Let me show you a page in the Google strategy document 2009. Google will be the launching "Where you go, I will follow" marketing services for advertisers. They will launch this ad serving serive based on their two years of development work and some acquired technologies. The new Google strategic platform will be built around face recognition technology. They will literally be able to tell where you've been, why you've been there, and when you've been there.
Back to 2007,Google is now very close to acquiring Riya, a face recognition service that has expanded into a visual search engine for faces (and objects). They didn't want to buy the company because they prefer to develop one in-house. This can be integrated into Picasa to automatically detect people in your photos and organize them better (like MyHeritage does) and might be the foundation of a new kind of image search engine, that understands more from the pictures. But this is only the begining. They've just acquired Neven Vision, a company specialized in image recognition. Neven Vision has developed a suite of mobile recognition technologies that enable images to become the interface to digital content—photos of ads become hyperlinks to branded content portals, while your camera phone can snap a picture of your face to secure verification of identity and control access to your private data. By equipping customers with an intuitive visual interface that anyone can use, this technology is unlocking vastly untapped market opportunities.
Initally this technology will be used by Google to improve Picasa, by detecting and recognizing obects and persons in the picture. But the biggest challenge would be to integrate this into their image search engine. The future goes beyond photos, imagine when we enter a department store and the security cameras pick up our face and activitate the personalization engine, then we will be beamed with special product recommendations, promotion pricing or just a list of our favourte designer items waiting in the changing room. Can you imagine the power available when, face-image recognition + search record data + location data = ?
How about walking past a shop window with the screen showing the exact product that you have been waiting for and was searching for on the internet the previous night?
How about walking into a store when the giant screen shows your friends and their shopping lists as they are linked to you in your social networks?
How about walking into the subway and the billboard showing you a happy birthday message to you together with a recommended list of presents you should get for yourself?
The only way to avoid this is to wear a mask and a hoodie when you go out, you will be ads free.
One thing I love about magazines (I subscribe to roughly 46 publications) is that there are no pop-up ads, no tracking of what I was reading, and I am nowehre to be found. Nice.
