How did Canadian authorities figure out that suspected terrorist Khurram Sher auditioned for Canadian Idol in 2008? Possibly an alert Youtube viewer picked up on the image (you don’t get many Idol auditioners in full Muslim dress; it was a pretty unforgettable image). But if that was the case, we would definitely have heard from the person who uncovered the video – recognizing a terrorist on a TV show via Youtube would be the perfect ticket to 15 minutes of fame these days.
So in the absence of any claim to fame, we can assume that the connection was made using internet face recognition technology – like that developed by Israel’s Face.com. Face.com’s application checks Facebook photos, comparing photos in different accounts to identify unknown people on user pages. The application analyzes photos with tags, associates the tag with the person in the photo, and then searches for the same image in untagged photos in other Facebook accounts. In other words, Face.com can compare photos and determine identities based on information in other photos that are already a know quantity.
I interviewed Gil Hirsch, CEO of Face.com., last year, and wrote
While Face.com’s technology sounds like it could be developed into a fantastic security application as well, Hirsch says that the company is concentrating on the consumer market for now. “Our next step is to expand our presence in Facebook, and over the next year we will be rolling out more services on other sites.”
Face.com has expanded since I did that interview – and is now available to developers for use with other platforms. Interestingly, in this story from August of this year, Hirsch is quoted as saying that
You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube.
So could technology developed by Israel’s Face.com have been used to find the “singing terrorist?” Could be!
So I was looking for something to blog about when I decided to write about my new favorite phone program, TuneWiki – when I came across this press release that said that it was actually an Israeli-made program! But of course that makes sense – of course it would be an Israeli company that came up with the ultimate on-the-go music/social/internet program out there!
TuneWiki turns listening to music into an event – a social event. You can use it to play music on your device’s library (there’s a version for Symbian, iPhone, and Android), and display the lyrics and album cover art. Not only do the lyrics automatically show up for any song, but they display “karaoke style” – meaning they change in the window as each line of the song is sung. You also get access to videos of the song on Youtube – TuneWiki will create a page of all the videos with the name of the song you’re listening to (not necessarily only by the artist performing the version you’re hearing), which you can play just by clicking on it.
TuneWiki works not only with your device’s music library – it can also play any online Shoutcast station! The app connects with a mobile version of the Shoutcast service, where thousands of stations of all genres are available right on your phone! I have three different internet radio apps on my Nokia XM5800, and none really work (two do absolutely nothing and one connects to just a few stations). TuneWiki “picks up” all the stations, even the high-bandwidth ones (tip: when you connect on 3G, go for the lower bandwidth stations). If for nothing else, TuneWiki is invaluable for its Shoutcast component, finally giving phone users real access to online music.
But wait, there’s more! My favorite part of TuneWiki is its social component. On the TuneWiki menu there is feature called “Where is this song playing,” which connects you to other TuneWiki users listening to the same song you are right now! You can then follow/connect with those listeners, and check out what each of you are listening to anytime. When you follow someone, they send the name of their selections to your “song inbox,” and you can display the lyrics, as well as play the songs on your device (there were buffering issues, though). And, you can comment on any song to Twitter or Facebook, with a “blip,” either “love it” or “hate it,” or give a whole commentary (140 characters or less, of course!)
And the best part? It’s all free! I don’t want to give the TuneWiki people any ideas, but one question I am dying to ask TuneWiki CEO Rani Cohen is – why aren’t they charging for this app, considering so many apps of much lesser capability seem to be selling very well?
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