Google Buys Photo Management Company Picasa

[dannysullivan]

So looks like photo search and indexing will be coming to Google. From the press release (http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/picasa.html):

Google Inc. today announced it acquired Picasa, Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based digital photo management company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Picasa enables users to easily manage and share digital photographs, and its technologies complement Google's ongoing mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management. "Picasa is an innovator in the field of digital photography, and we're excited that the Picasa team is joining Google."

Picasa was founded in October 2001. In May 2004, Picasa announced a technology partnership with Google's Blogger service to make publishing digital photos with Blogger faster and easier. Further product integration plans have not been announced. Picasa users will not experience any interruption in service.

[Chris Sherman]

Multimedia search is also apparently on the way. From today's New York Post:

"Google is planning to launch a new feature to allow users to scour the Internet for audio and video clips, The Post has learned.

"The company has yet to announce plans for the new service, but Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made no secret of it during talks with investors and media executives at an annual retreat hosted by investment bank Allen & Co. in Sun Valley, Idaho."

Full story:
http://www.nypost.com/business/27206.htm

Interesting that all of this activity is occurring during their "quiet period..."

[garyp]

It will be interesting to see if AOL does work to improve SingingFish.com? They purchased the company last year and haven't done much to improve the technology.

Several other interesting multimedia search tools exist. Here's a look:

1) Numerous demonstrations from Virage using material from PBS
http://digbig.com/3few

2) A new demo from StreamSage called CampaignSearch.com*
http://www.campaignsearch.com

3) Speechbot.com*
http://www.speechbot.com

4) Feedroom.com
http://www.feedroom.com
Keyword search segments from newscasts from around the U.S.

5) Fee-based services like ShadowTV.com
http://www.shadowtv.com

* Both of these demos allow you to keyword search all words as they are spoken. The searchable transcripts are created using voice recognition technology. Other services exploit the closed captioning associated with
each program.

Products like Yahoo's AV search, Singingfish.com, Feedroom and others only index metadata associated with each file.

Finally, Chris offers a review of FindSounds.com, a useful and dare I say "fun" tool.
http://www.sewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3308571

[garyp]

Google is now making the Picasa software available for free.
http://www.picasa.com/google/

[AussieWebmaster]

Portal... Portal... Portal
When is the portal going to be arriving.

[Nacho]

I've been playing around with it for a little while now and I'm very impressed. It's >almost< like Gmail in some ways. What I like the most about are the:

The SEARCH function is amazingly fast. It goes by how you name the files and folders. Bravisimo!
The Red-Eye Repair works like a magic erraser.
The Time Line function feels like going into a "time travel machine", brilliant. It works based on the modify date of your image.

Good buy Google! I strongly believe that search needs to strengthen at the PC level. IMHO, this is the path search engines will be taking in the future as I have discussed before (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?p=4849#post4849) here at SEW Forums.