As its Friday, I’ve got a couple more sites for you, both courtesy of Google. I’ve chosen Google rather than any other source as it is often a good indicator of how far the mainstream commercial or consumer marketplace has come. The two ideas that are not new. It is just interesting to see that Google has (a) got involved and (b) made them commercially available.

It’s good to be back

A

Mass access to Biometric algorithms in Picasa 3 (http://picasa.google.com/)
I mentioned Picasa in a Friday mail a couple of months ago, and got a great response from a few people in creative. For those who missed that mail, Picasa is a freely available image editing tool (mainly used to improve photos). It is incredibly simple to use. Anyway, the latest release (still in Beta) has a number of new features like version for Mac users and the facility to create movies. However, the most interesting new feature is one that will trawl your images and only display those that have faces; essentially the team at Picasa have incorporated facial recognition software into their code.

Think about this for a minute – back in the late 90s, when I was working on some pretty sophisticated security modifications for a pan European Banking Consortia, biometric security was seen as the big thing. Even now, facial recognition is being introduced at various airports and complex versions are used at football stadia to identify pre-known hooligans. And now we’re seeing the application (even a basic version) being made commercially available at zero cost to the user.

I’m just wondering how long it’s going to be before we see this facility used in advertising (for example for gender- or ethno-specific targeting)…

Google’s version of a wiki – the knol (http://knol.google.com/k#)
A “knol” is a unit of knowledge. Not to be confused with the grassy knolls of JFK fame. Anyway, this site seems to be Google’s equivalent of Wikipedia. I have no idea why Google has chosen to introduce this, as Wikipedia seems to have a monopoly on the marketplace, but it is an interesting move and one to watch.