Tian Bai

Selecting and distributing photos of friends has been painful for me, especially when friends do not want them degraded or publicly accessible on web albums.  Manually grouping photos by person, respectively attaching to each email, and then sending one by one is just broken.  To right the wrong, I once got the idea to combine manual tagging and face detection&recognition.  I talked to several folks, searched around, and accidentally got to know ilovephotos.com via their elevator pitch that they are implementing this idea.  And… that’s it.

Today I randomly mentioned this idea to 老丁 and 何志坚 during the dinner.  Right after the dinner, 老丁 sent me the news that Picasa 3.0 was introduced with a brand-new feature called “name tags”.  I read it with with mixed feelings – glad to see that Picasa, which is one of my favorites, makes this idea real and addresses my pain; ashamed to see this not-bad idea (at least sounds not bad to both Google and me) is still just an idea to me.  I simply didn’t even start.  Admittedly, Google had this idea way earlier than I did, probably back to 2006 when it acquired Neven Vision (a key player in face and image recognition), but it should be just in the blood to feel impelled to execute on exciting ideas.

BTW, in terms of how much an idea is worth, there are two sayings I like most:

• The market price of an idea is “less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA”.
• If you get an idea that no one ever thought about / worked on, either the idea is just stupid, or you don’t even know how to use Google.