every other Tucows employee is a huge Mac fan and uses one in the office or at home. 

So, every time one of the Mac users passed by, Kim would have a question.  And invariably their response was 'that's easy'.  Except it isn't easy when your instincts are off.  I joked every time she asked a question that 'It should be obvious to you how to do that, its a Mac'.  The hilarity of that wore off quickly.  So I watched how she had to ask questions.  Our CEO delivered sensei like advice when he passed by and said, 'Every time you think to use Ctrl, use the Apple key.  Apple key Kim.  ... Apple key....'

When I got my Tivo (finally) working, my Tivo guru onezan said, 'Its so easy to set up.  You will love it'.  And you know what, he was right.  It took literally 2 minutes to get the hang of it.  I think a lot of Mac users would put forward the same idea.  Not so.

At the end of the day, its another OS and learned behaviour (of Windows users) is hard to say 'but this is intuitive....'  But Kim is an interesting case study.  Why did she really want a Mac?  Well, brand managers rejoice, she wanted one because its cool.  It works with her iPod.  And you know what, I kind of want one too.  I helped my friend get going in blogging, she's a Mac user and a friday night of wine, and blogging on the Mac and I couldn't believe it when I found myself thinking, hey this is kind of cool.  As the T. said, 'You too?  I guess the fashion is really working'

It would be nice to have a Mac in the living room so I don't have to look at another PC when I come home.  But Apple and friends, stop answering every question with 'that should be easy or that's obvious or that's a no brainer'.  Its not easy if you're a Windows user, it is easy if you're 10 years old with no PC history.  It is just as hard for Windows users to use a Mac as it is for you to use Windows.

Mac brand managers, the brand success of the iPod is slowly working.  For the first time in my life, I would consider buying a Mac to have in our livingroom.  But you have to make it easy for me.

You can't build a cool web app these days without some blogger asking, 'But what about your business model?'  And so I ask this question about Riya.

We've all learned the lessons of the dot-com with most companies having had no real business model, usually because of a poorly defined market segment (think LiveSquidinaBox.com)  Today, the business model de rigeur would seem to be 1. build a cool app, 2. get bought by Yahoo, Microsoft or Google.

And so for Riya?  Currently, there is no charge associated with using Riya and there is no advertising on the site.  It is currently still in Beta.  From what I have read about Riya, I get the impression that they expect an eventual business model to come from advertising.

My fear is that Riya could become the Tivo of web apps.  Those who use it love it, everyone else asks,  'what's so great about it? it sounds like a VCR etc. etc.'

There is much discussion in the blogosphere around the "new" marketing and the fact that if people love a product it has a strong chance to become widely adopted through viral marketing.  But the reality is that strong viral marketing must be combined with a good business model.  Tivo never really got its business model quite right. 

So Riya, please get it right.  My view is that the ideal business model for Riya is not advertising but rather to licence the technology.  Clearly team Riya is good at image recognition.  Create a brand around being the best (models to look at: Dolby Noise Reduction, MPEG-4), licence it in private agreements and get it out there with all the photos sites, blogging tools and maybe even Google images search.  There are so many businesses that I can think of that are now taking large numbers of digital images (professional photographers, media, archivists and the list only goes on). I believe they would pay for a technology that reliably labels and tags their photos. 

Don't (whatever you do) get bought out by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.  Why?  Because network externalities affect the usefulness of this technology.  Its only when many people are teaching Riya that it becomes truly useful.

Riya appears to be the first company to build a strong brand around image recognition technology.  But people leave companies, they take  technology with them,  people talk, write papers and eventually being able to do what Riya does will enter into the technology collective.  The biggest advantage that Riya has now is being first and in this case, getting big fast is important. 

Riya must start to build the most significant user base so that it becomes the tool of choice for image recognition.  It can build the business model from working with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others.

In this hazy, crazy world of Interweb apps, Riya is a product that I stumbled upon.  I found this blog and started reading it.  I signed up for the Alpha but I only really used the tool properly now during the Beta.

So what is Riya?

Riya is a tool that searches images and recognizes people and objects.  By identifying all the people in your picture set, you can search on a person's name to find all the pictures of that person. 

How does Riya do this? 
First: You have to upload a huge number of photos (1000+) using an uploader application that is installed locally.  Riya recommends uploading all your pictures over night or when you are away from your machine (whatever that is for you).

