McInblog

Startup2Startup Panel

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:43:08 -0700

Last night, I had the pleasure of being on a panel discussion with Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier and Howard Lindzon, moderated by David Cohen of TechStars. This was a Startup2Startup event, graciously imported to Boulder for a night by Señor McClure, that guy with all those hats. We started the evening off with margaritas and dinner at Tahona and then retreated to the TechStars bunker for the panel.

Entitled "The Ultimate Platform Hotness Smack Down", the purpose of the panel was to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of four platforms: Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter and the native web / search ecosystem. Each of us represented one of the platforms, and I was the one who championed the native web / search ecosystem, no doubt given my history as a founder of a now-defunct first-gen internet search engine and portal. It was a fun event and it was great to hang out and talk platforms with folks from the Boulder/Denver tech community as well as my fellow panelists. Dave put up the slides from the panel, so take a look:

Ultimate Platform Hotness Smackdown (Twitter, Facebook, iPhone, Native Web / Search)

View more documents from Dave Mcclure.

facebook, iPhone, openweb, panel, startup2startup, twitter

New Gadget: Verizon MiFi

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:00:19 -0700

While I wait with eager anticipation to get my hands on the new iPhone 3GS, I've been enjoying a new gadget: the Verizon MiFi. The MiFi is a combination wireless 3G EVDO modem with an integrated router/hub and wifi, all delivered in a sleek black unit the size of a small stack of business cards.

I use a MacBook Air, and I had a Verizon EVDO USB modem, but the aesthetics of having the dongle hang off the side of my MBA bothered me, and then the unit stopped functioning, giving me an excuse to jettison it. The beauty of the MiFi is the ability to share the connection with up to 5 users -- very handy (and a great way to make friends) while in the back of a car with colleagues, at a local coffee shop or anywhere that lacks free wifi. The connection is really zippy and Verizon's coverage puts AT&T's to shame.

Ironically, I sometimes even connect my iPhone to the MiFi because it enhances the performance and coverage I get over using AT&T's 3G crappy network, which brings me to an opportunity to rant about just how bad AT&T is. AT&T is lucky the iPhone is a such a great device - the iPhone is so good it is succeeding in spite of the inferior network users are forced to subscribe to.

Apple's iPhone 3GS announcement this week really put AT&T's weakness in focus -- they announced that iPhone software 3.0 would support MMS messaging and tethering functionality, two oft-requested features, yet Apple had to footnote their announcement to mention that both features were "coming soon" for those of us unlucky enough to be stuck with AT&T's lame service.

I can imagine that Apple will be more than eager to jump to a new carrier when their exclusivity with AT&T ends. For shame, AT&T. You've got the most popular mobile computing device ever created tied to your infrastructure, yet you are squandering this opportunity with your lame network. I'm no network architect and I'm sure I don't appreciate the complexities around build-out and capacity planning, but I'm guessing AT&T's crappy network is not a result of unsolvable technical issues, but rather lack of will and general organizational inertia and incompetence. Or maybe a calculated decision to enhance profits in the short term by delaying capex. But neither scenario puts AT&T in a good light.

And yet, despite all this, I'll be stuck with AT&T since I plan to upgrade to the new iPhone as soon as I can. I just wish I had a choice in carriers.

AT&T, AT&T, Gadgets, Verizon

Bing Juice?

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:32:10 -0700

With all the hubbub surrounding the launch of Bing, I finally got around to spending some time with MSFT's new search engine over the last few days. My behavior, along with millions of other search lookie-loos out there, likely single-handedly accounts for MSFT's probably temporary increase in search market share since the launch of Bing.

I may analyze Bing more in-depth in a later post, but for now I'll confine my reactions to the first act that many people engage in upon using a new search engine: the vanity search.

Let me say one thing: Ryan McIntyre won the lottery when Bing launched. Not, me, but rather one Ryan C. McIntyre, a financial representative with Northwestern Mutual in Caspar, Wyoming. That Ryan McIntyre is at the top of Bing's search result page when someone searches for "Ryan McIntyre" on Bing, but he's several pages deep in Google's search results. If Ryan C. McIntyre is watching his web traffic, he's probably seeing a sharp increase in the number visitors coming from Bing as well as a bump in traffic proportionate to Bing's market share.

