Questions about Riya and Google

So many of you have left comments asking for the full back story on Google and Riya and why didn't they buy us vs. Neven Vision. I'm so sorry but for legal reasons I can't talk about it. We have actually signed Non-disclosure agreements that prevent us from talking (I'm checking on the expiry of it right now ;-). I tell you this becuase many of you know I am fairly transparent with all of you about Riya in almost every other regard. It kills me that this prevents me from sharing this episode of Riya as openly as we have all of rest.

At this point what you can see are the public facts around Riya:

a) In Nov'05 you heard a lot of rumors about Google and Riya
b) In January'06 you heard me say that we are still an independent company
c) In January'06 you heard Riya announce it just raised a large series B financing of $15.5M - large rounds are usually pre-cursors to fund large new bold (and risky) strategies.
d) In March'06 Riya launches Riya 1.0
e) In May'06 Riya launches an expansion of it's vision to Riya 2.0 Visual search for the web = bold big strategies
f) In Aug'06 you hear about Google buying Neven Vision to deliver Riya 1.0 functionality to Picasa

So you can interpret it several ways but you have to do the inference here. Chose the interpretation that makes the most sense to you or come up with one on your own, however, I caution everyone not to be too Google obessed. There are too many people who thing Google has the gold touch right now and if they buy or don't buy something it is tantamount to being blessed by the pope. Google is a great company but not infallible.

What does it mean for Riya now that Google bought Neven. A few thoughts.

a) I don't believe Google is doing well in most of it's brand expansions. Gtalk beat by Skype, Orkut beat by Myspace, Gvideo beat by YouTube, Blogger beat by Typepad, Google Finance, Froogle, blogsearch etc all beat by other companies. So I am not scared based upon an analysis of their past success record. Others have shown that Google is beatable outside the core of text search.

b) If Google launches face recognition into Picasa it doesn't change our future or prospects as Riya has completely refocused on creating a public visual search engine.

c) The Google announcement is only driving many others who see Google as a competitor to partner with us. In many ways it is accelerating our adoption and improving our prospects. As the old adage goes "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Google has many many many enemies these days and not just Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, etc.

If you plan to attack a big market you have to have a strong stomach, be a fighter, and be somewhat insular (to not get distracted by the noise). There is no new company that doesn't get attacked by a big entrenched competitor. New networking startups get attacked by Cisco, chip companies by Intel, etc. It means you are onto something big and it means you better run.

So this week we all looked up from our keyboards, saw the announcement, turned to each other and said, "Bring it on Google" turned back to our keyboard and kept coding even faster. Riya has always been the underdog and we continue to think of ourselves in this way. As underdogs we have always believed that we were fighting against all odds to succeed. Nothing has changed there.

We will continue our work to build the best visual search engine we can possibly build and hope it brings us the millions of users which is the only measure of success / failure that matters for a consumer Internet company. Google actions are not the measure. Whether or not people love our new visual search engine will have a greater impact on our long term success than anything Google does.

Comments

[/pd]

Great Comeback Munjal !!

[Sam Davyson]

I'd agree with it all. Except Blogger beaten by Typepad. Good luck!!

[tim]

I would like to know what your plans are on Riya 1.0 I'm feeling kinda dissed right now as the reason I got excited about Riya was being able to auto sort my pictures (sorry my kids are more important to me that the latest Lindsay Lohan pictures ;-) I get the feeling I'm being dropped like a hot potato which is fine if that's what the business stats say to do. I just want to know should I quit uploading to Riya as you are never going to improve the engine for it? If you are going to leave Riya 1.0 to die then I should just wait for Google to get their stuff together and use picasa/Neven Vision right?

[Michael Tan]

What you write about google sounds very bitchy. I guess you guys negotiated too hard.

Even then, you do not address what is obvious to most of us. Google has a whole LOT of images in their databases - you don't. Adding metadata to their own image collection alone, is already a monumental contribution to mankind.

And the power of that, drowns out all else I can think of in this field.

[Anjanesh Lekshminarayanan]

It would be really nice if the future version of Picasa alloed to switch face-recognition engines. Say, use Google Neven-Vision or Riya or someother.

