No I do not do the mini-event “Demo” and I seldom write about companies that go there. It’s too staged for my taste and I’ve never seen anything great come out of the event. Besides I can’t see paying anyone to see demos. Here you have vendors paying $30,000 to demonstrate their products to people paying $2995 to see the demo. What kind of bogus intermediation is this in the Information Age? This is selling refrigerators to Eskimos in a big way. I would feel like a total sucker going to this event. It makes me laugh. Of course the promoters laugh all the way to the bank. The net result is coverage such as this beauty in PC-World — PC World’s Techlog – Riya’s Amazing Face-Recognition Photo Search. In this write-up McCracken says the following:
I haven’t tried Riya myself yet, but it demos extremely well.
It demos well? Geez, some criteria for analysis.
“…the Riya exec I talked to admitted that there are times when the technology will think that one person is someone else, or will fail to find a given person at all. But you can train the service by telling it when it’s right and when it’s wrong….”
This whole spiel reminds me so much of Voice Recognition technology. Although it’s been several years since I played with Voice Recognition software, my favorite part is when the vendor claims a 99% accuracy level. Even if true, do you realize how much time you spend correcting 1% errors? You might as well type it yourself.
You have to pay to see a staged demonstration? Get out !!!Do people actually pay too?
I know what I’m going to start doing.
Yup.
Maybe you should look at the issue of 8 bit installers not being supported in 64 bit Windows which means that all those printers, scanners and other peripherals will have to be replaced. Two of my scanners are toast.