Northern California start-up Viewdle on April 27 released software that lets Android-powered smartphones recognise people's faces. The free SocialCamera application available at the Android Market or online at viewdle.com/products/mobile was billed as the first of its kind for US smartphone users.
"Viewdle SocialCamera is the first mobile camera app to encourage socialising and communication," said Viewdle co-founder and chief executive Laurent Gil.
"Consumers can now instantly share their photos based on who appears in them," he continued. SocialCamera uses computer algorithms to create "faceprints" that people can tag with names and store in smartphones. The software then matches faceprints to subjects in subsequent photos.
Android smartphones can instantly connect names to those in photos and share the images with those involved using social networking service Facebook; photo-sharing website Flickr, or by email or instant messages. SocialCamera was billed as the first in a line of facial-recognition software applications aimed at the consumer market.
High-powered players in September pumped $10 million into the Palo Alto, California start-up devoted to crafting ways to let smartphones "see" things the same way people do and identify faces.
The influx of cash came from Qualcomm, BlackBerry Partners Fund, US electronics retail chain Best Buy, and Anthem Venture Partners, an investment firm that has backed Viewdle from the outset.
"We are giving smartphones human eyes," Gil told AFP in an interview when the funding was announced. "Letting them see the world the way people do it is artificial intelligence," he said. "It is happening."
Viewdle bills itself as the leading independent facial recognition company for consumer gadgets. Its technology is developed by the company's research team in the Ukraine. Viewdle is the result of 15 years of research, rooted in work done at The Cybernetics Institute in Kiev.-AFP
Israel unveils 'first sin-free Yiddish smartphone'
JERUSALEM: An Israeli telecoms company is offering ultra-Orthodox Jewish clients a kosher smartphone with Hassidic folk music ringtones and a menu in Yiddish, a newspaper reported on April 27.
While other firms have tapped into the religious market by offering phones free of Internet access, with no email or access to Facebook which could lead users into temptation, none has so far offered its services in Yiddish, Yediot Aharonot said.
"This phone has no text messages, Internet access, Facebook or email. It doesn't even have a camera," said the paper. "And if you call from it on the Sabbath, you will pay an exorbitant price of 10 shekels ($3/2 euros) per minute."
And all the menus are in Yiddish - the traditional German-derived language still widely used by ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the local market estimated at between 350,000 to 400,000 people, the paper said.
Local importer Accel Telecom said it took four months for a pair of ultra-Orthodox translators to come up with the interface which is written in Hebrew characters and uses words such as "Klingen" (ringtone) and "Schirm Verteidikung" (screensaver).
But to win rabbinical approval for the device, which is based on an Alcatel T-701 handset, Accel had to first prove that tech-savvy users would not be able to work their magic to circumvent the safeguards and succumb to sin.
"It is not simple to make the phones kosher and bring them to a level in which you prove that the phone cannot be breached or changed in such a way that it will be possible to send text messages or surf the Internet with it," Accel CEO Mark Seelenfreund told the paper.