Would the future Riya have an API to integrate for developers to use on their apps ?

[Dave]

i agree with the general perspective, Google is certainly not impenetrable / unbeatable, particularly outside the core search market.

probably not Blogger beaten by Typepad alone, however i'd say Wordpress + TypePad + Movable Type + Live Journal + Xanga + MSN + others are equal or larger market share to Blogger. more notable is given Blogger's position at the time of acquisition they haven't done more with the property, but still i'd say they're still a substantial player there... just not the only one, nor the outright winner.

best of luck with the [re]new[ed] effort!

- dave

[Ven]

Hey Munjal,
Read this with interest. However, I don't think Blogger's beaten by Typepad.

Good luck!

[Ron]

I would also like to know what your plans are on Riya 1.0...like another blogger (Sam Davyson) I just want to know should I quit uploading to Riya as you are never going to improve the engine for it?

[Ron]

I would also like to know what your plans are on Riya 1.0...like another blogger (Sam Davyson) I just want to know should I quit uploading to Riya as you are never going to improve the engine for it?

[Jagdish]

You're list includes typepad, skype, AIM(anything which is outside the golden touch of Google !). That doesn't mean that Google is surpassed by the above list.

The power & dynamism what Google has right now providing services many underdogs have to crave a lot to get that edge.

I was expecting some kind of pro-active & intelligent BizTalk from CEO of such a dynamic co(+Andale). But not this under rated comparison with Google. That gives us the perception that ur fight is with Google & not really a dynamic technology development!

[ice.echo]

I am form China,I want to design a system like what you done,but my steps are very slow...can you give me some helps?Thank you..
I am majoring the signal process , image process , and others you friendly view my site of http://hi.baidu.com/icecho

[Tuhin Barua]

great going!
i like the atitude "run fast"...but u have to run really fast. coz google is after you. well i dont believe they are the best at everything but they are good ;-)

and what do u guys think about yahoo?
i think yahoo can create much more problem for riya than google.
yahoo allready has flickr and as well as their whole bucket of photus in their pocket, and i believe yahoo is not sitting there quitely and watching google-riya-nevenVision game. i guess soon they will launch similar thing :-)

best of luck

[Atul]

hi, I was thinking of the same kind of idea, but my idea is based on image congruency( how much an image maps to another) and according to that we search. one can upload the image and match with other images on web.What do you say, how much it's feasible?

[Krupa]

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ Is this going to be a big threat for you guys? Looks like they are looking into the picture through humans. do you guys beleive that you can beat them with your technology?

[Riya]

riya allready hired some 70 people (stil hiring i guess) to download and tag images from the web, so that they can have a nice organised database. they are giving those poor people 5000 rs per month :-)

[Frank]

I think you've made a mistake in your latest gamble and are overextending yourself with your hiring in India. Good engineers are notoriously hard to come by and while I'm sure your team is relatively top-notch you can't lure enough good people esp. in India to compete with Google on any scale. Your best bet is to be bought out by yahoo at some point because you are somehwat late to the shopping search game, and you are probably aware that similarity based shopping wont give you all that much: its only a few niches such as clothes that lend themselves well to that, and those wont give you a stellar valuation, at least not enough to get good engineering talent to do large scale image search of the web.

[/pd]

Frank, I disagre with ; "you can't lure enough good people esp. in India to compete with Google on any scale"

Riya, has lured the best talent captial within the image reconginzation arena. Google just aquired a company with vectors in the same space. google Labs in Bangalore -has nothing to do with Iamging , their areas of (current) focus is far from imaging. BTW, AFAIK- Google finance was cut out from the bangalore labs.

So the image space is pretty much wide opened for talent aqquistion in India.

[rpv]

you guys are definitely good. its basically getting the message out. and creating the brand awareness. google did it fairly well initially and established the brand. so did microsoft and cisco. i think you will get there eventually.

[Luke Onslow]

I have recently watched the following video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
It is a presentation by Luis von Ahn from CMU. It tries to use Human Intelligence for tagging images which is also an interesting approach.

Good luck...