Update: July 17th, 2007. Last week Evryx ran a couple of contests, both here and in Japan, to promote use of their image recognition system. The local Pulitzer Prize Winning "Orange County (OC) Register" gave the company a whole page of free coverage in their business section, so it wasn't for lack of people knowing about it.
The results of the promo, according to the Register: Four (4) people entered the contest in the OC, which has a population of several million. 2 Million (!) people entered the corresponding contest in Japan, which has a population of approximately 100 million. I.e., about one person per million here vs. one person out of fifty in Japan. What gives?
Of course the Japanese are more technophilic than us Amerikans, and they are a generation ahead of us in cell phone usage, but a ratio of 20,000 to one is still rather breathtaking. For my part, I've decided to learn Japanese. When I look at the field of science fiction, which is of major interest to me, both as entertainment and for the messages that it gets out there to the public, I note that a similar ratio occurs in science fiction fandom.
LOSCON, the major sf convention that takes place every year over the Thanksgiving weekend, is one of the best deals ever, despite my critiques of some of its failings here in other articles of my blog. Not only do you get to meet and talk with some of the smartest people on the planet, as well as movie stars and major writers, but there is food, first-class entertainment, dancing, art, and endless wonderful parties. Three days, all for $40 - or $25 if you re-upped at the last con. And the major restriction on who can attend has to do with metabolizing oxygen.
Given that it is such a deal, of course 50,000 people show up every year, just like the Manga/Anime con, or the even bigger Comicon in San Diego. NOT! Actually, only about a thousand people make it to LOSCON, a fair number of them from accross the country or even from other nations. Given the population of the SoCal area, that works out to about one attendee per 30,000 inhabitants.
So, can you spell "anti-intellectual?" Becuz, that's what it looks like from here. Not the people who attend, but everyone else. Note that when I moved to Long Beach in early '76 from the East Coast, I was stunned by the lack of ANY intellectual life in the L.A. area. It took me about a month to find the ONE intelligent ongoing discussion group at CSULB.
Just for one more example, the Orange County Science Fiction Club, which I attend religiously, has had all kinds of terrific guests that you would expect to be appearing before audiences of thousands or on major radio talk shows. Instead, they come before our huge crowd of typically 25 people. The local monthly furry party, which is actually as close to an intellectual gathering as anything in the OC, gets more than twice that number, but it's still a vanishingly small number out of the several million.
Sad, sad, sad....
http://www.evryx.com/
Featured prominently with about two newspaper pages of coverage in today's OC Register business section. A whole NEW idea of a product. Namely, use image recognition technology on the server side to recognize images from a cell phone in near realtime, allowing the cell user to identify people or things and call up databases linked to the recognized image.
Note that - as usual - I was there first. In fact, my article on this general subject was published by "Amiga User International" around 1993, altho, due to screwups at the publisher, it came out as written by a friend of mine, Michael Hanish. I was a few technological steps ahead of where Evryx Technologies is today, but I must be slipping as I didn't see the app coming as they developed it. My projected system used RF ID tags to link the user to the online database. I foresaw the user with a see-thru head-mounted display which would eventually become sophisticated enough to localize the image as an overlay on top of the visual field.
Once that tech is in place - and note that the RF IDs had been out for several years in '93, and HMDs were available for a few hundred dollars back then - then the user could call up information, be deluged with spam appearing on the sides of buildings, play games in an overlaid world, interacting directly with virtual objects via projective VR (technically known as VideoPlace), and many, many more possibilities (virtual fashion that appears differently to different viewers, for example).
Note that others have pursued this idea a lot further than I did - at least in terms of fleshing out the details. An XLNT novel by two-times Hugo award winner and libertarian Vernor Vinge is "Rainbows End," which does a superb job of pushing the limits of technological projection in this area. Vinge projects a world - circu 2025 or so - in which everyone lives in a mix of real and virtual worlds as a matter of course.
I'm a little surprised that Evryx is able to bring that much horsepower in terms of the image recognition to bear cost-effectively. If I had been aware of that, I suspect that I would also have thought of their app, as I am well atuned to that general field. Assuming that their product actually works as advertised, then they ARE the next Google, and the additional capabilities that my '93 article projected will be soon in coming. My recommendation: Beat a path to their door. Figure out SOME way you can work for them and get paid - at least partly - in stock shares. Hold onto those shares, BTW.