The new startup on the block, [[http://riya.com|Riya]], is all over the blogosphere. So I thought I might take a look as well. I found the company very interesting for three reasons.

The first thing that caught my eye was the [[http://riya.com/corp/team.jsp|predominantly Indian staff]]. Not only that, almost 70% of the development is [[http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2005/11/correction.html|happening back in India]]. Also interesting to note is that there are no fresh out of college or even experienced IIT graduates (or even RECs, as far as I could tell) on their team. //For these new age jobs, people are not running after IITians, and IMHO this is a **GoodThing** (TM)//.

The second interesting aspect is the product itself. It has all the qualities of a good venture — a timely idea, a talented team (they have a whole bunch of PhDs, one of them from UCSD/UIUC infact and they even mention David Kriegman — so I trust they really know what they’re talking about), and a hugely succesful (and probably not all intentional) marketing campaign. The idea is timely because indeed we have too many pictures and too little time to organize them. And as broadband takes over, we will be sharing more and more pictures. So it only makes sense to automate this process as much as possible, making use of collective efforts of thousands of users in the process (I tag a picture that has you in it, and voila, the system knows who you are).

The third interesting facet is all the rumors floating around about [[http://digg.com/search?search=riya+google&submit=Submit|Google acquiring Riya]]. And bear in mind, that all this buzz is around a company that has barely launched, and has not even released an alpha yet!!! Clearly, something is going on here. From a strategic viewpoint, it seems to me that Riya is valuable for Yahoo! and Google both. For Google, it will be a good chance to create a niche in probably the only area of web services where Yahoo’s presence is far more dominating than Google’s — online image management (Yahoo owns Flickr).

I’m surprised and somewhat disappointed that I’m not hearing any stories about Yahoo trying to outbid Google. Disappointed, because I think Riya makes more sense for Yahoo than it does for Google. Firstly, Yahoo already has an //enormous// collection of //tagged, categorized// pictures with loads and loads of other meta data (notes, comments) on them. Is it really possible to get any better training data for Riya? And once they do have Riya, they can enhance flickr to no ends.

True, Google has a huge image database of its own. But its largely unstructured, and there’s hardly any meta data to go along with it. And its not going to be easy to convince people who have spent money and //huge// amounts of effort to move all their snaps from flickr and retag them in Riya. The client software itself is irrelevant — once you have the APIs in place, the client software will build itself. Look at flickr — there is built in flickr support in all good photo management apps (iPhoto, f-spot, digikam? etc), plugins for all good content management systems and so on.

So Yahoo! if you are listening — go buy Riya!