Tea Discussion - Friday November 29 2013

Hey guys,

Following is a brief coverage of a pastime discussion with my friend Abhishek where we munched over a specific topic along with tea on a rainy afternoon. Hope we might soon get our hands dirty in this idea! You are welcome to share your thoughts and hopefully be a future business partner! ;-)

Topic - 'Photos' – millions of photos per minute recording each precious as well as silliest moment of your life. How to mine/tap this treasure trove of information?

Text analysis has been exploited and tags are used for better semantic analysis – now it is turn for photo Analysis – image processing – Google goggles have made it feasible to search based on photos, though it is in its nascent stages. Also there are many photo apps such as instagram which have made photo sharing easy and lucrative to end users.

What features are needed - ability to identify what stuff you have, what could be marketed to you. What you tend to do often and what you like to flaunt. For example you keep posting photos of you and your dog, it is an ideal opportunity to market dog related products to you and more suitable if we are able to identify your dog’s age, breed, etc. and market suitable products.  Similarly which places you have been to and what you can do. For example, if you keep visiting museums and post more art stuff,  then it is not apt to promote safari trips to you unless you have shown open mind towards it.  Also the application can keep track of your interests and this can be used for future marketing to your kids and kinsmen based on human behavior studies. Whether it comprises your future generation’s privacy is a different question, but it will be definitely be helpful to detect what future trend will be. Many social experiments are being undertaken using the data shared at social network, one such freaky thing was posted in YouTube – show's host walks randomly to a person in the street and starts recalling like a psychic about all things which the person had shared in the social network using the location tags and his/her posts in the social network like twitter and Facebook. This definitely freaked out the audience, let’s see how much it will freak out the technology?