Search buzz

Videosurf won most plaudits from the expert panel for its video search engine. It’s designed to deal with the problems facing existing search engines, most of which base their results on text-based tags, captions and filenames. That limits the usefulness of the search – and assumes a level of honesty among video taggers which may not always be realised. Videosurf aims to solve these problems by jumping inside the video, analysing images frame by frame and detecting faces, objects and scenes. This means you can search for films by actor and go straight to the scenes in which he or she appears, or trawl through home movies looking for particular people. Combined with a little human input tagging people and scenes, this becomes a really powerful tool and as the quantity of video on the web increases it’s clear that we’re going to need something like this.

A similar idea lies behind GazoPa, a clever image search engine developed by Hitachi which recognises what’s shown within a photograph. This means you can upload a snapshot of an item you’d like to buy and GazoPa will find a variety of similar-looking products. Click on one you like and it will narrow results to products that look more like your selection, prioritising colour or shape as you prefer. You can even draw what you want to find into the search engine and it’ll present you with photographs that match your doodlings.

Bojam is a collaboration tool for musicians, providing a web-based multitrack recording studio that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. That means individual band members can record their contributions from bedrooms in different continents and at different times, or can download existing tracks and add their own embellishments.

Fotonauts resembles an amalgam of Flickr and Wikipedia, letting people load up their photos and match them with links and text from around the web to create a slickly presented gallery with a great deal more depth than a standard photo-sharing site. It’s a simple idea, but so was Flickr and that hasn’t done too badly.

The challenge for all three businesses is to make money from their products, presumably through some combination of advertising, sponsored links and premium services. In the mean time, they seem content to set about building up a network of users and work out how to make money from them later (or perhaps to hope that one of the big boys will buy them out before making money becomes an issue).