Visiting Tara at Riya

I’m sitting in the Canvas Cafe on 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco right now waiting for Chris Messina to get here. I just finished meeting with Tara Hunt of Riya.com. What an awesome person! We had a good chat about Riya and licensing their technology for a couple projects at Infobase. She’s clearly very sharp and really knows her stuff. We ended up discussing several things non-Riya related. She has some really good insight on tagging and its uses and how it will affect the world.

I don’t know if she will know the term, but she proved herself a true LoveCat (a term from Love is the Killer App) while we were talking about new software trends and wanting to change the world, she said “You’ve got to meet with Chris, he has the same goals and he has a project you would be interested in” so she immediately jumped on the phone and called Chris, he said to come on over to the Cafe. Thanks Tara!

During our visit, she demoed Riya for me. I watched in awe as it found, with fairly reliable accuracy, tons of pictures of people as she started tagging them. One of the cool things it does is text recognition, of any text. What this means is that as it was processing the photos, it identified all sorts of text that humans would naturally filter out – words on shirts, banners, mugs, papers, everything! It was pretty neat to see it working. The software is very straightforward and easy to use, I’m really looking forward to playing with it!

More later, I see Chris