Last week I finally had the opportunity to meet with the founders of the next-generation visual search software company, Idée. Leila Boujnane, CEO, and Paul Bloore, CTO, met when working as employees number five and six at the then infant Algorithmics. Move forward eight years or so to the late nineties. Image recognition is a new and potentially hot market. Leila and Paul have an idea: embedded watermarks on photos work but they are old generation thinking. How can the process of identifying images and then managing their use be automated? After all, image management is a multi-billion dollar industry that uses outdated if not down right arcane processes. It was a smart move. Idée is now a major player in the image recognition market with their proprietary technology. Clients include Adobe and Agence France Press.

Our mission is to provide intellectual property protection and automated billing services to the stock and editorial photo industry through Espion Monitoring Services (EMS). EMS is the only image monitoring service specializing in monitoring both print publications and the Internet. EMS is powered by Idée's unrivaled image recognition technology.

It is always a pleasure to visit a company that is thriving. While not quite Google - at least not yet - the energy a good idea and strong execution brings to the team at Idée is almost intoxicating. There is also something about 200 rack-mounted servers crunching terabytes of information that defies description. They look like - victory.

Their product line is impressive:

Espion Visual Search Visual search for large image collections. Find similar images based on image features.

Espion Monitoring System Track image usage for both print publications and the Internet.

Espion Video Search Visual search for video collections. Find similar shots based on image features.

Espion Developers Kit Integrate Idée's visual search software (...read more...)