I'm the second Ryan McIntyre who shows up on Bing, and I am the second Ryan McIntyre who shows up on Google, so in that respect the results are similar, though on Bing I show up ahead of another Ryan McIntyre who tops the results on Google...

Despite my blogging, my ownership of the URL ryanmcintyre.com, the stories in the press and other blogs that mention me, my bio pages at Foundry Group, Mobius VC and the many portfolio companies where I sit on the board (all of which result in more links to my blog and presumably better page rank), I've never been able to unseat my Google nemesis, Ryan McIntyre, who sits atop the Google search results page for "Ryan McIntyre".

Ryan is a singer-songwriter from Waukesha, Wisconsin, he gigs regularly and has an active MySpace page, which results in concert reviews and venues linking to him on a regular basis. His profession, even more than mine, ensures a steady stream of links to his website, giving him major Google juice.

It is easy for me to understand how both I and Ryan McIntyre the touring musician wind up near the top of the search result on both Google and Bing, but I have to say I'm downright confused how Ryan C. McIntyre the financial representative came to be so endowed with Bing juice such that he shot to the top of MSFT's search results page. Go figure.

Minus this surprising anomaly around my vanity search results, Bing seems like it delivers reasonably good results, though not markedly different than Google's, which is a problem for Microsoft since changing user behavior around search is going to be difficult without delivering qualitatively and quantitatively better results to the user -- which is what Google delivered when they first came on the scene, something that was once difficult for me to admit back in my Excite days, yet was obviously (and painfully) true.

This lack of a stark difference between MSFT's and Google's search results is going to make it challenging for Bing to deliver on their (methinks quixotic) quest of becoming verbified. Besides the search results themselves, the actual word bing will also hinder MSFT's desire for verbification. If I email someone and explain to them that yesterday I xeroxed a document or googled myself, they will know what I mean, but when I tell them that last night I binged on jelly donuts (true story), they're just going to think I have self-control issues with food.

Bing, Search

Memeo Share Gets Five Stars at Cnet's Download.com

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:59:33 -0700

Congrats to Foundry Group portfolio company Memeo for receiving a five star rating from cnet's download.com for the new release of Memeo Share, version 2! Download.com just gave Memeo Share a five star editor's rating, and they've got a nice more detailed blog post about the software here.

I've known Memeo's founder, Hong Bui for several years and met him right when he was starting up Memeo. We hadn't yet raised the Foundry Group fund at the time, but the stars aligned when Memeo decided to raise a venture round coincident with the close of Foundry's fund, so Memeo was one of the first companies we invested in out of the new fund.

Memeo fits squarely into our digital life theme at Foundry Group and it has been great to work with the company as they've built on their vision to take a core technology for managing, copying, protecting, sharing and synchronizing files across multiple devices to deliver a suite of products that offers solutions for file backup, file sync and now, file sharing.

Version 2 of Memeo Share is a great leap forward in functionality and ease-of-use from their already-excellent version 1, and it makes sharing full-res photos and videos among friends and family incredibly simple and allows you to do it directly from your desktop, and gives you the option of avoiding sharing your photos on public photosharing and social networking sites, though it also provides tools that make it really easy to autopost photos on Facebook or to Memeo's cloud-based backup service, if you want to socialize or protect your photos and videos.

Way to go, team memeo -- the new version of share is looking really good!

Digital Life, Foundry Group, Memeo, Photo, Video

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:18:45 -0700

I just finished reading one of the most nerdtastic books I've read in a long time, thanks to Kwin Kramer at Oblong, who generously gave me the book he had just acquired at the MIT Press bookstore while in Cambridge. Kwin hadn't even read the book yet, but I think he saw me salivate (and therefore judged me more in need of the book than himself) as I thumbed through the pages and saw snippets of assembly code and discussions regarding the coding necessary to perform game calculations in the processor cycles available during the analog/CRT video horizontal and vertical sync intervals.

The book was a true pleasure to read and made for a nostalgic trip down memory lane since I was an avid Atari 2600 gamer as a kid. Guilty childhood confession: I once even made friends with a kid I probably wouldn't have otherwise hung out with because he was the first one on the block to own Activision's Pitfall!

