Walt: We have a demo now from Korea, a companycalled Enswers. And they’ve been I’m sure waiting and waiting so let’s bring emout. So tell us what it is. Show us.
Sherman: We’re here to debut a multimedia search technology. It’s called Image2play. And it doesn’t use text or anything like that, it actually just takes an image and finds a video based on that image alone.
Walter: Image? Image matching?
Sherman: Well, it’s image to video matching. So as an example, say I’m here looking at People magazine. I’ve been following dancing with the stars, it’s a pretty fun show. This is clearly a screen shot. If I’m looking at it, I know what it is. Computers, we’re not so sure, it’s just an image. I’m gonna turn on our little plug in right here, it’s the image2play plug in and refresh the page. What happens right now is we’re sending the image as a query to our servers matching it to millions of videos, and identifying which one it is. You’ll see right on the page, oh nice advertisement haha. We’re gonna see a play button up here,
Walter: Right, that play button was not therebefore.
Sherman: and right there, this is a screen within the screen shot. And you can see the video right from that moment. Now you know I want to know what happens here, and I’ve only provided 1 minute of Image2play. From this video of course we also search for it on Hulu, or iTunes, or other places so you can purchase the full length content and then go right on Hulu and watch it. Of course, it’s not available here in Hong Kong.
Walter: Of course.
Sherman: But it would be possible in the States. This technology really works independently. I don’t have a deal with People magazine. So if you look at this for instance on Facebook, my friends are sharing screenshots. Of course they’ve only left comments like “it’s fantastic,” so I have no idea what this is and I want to find the video. Who are these four guys?
Walter: I have no idea.
Sherman: Yeah, well we can go ahead and use image2play and find it. It finds it…in fact it’s a Bon Jovi music video. Right,and my friend of course, captured the wrong screen, but this is kind of the power of the technology—we can search the way that human searches.
Walter: So how do people get this? Or youselling it to web publishers or consumers?
Sherman: A consumer can download our plug in, and as long as we’ve indexed the content, they can go search any image on the web for it. We are going to start working with publishers, like they can go enable their sites, so users don’t even have to download the plug in.
Walter: OK, but in the plug in phase that you’rein, you have to make sure it works on every major browser, platform, and doesit work on mobile devices?
Sherman: It does. This is a Chrome extensionright here, it works on all the platforms. What I’m going to show right now ishow it could work on the mobile phone. And if you take a look at our options here, it says play on your phone. Of course I registered the device, and it’ll send it directly to my mobile phone, so I can watch it.
Walter: Seriously?
Sherman: Yeah, just like that. And I can watch it from that precise location. Anyimage on the web.
Walter: That’s good. That’s pretty unusual. Whenis this coming out in market?
Sherman: Hopefully it’s coming out in marketsoon. In Korea, actually it’ll be out next week. And we’re working to get theclosed beta of our plug in available. Within the next couple months we’re goingto actually wire the entire portals, so all the images there are searched andlinked to videos from major Korean broadcasting stations.
Walter: How about beyond Korea? When will thathappen?
Sherman: Well, it depends on how well I do here,and if someone gives me a business card.
Walter: has he done ok? What do you think?
Sherman: So we’re going to do that one otherpart, it’s kind of the last piece of sales pitch. If you’re a portal or socialnetwork and you don’t want your users to download a plug in, how can weidentify all the images that are linked to a video? Here I have a blogger.comblog and we’ll go ahead go back to image2play and get the code. It’s actually asingle lined script. It’s copied and I’ll go ahead and add it to my blog here.All I have to do is cut that one line code and publish the post and let’s goview it. Automatically, well, actually I have to go turn off my plug in.Automatically it’s going to find every image on the page that is actuallylinked to a video and the same thing happens. It’ll find this is from theNotebook and it’s going to find the video right there at that scene.
Walter: How do you distinguish images from avideo and just from images? Is there some index, database?
Sherman: It’s a search query. Each image isqueried against a database of millions of videos. It’s kind of like videos oftons of images and we’re finding a single frame. There’s a lot of process andcost here.
Walter: Very impressive. I apologize for the delay but I think the demo was quite interesting. Thank you.
