The end of tagging by hand

Looking back, it would seem that Picasa was just left hanging by Google. That’s all set to change on Monday with the launch of facial recognition which should you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.

The new feature works by suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them. This new technology is courtesy of Googles acquistion of Neven Vision, a company specialising in matching facial details with images already stored in a central database.

As yet there’s no guarantee the tech will work but there is a setback - the system works best when users directly face the camera but has problems if they’re not.

It’s a start, now let’s see who gets matched to my ‘horses arse’ photo!

Popularity: 24% [?]

..in Japan.

Figures from Nielson Japan show that Yahoo took 76% of the 350 billion-ish search engine and portal-related pageviews leaving Google trailing far behind with about 5.4%. he figures translate to 21.9 billion pageviews for Yahoo and 2.2 billion for Google. That’s some catching up to do.

To most of us, it might not seem like a big thing until you find out that Japan has one of  the highest levels of internet penetration in the world (about 74%). This makes the Japanese market a key battleground for ad revenue. So how does Google beat Yahoo?

Mobile Web! By targetting Japanese mobile phone companies Google is seeking to sneak in the back door via pre-installed apps on handsets. Docomo and KDDI have integrated Google Search into their start menus which means users get content from mobile and web sites (plus ads, of course!).

Japanese users can also access Google Calendar, Youtube and other Google services. Some Docomo handsets are even being shipped with Google Maps pre-installed.

The question is, ‘Will it be enough?’. I’m not sure,  Internet portals are still big business in Japan and Yahoo caters to that need. Looks like Google are trying to ignore this and draw in users of mobile web apps. It may be successful but only if Google manage to persuade a whole nation of users that the Google way is best.

Popularity: 50% [?]