What exactly is the value of a technology? Sometimes, when I talk about HashThySelf to people who are likely to benefit from it, the questions that tend to pop up are along the following lines:
- Well, what is the accuracy?
- If I upload a pic of Brad Pitt, will it tell me it is in fact Pitt?”
- Why can’t you make it better?”
- Aren’t there face matching technologies out there that are far more accurate?
We do, of course, have internal metrics by which we gauge the accuracy of our face matching procedure. But it turns out, as it does with almost every technology today, that you can pick 95% of the low-hanging fruit with a fairly low investment in time and effort and a few clever trade secrets. The remaining 5% takes a tremendously greater investment, often by an order of magnitude.
What this means, in practical terms, is that every technology has its limitations. Yes, even Google :-). A creative and resourceful product person knows exactly how to exploit what is there, rather than complain about what is not. That’s exactly what we decided to do with HashThySelf.
Instead of going the whole hog to get the technology to CSI-Miami grade and then pricing the licenses way higher than we currently do, we decided to offer a simpler solution that is more than sufficient for the vast majority of users, at a price that is orders of magnitude lower! And, by the way, CSI-Miami-grade face-matching is simply not out there for public use today no matter how much you want to pay, or what other companies claim.
We started off this whole enterprise as a low-budget effort, intending to keep it that way. We developed the technology to the stage that the accuracy was good enough for most uses and made an executive decision to stop right there. This is not to say that we won’t develop it any further; just that we defer that decision to a point when we are convinced of a real customer need for that level of accuracy, and have a customer who is willing to pay for it. Identifying terrorists is simply not in our business plan. Instead we rely on creative people like ourselves to come up with novel uses of the technology as-is. Often we even participate in the brainstorming process with such creative people to jointly come up with compelling use cases (as has been the case with our first few happy licensees).
And so here is the bottom line:
- Sure, there are zillions of companies out there from whom you can license face-matching software
- Some of them claim accuracies and speeds that are too good to be true (and aren’t)
- In truth, only a few (very few) of them are more accurate than HashThySelf, and that too only by 1-2 percent, depending upon which test-set you choose
- You will end up paying an enormously greater license fee for the marginally increased accuracy. So you must be sure that it’s really worth it for you. After all, what’s the point in buying a sledge hammer if all you want to do is drive a nail?
- HashThySelf will work with you to analyze your use case and see how our technology can be put to use for you, to add real value
- A. Hasher
Dudes et dudettes
Please welcome two new facebook applications into the fold. These are Zetameter and Pittometer, part of a growing family of applications that we have called z-meter apps.
z-meter apps offer a unique Facebook experience by mashing up the HashThySelf Image Search Results JSON object via its Mashup API into Facebook apps that tell you where you stand at that very instant, in relation to all other users, when compared to the z-meter target.
The zetameter application, for example, allows you to display on your profile the percentage of users who look less like Catherine Zeta-Jones than you do! The Pittometer application allows you to display the percentage of users who look less like Brad Pitt. Needless to say, the percentage will keep changing as more and more people use these apps.
We hope you enjoy them. Please keep an eye out for more z-meter apps down the line. We plan to launch a new z-meter app about once each week, especially for those targets that you want us to. Soon we also hope to give you a web-based interface to z-meters, just like for HashThySelf, so you can install z-meters on your own home pages too.
Zetameter and Pittometer were created by David Romano and Anand Venkataraman.
Enjoy!
A. Hasher
Dudes et dudettes,
As some of you might have seen already, HashThySelf Version 2 has now been live for a couple of days. We’re very pleased with its look and feel, although it doesn’t quite measure up to our old literary standards 
As I had mentioned earlier, we had some setbacks including hardware failures and network outages. But the killer setback was that Morgan R. Allen, who was originally assigned this project ran into personal emergencies that made it impossible for him to finish it in time. Fortunately for us, and thanks to Google, I managed to locate Mike Foster by searching the net for folk who had implemented things similar to what I had in mind. A quick email discussion later, despite the vast distances separating us, Mike and I had struck a chord and the cosmically cool widgets you now see on our site and yours are the results of his amazing work.
Let me take this opportunity to thank Mike for (a) stepping in to rescue us in the nick of time and (b) for doing such a great job in such a short time, allowing us to stick to our original deadline!
More good news - HashThySelf has found our first technology licensee. We have already confirmed that our simple plug-and-play deployment option works like a charm at their site. All they had to do was practically insert our HashThySelf image matching linux box into their network, point it at their image store and it went to work right-away, serving image matches from their inventory. With this new source of funding, you can therefore expect us to invest in improvements to both the service and the core technology going forward.
In other news, we have our first job posting out for a Business Development manager, although it is initially commission based. Let’s hope this is the first of many in a rapidly growing venture.
Meanwhile, enjoy the new site and feel free to send us your comments. We appreciate them greatly, as always.
A. Hasher