Reading this history of this seminal home video game system and technical discussions of the constraints and idiosyncrasies of the platform gave me tremendous respect for early Atari game designers like Warren Robinett, David Crane and Howard Scott Warshaw. First, these guys did it all -- graphics, sound, gameplay, design, etc. Each game was a one-man show. Even more impressive was how they were able to produce great games with technical constraints that today sound totally ridiculous -- these guys had to confine themselves to 2K of ROM for games and graphics, no frame buffer for rendering a screen (they had to render each CRT scan line in real time in code) and a laughable 128 bytes of RAM.

Some of my favorite programming tricks covered in the book involved the arduous process of code-size optimization. 2K was not much to work with, so programmers often had to squeeze every last byte out of the code and graphic sprites in order to get them to fit in the highly constrained space. This often involved hand-optimizing of MOS 6507 assembly code, and economizing via clever hacks. For example, in Yar's Revenge, Howard Scott Warshaw need to create a random-looking field of blocks on the screen, but he could not afford the space or computational time needed for a pseudo-random number generation algorithm, so instead he just used sections of the code itself to produce a string of seemingly random patterns on-screen. So cool.

In another game, a programmer was able to save a byte of space when the final byte of a subroutine happened to be identical to the first byte of a sprite bitmap, which happened to immediately follow the previous portion of code in the ROM. So the programmer cut one of the duplicate bytes out and pointed the sprite bitmap to an address one byte earlier in the code to enable both the code and the graphic asset to share a single byte. That is a hardcore level of optimization, possible only when programming so close to the hardware.

The architecture of the system was originally designed to enable games like Pong and Combat, so the system was given two controllers and assumed head-to-head-play, and a video rendering subsystem that included two moveable sprites, a cursor and a missle and hardware support for things like symmetrical playing fields, scaling and mirroring of sprites and collision detection of onscreen objects. The book does a excellent job tracking the evolution of the games developed for the system, with programmers taking the system to a level of sophistication and functionality likely unforeseen by the architects/designers of the platform, a remarkable feat given the simplicity and constraints of the system.

And perhaps most unforeseen by Atari was that their console sparked the rise of an ecosystem of developers and publishers around a game platform, presaging the modern videogame market. Atari hadn't anticipated this, never published a spec for their proprietary system and assumed all games would be developed in house. In fact, they initially tried to prevent third-party developers from releasing titles for their system. Several early Atari programmers who felt under-compensated as a result of their $20k salaries and no participation in the multi-million dollar profits their games generated for Atari spun out to create Activision, the first third-party game developer. Parker Brothers even made games for the console and had to hire a team of programmers to reverse-engineer the system by disassembling the code in existing game cartridges, since Atari wasn't interested in publishing a spec or providing tools to allow third parties to develop games for the platform. As a result, they lost out on lucrative licensing revenues from third-party publishers, an error Nintendo wisely learned from when they launched the NES in 1983.

If you are a gamer interested in the history of video games or have an interest in how software design and programmer interacts with hardware design, this book is for you. My only complaint is that this book is not available on the Kindle. C'mon MIT Press, get with the program! I understand the subject matter of this book is retro, but think of your audience here in the 21st century.

Digital Life, Gadgets, Nerdy, Atari

High Job Satisfaction Week: Gist, Glue, Medialets, Pogoplug, Cohen, Eminem and more...

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:17:30 -0700

When work is going particularly well, my partner Jason Mendelson and I like to say, "today is a high job satisfaction day". Well, this past week has been a high job satisfaction week. (Of course, in general I feel like an insanely lucky guy to have the job that I do, so my job satisfaction stays at a pretty high level most of the time.) But this past week was a particularly good one for Foundry Group.

First off, I'm very excited about the three new investments we've announced in the past week: Gist, Medialets and Pogoplug. Second, we are in the final hours of the Glue Conference here in Denver, put on by the indefatigable Eric Norlin (who also runs the equally excellent Defrag Conference), with the help of my partner Seth Levine who also put a ton of work into making this conference a great one. Highlights of the conference for me including having the opportunity to have dinner with Mitch Kapor last night, followed by listening to him give a great keynote this morning that nicely outlined the history of innovation/disruption in the technology work from the mainframe era to the present date.

I'm also happy to say that David Cohen, founder of TechStars, has announced the close of a $2.5m seed fund today. Having worked with David and TechStars over the past several years, I'm excited to welcome another fund addressing the very early stage into the mix, and I'm delighted to be a personal investor in the fund as well.