Local uploader your say, but this is Web 2.0? That's what I thought but the local uploader is required to use your PC cycles to do some pre-processing on the images.  And hey, a local win32 app,  its kind of kitschy in a 1998 sort of way.  This is definitely the most awkward part of the product but it would seem technically unavoidable at this stage.

Second: As pictures get uploaded, Riya starts to go through them to identify faces.  Then it asks you, Ms. User to label each face it has found.  Once you give it a bunch of names to the faces, it starts to go into an auto-recognize cycle.  It looks for those faces within other faces.



Three:.Riya asks you to confirm that it auto-recognized those faces correctly.  It is really a 1,2,3 step process.  When you keep repeating it, Riya keeps getting better and better at recognizing people correctly.  Essentially, Riya starts to learn how to recognize the faces from your set.

How hard is it to recognize faces?  Its hard for a computer, easy for a human.  Have you ever sat with a parent, grandparent or sibling looking at old photos?  I've seen my dad look at a picture from 1912 point at a boy in short pants and say 'That's my uncle Eddy'.  My dad wouldn't have known his Uncle Eddy in short pants so how did he recognize him?  The angle of the head, the area around his eyes, perhaps the smile made him see his adult uncle in the child.  For a computer to do that type of recognition means converting these types of patterns into algorithms and then calculating probabilities of pattern matches.

Though Riya involves a 3 step process, the UI is fantastic and is the product's saving grace.  Users barely tolerate 2 step processes.  Riya uses some nice UI techniques to keep users on track. 

The face recognition is good but Riya needs a large number of photos before it can reliably recognize a face.  So at first, it seems like 'what's the point?' because it can barely recognize people and you have to keep telling it who they are over and over again.  But as it starts to get better, it becomes more fun. 

I like when Riya matches pictures of me to my sister or my niece to her brother, this makes it seem like the application is getting smarter.  The T. and I had a laugh when Riya matched the pictures of two friends who we always joke are so alike in personality (turns out they look the same, algorithmically speaking).

A great thing about the tool is that it looks for all the faces in your photos.  But a frustrating thing of using the tool is that it goes through pictures and looks for ALL the faces.  Think of all the faces of people you don't know that you are forced to include in a wedding shot. 
There were alot of people matched to my friends and family for which I thought, 'Who is that and why do I have a picture of them?'   Riya has a 'Don't Know' option but I think they should add a 'Don't Care'.  I would love it if eventually Riya could get smart enough to determine that a face that appears once doesn't have to be identified as quickly as one that appears many times.

And why does it keep matching me to my friend Alex?  He's a dude, for one thing.  And I keep telling it, 'Bad Riya.  Bad match'.  But it keeps bringing it back.


The nice touches of Riya outweigh the small problems.  For example, Riya included pictures of my niece playing hockey in her name search.  Not because it could match any faces (hockey helmets!) but because her name is in the album name and it included the album name in its Search.

Another cool feature of Riya is that it can be taught to recognize objects.  In one picture of our living room, it identified our tv and our sony player.  This was the first thing that impressed the T.  When I first talked about Riya, the T. was less than intrigued because he has seen one too many projects that pursue an academically difficult problem that has little practical application.  But to see it identify a TV won him over a bit.  Why? Because its useful and I could point out to him that the collective had taught Riya to recognize TVs and now she was good at it.  And she will only improve over time.

I have personally taken on the mission to teach Riya how to identify the CN Tower because I have alot of pictures of it.  And I think the idea that I can teach Riya  to identify this landmark is pretty cool.

So how did the collective teach Riya?  Because on upload, all pictures are public!  So it compares my TV picture against all the other TV pictures.  This surprised me as I thought it should be private by default.  I don't put pictures of my friends and family public without their permission.  I suspect that the majority of people would share this view with me.  But the lead users of Riya (who routinely put all pics up on Flickr) probably don't care about this.  But that default setting is something Team Riya should probably think about more if they are going for wider adoption.

So I'm hooked on Riya's wash, rinse, repeat cycle.  There are pictures I haven't looked at in years.  I can see how badly my photo albums were organized and now with Riya I found my niece's hockey pictures.  My only question is ... Now what? 

This leads into a question about what will Riya's business model be after it leaves Beta?  I will put my thoughts into another post.