Finally, in other news, Topspin Media, is now supporting the release of Eminem's new album, Relapse. This is a big deal for Topspin, since Mr. Marshall Mathers is definitely the biggest star the company has worked with to date. You can buy it here, or listen to it below. Enjoy!

Foundry Group, Gadgets, Gist, Gist, Glue, Medialets, Music, pogoplug, Topspin, VC, Venture Capital

Feature Request: Compress My Tweets

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:57:59 -0700

OK, I'm only half joking here, but I'm surprised no one has wired up an app to Twitter that lets you pass compressed/zipped text messages via twitter so you can send messages longer than 140 characters. The community should agree on a convention, for example, let's say whenever a tweet begins with #ZT: (for zipped tweet), this app would assume the remaining 136 characters were a compressed text string.

Then apps could automagically compress / decompress the characters following the #ZT: , which would then enable tweets much longer than 140 characters since text compresses pretty well. Sure, you'd see a bunch of garbage text strings passing through your twitter stream when folks you follow choose to use this convention, but that would part of the fun of it, since only insider geeks would know what they would need to do to follow those (literally) cryptic conversations.

Has anyone out there built this? Seems like it would be pretty simple to do...

Five Peace Band: Chick Corea & John McLaughlin

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:07:38 -0700

Last week I attended the annual NVCA conference, held this year in Boston. Boston obliged with some lovely springtime weather and, most importantly, Boston provided a once-in-my-lifetime musical event, in the form of the second-to-last show in the world tour of Chick Corea and John McLaughlin's Five Peace Band. My partner (and Soul Patch band-mate) Jason, who just joined the board of the NVCA (congrats!) noticed the tour, but we were both out of town when it came through Colorado. Luckily, he realized they were playing at the Berklee Performance Center on the final evening of the NVCA conference last week.

Thanks to the magic of StubHub (and our good fortune that we can both be relatively price-insensitive), we managed to score third-row center tickets to see an historic show. The last time Chick Corea and John McLaughlin played together was 40 years ago at the sessions for Miles Davis' seminal jazz fusion albums Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way. IASW is easily one of my favorite albums of all time. And Chick Corea's song Spain contains one of my all-time favorite chord progressions, one that still inspires and vexes me whenever I try to solo over it.

I've had the good fortune to see Chick Corea play once (in Berlin in 1992 with his Elektric Band) and I've seen John McLaughlin several times, once in a 1996 London date with fellow guitar virtuosos Paco de Lucía and Al Dimeola and once in California with tabla master Zakir Hussein. Needless to say, since I was born too late to see Chick and John play together back in the day, I was thrilled to discover they were touring and that I'd have an opportunity to see them.

The show did not disappoint. The rest of the band included Brian Blade on drums, Christian McBride on bass and Kenny Garrett on sax. I've seen Christian McBride play several times at SFJazz Fest dates with Joshua Redman and others, but only on upright bass. He played at least half this show on a fretless electric five string and I can say without hyperbole that he is quite likely the best bass player I've ever heard. And together with Brian Blade, they were an unstoppable force as a rhythm section. And Garret's saxophone playing is truly stellar and he's capable of being both incendiary and restrained.

Every single player in the band is a bona fide virtuoso and it was quite easily one of the best shows I've ever seen. A week later, I'm still blown away by what I heard. As a glowing review in the LA Times aptly put it, the band was led by and supported by "genius level musicians".

A highlight of the show for me was Garrett's solo in a new Corea composition entitled "Hymn to the Muse". Finally, at the end of the evening during the encore, the band performed "In A Silent Way / It's About That Time" in a way that was both faithful to the original performance of 40 years ago yet also incorporated evidence that modern jazz fusion has continued to evolve since Miles, Chick and John helped unleash it upon the world.

I feel incredibly fortunate that I was able to see this show, and it easily earned a spot in my top five shows of all time. Wow. As Zappa said, "music is the best".

jazz, Music, Music

From the Archives: Rattlesnake

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:24:38 -0700

As many of my readers know, I've got a small record label, in partnership with my band-mates from Soul Patch. The genesis of Toothless Monkey Music (the name is another story entirely) starts when I set up my first "real" recording studio in a sound-proofed, detached two-car garage at my former home in Portola Valley, CA. It is on an idyllic creek-side spot, and many of the albums on the label were recorded and mixed in that studio.

One day, back around 1999 or 2000, when the studio was not-quite-fully operation, some friends dropped by, and a phenomenal luthier from the Santa Cruz area named Fred Carlson was with them. Fred builds some amazing instruments, starting with guitars, but ending with sympitars, harp guitars and other one-of-a-kind works that defy categorization. Check out his site at Beyond the Trees.

Anyway, Fred sat down and performed a song, which I am assuming is called Rattlesnake, but I don't know for sure. We had one microphone set up hanging above him that captured the performance. My band-mate Nick Peters dug it up from his archives, and I did a little bit of mastering to add some stereo imaging, some gain and to bring out the vocals a bit, since the original recording wasn't as good as it could have been -- the performance was great, but I was a very green audio engineer at the time. It is a fun, quirky song, and well worth a listen. Enjoy!

Music

After the Apocalypse...

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:17:03 -0700

A tip of the hat to my friend Dennise for sending this one to me, and another tip of the hat to the folks at Topatoco.com who created this fine technology / science cheat sheet, which would be quite useful in rebuilding modern science and technology if one were suddenly thrown back in time or we all wind up back in the stone age through pure human folly, something I place higher odds on these days...

Humor, Low-Tech, Nerdy

The Glue Conference

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:04:23 -0700

My partners and I at Foundry Group have been involved with Eric Norlin for the past few years, and he has put on two great Defrag Conferences in Denver over the past two years (the inspiration for which came out of our work on our Implicit Web investment theme), and now we've decided to add another one to the mix: The Glue Conference, which will be held on May 12th and 13th in Denver.

The idea for the Glue Conference came out of our work at Foundry Group on our Glue investment theme and brainstorming with Eric about how we could take the basic notion of the web as a platform and dig in at a fairly technical level into the problems, challenges and opportunities that arise when one assumes the web and the cloud as a given and as the fundamental platform going forward.

Glue's got a great agenda, including keynotes from the likes of Mitch Kapor (Lotus founder), Bob Frankston (VisiCalc creator) and Josh Elman (Facebook platform).

And, as far as conferences go, it is a bargain, only $495 for two days, so go ahead and register here. The Foundry Group partners will be out in force, and Seth and Brad (and I'm sure Jason and I will join in the fun at some point) will even be sitting down to listen to pitches from entrepreneurs during the conference.

Colorado, Conference, Defrag, Glue

Netflix's 10 Year Sustained Bandwidth is 200 Gigabits Per Second!

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:27:08 -0700

Today Netflix announced that they delivered their two billionth DVD, an impressive milestone. This brought to mind something we learned in the early days of Excite, which was to never underestimate the bandwidth of physical storage media sent via UPS, the USPS or FedEx. When we opened our second datacenter circa 1996 (on the east coast in one of AOL's datacenters) we quickly found out that it was faster, cheaper and more reliable to simply FedEx overnight an archived backup tape copy of our search index to the east coast mirror site than to transfer the files over the internet.

I've always thought that Netflix's business was a brilliant bet that the bandwidth and quality of a rental experience powered by DVDs sent via USPS was going to be cheaper and exceed the capabilities of on-demand via the internet for much longer than people were expecting, and of course this turned out to be true. And now that internet tech is finally catching up to the low tech method of shipping atoms full of bits around the country, I think Netflix has done a brilliant job with their internet strategy and distribution partnerships, which should enable a graceful (and still longer-term than people expect) transition from postal delivery to internet delivery.

So when I saw the announcement of the two billionth DVD delivered, I decided to do a quick and dirty back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much data Netflix has delivered to customers in the roughly 10 years since their subscription service launched. (Apologies in advance to all the sticklers out there who might point out the imprecision of this calculation since I'm using factors of 1,000 instead of 1,024 to measure my gigabytes and petabytes.) Here goes:

A DVD has a max capacity of 4.7 gigabytes. Since Netflix also ships TV shows and the like, which don't fill a DVD to capacity, let's assume that the average DVD contains 4 GB of data. So, that means they've delivered eight billion gigabytes, or eight million terabytes, or eight thousand petabytes, which boils down to an average of 800 petabytes per year over a ten year period. Multiply that by 8 bits per byte and divide by 31,536,000 seconds per year, and you get 202,942,669,000 bits per second, or a sustained ten-year average bandwidth of 200 gigabits per second.

Of course, that's an average spread evenly over 10 years, and today's outgoing bandwidth from Netflix via the USPS is many times higher, given the ramp from zero DVDs shipped in the early years and given the fact that Netflix is now shipping Bluray discs, which hold 50GB vs. the 4.7GB on a traditional DVD. And, finally, given they are actually delivering movies via the net, they are now using actual net bandwidth instead of theoretically derived, USPS-enabled bandwidth, though I'm sure their actual bandwidth consumption is still dwarfed by the discs in the mail.

But still, I was surprised by the 200 Gbps number and had to check my calculations a few times to make sure I was right. And it is conceivable that that means that their theoretical bandwidth today could be in the terabit per second range. Golly.

Digital Life, Netflix, Milestones, Bandwidth

Direct Mind Access (DMA) Composition Technology

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:33:23 -0700

So, the best corporate April Fool's joke I've seen today comes from Antares Audio Technologies, makers of the ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch correcting audio plugin, which is used extensively throughout the recording industry, though some producers and vocalists will deny it. There's a great article in the New Yorker about the impact Auto-Tune has had on popular music.

Today they announced the upcoming release of Direct Mind Access (DMA) Composition Technology, a faux product that claims to enable composers to "think" their compositions directly into a computer, provided they've undergone the requisite cranial implantation of the iLobe USB device.

I'm amused that this is the second fake mind-reading device I've encountered in as many days (see my post from this morning for details on the other one). I'm also amused because while these two products are spoofs, there's clearly a meme around mind-machine interfaces picking up steam out there, which fits quite nicely into Foundry Group's HCI theme, and is likely influenced by the fact that there are real companies in the market today (including companies like Emotiv, NeuroSky and Foundry Group portfolio company EmSense) building real technology and real products based on EEG technology.

April Fool's, HCI

I Need One of These

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:17:38 -0700

I've written in the past about our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) investment theme at Foundry Group and have mentioned our portfolio companies that fit into that theme: EmSense, Oblong and Smith & Tinker.

Well, pictured above is a delightful faux-advertisement I discovered via Thomas Dolby's blog. I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas years ago (back in the Beatnik era) and then again around 2006 when he returned to the music world, and spent some time rehearsing for his tour at my friend Heidi Roizen's place in Atherton. Thomas started blogging a while ago and I've been following it with great interest since. He's moved back to the UK and has been working on a new album, which I can't wait to hear. He is recording in a studio he built into an old retired boat that is sitting on his property that has a view of the sea, which seems to me a brilliant and delightfully wacky enterprise, and strikes me as a quintessentially English sort of thing to do.

Anyway, this ad was created by the folks at Status Graphite guitars, and it seemed to fit into my fascination with all things related to HCI, even if it is, sadly, not yet a real piece of gear. It is now on my fantasy product wish list.

Gadgets, Gadgets, HCI, Humor, Humor, Music, Music, Oddly Compelling, Random

Faces in iPhoto

ryan@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:32:43 -0700

I've been playing around with the face recognition feature in the newest version of iPhoto, and I'm pretty impressed with how well it works. And with how well it fails. I went through the process of confirming/teaching iPhoto to recognize me on photos where it had assigned a high probability that a photo was me, but needed my confirmation to be sure.

I know most face recognition systems start with identifying the size and shape of and spatial relationship among eyes, nose, mouth, etc. What I found to be interesting was the false positives the system delivered. When a picture it thought was me wasn't me, probably 75% of the time it was an immediate family member: one of my parents, one of my brothers or my son. So clearly there is some amount of facial geometry that members of my biological family share. I wonder if other iPhoto users out there have noticed this? Hmm, maybe iPhoto could conceivably be used as a poor-man's paternity test, or it might lead someone to discover they were adopted...

What was also interesting was that for the remaining false-positive identifications of me in my photo library, most of the rest were confined to four of my closest male friends: Sam Chambers, Scott Derringer, Martin Reinfried and Jason Mendelson. I'm not sure what to make of that. Are we friends because we look like one another in some subtle way that isn't obvious to me? Or is it just statistically-likely noise since I have relatively more photos of them in my collection than other folks who appear from time to time?

Apple, Digital Life, faces, iPhoto, photography