TagCow Announces Departure David Cantu

Matthew Nichols, Utah, June 30, 2010 – Munio Memory Services, LLC., dba TagCow today announced that David Cantu is leaving the Company to pursue other interests.

“David has worked hard to focus the Company’s business and message, establish strategic relationships and build the Company’s brand over the last few years,” “We have been fortunate to have David at TagCow. We want to thank David and wish him the best in his future endeavors,”

From Heroku:

http://status.heroku.com/

Over 20 Amazon instances failed at the same time today. All app operations are offline while we recover from this distributed failure. All data is fully backed up. We expect app operation to be restored within the hour.

Our service has been down for about an hour now. Looks like our cloud computing service www.heroku.com is down. We may switch to our Amazon instance if Heroku doesn’t come back online soon.

Thanks for your patience.

Want to know more about Tagcow’s consumer services and how we can help increase the value of your consumer applications like data backup services, photo sharing and photo print services (calendars, coffee mugs, post cards, prints, etc.,)? Remember, you have the images but without meta data you don’t have an asset! Image Data Equation: assets = your image + Tagcow meta data.

Meet our CEO, David Cantu, at CES Las Vegas from January 6th - 8th.

To setup a 1:1 meeting with David call him at 425-894-2155.

Event: http://www.cesweb.org/

Rihanna, and it wasn’t even close. Rihanna’s image was tagged almost 2x as much as the second most popular celebrity in ‘09, Lady GaGa.

From Tagcow

Coming off the heals of another celebrity tagging job I thought it would be interesting to take a different look at the data. So I set out to answer a couple of simple questions. First, what is the typical “mood” of a celebrity in the photos taken? Second, are there more female or male celebrities photographed? I’ll answer the question of “Most” photographed celebrity of 2009 in a special New Year’s Eve post tomorrow.

Celebrity Moods
As you can see most the overwhelming mood of photographed celebrities is Happy - 59% and Sexy - 25%. I guess we’d all feel happy and sexy if we were rich and famous. Chart below…

From

Celebrity Photo Gender Distribution
As you can see female celebrities have their photos taken roughly 12% more often than their male counterparts. The only surprise here is that there’s not a bigger discrepancy. I blame the Twilight Phenomenon of 2009. I think we tagged a million images of Robert Patinson and Taylor Lautner this year.

From Tagcow

As Chief Business Architect the best part of my job is that I have a lot of room to run out in front of the execution / operation team to spend money and to do things that the company otherwise wouldn’t do. I recently hired a new developer to the team, Semi Mol, who will be assisting me in a new “Skunk Works” project. While I obviously can’t get into what exactly we’ll be collaborating on I can tell you that it’s going back to the core of the Tagcow dream. When Matt and I conceived the idea for Tagcow over Sushi in December of 2007 we had one big idea - searching your personal image archive would be cool. Since then we’ve drifted away from the consumer image tagging market and moved towards the Enterprise market because getting a few companies to write big checks is easier than getting millions of consumers to write you small checks.

While we’ve been off busy executing on our Enterprise strategy I kind of figured that with all the noise being generated out of Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and others that somehow this problem was well on its way to being solved but then I looked a little closer…and you know what? All the noise was really around “People Tagging” either manually or through facial recognition software and honestly it’s not that interesting. It’s fundamental but not game changing. I’d recommend Face.com’s facial recognition software any day and if I had some spare time I’d call those guys and integrate their software into our platform to help with people tagging. But the real heart of the tagging opportunity lies with “descriptive tagging” of images which no one does better than Tagcow. So you have 400 photos of your daughter, Novella, tagged now what? It’s the ability to narrow down your results to “Novella + ballet” or “Novella + laughing” that’s really interesting.

As Semi and I make progress on this front I will keep the blog updated.

Welcome to the team Semi, it’s going to be a wild ride

Semi Mol

Okay, so we didn’t actually run it but we did tag all the images from the marathon. Very cool!

Statistics from the photo tagging job below.

Stats:
Est. Runners: 2,500
Total Images: 2,379
Unique Runners Identified: 1,057 (42%)
Total Tags: 4,739

Total cost: $47.58
Est. Time: 10 minutes

And by the way, I was completely wrong about the emotional tags for the London Santa Marathon it looked like the runners had a tone of fun! This job is a milestone for Tagcow as it represents our first attempt at event tagging. I’d say a smashing success. I am sure Brightroom will be calling us any moment to start tagging their events.

Event details.

To see some fun photos from the event go to 42run.com and search Santa Run 6k 2009 using the following bib numbers:
990
849
1425
1808

Who said working on Saturday isn’t fun…

I was just notified that our consumer image tagging service was featured on the popular podcast, Faceoff Show. They do a fair job of describing how consumers can get their photos tagged using Tagcow for a small fee and what the benefits are. They also discuss our brilliant use of Mechanical Turk and proprietary algorithms to solve one of the most complex computer science problems. I’ve always liked their show and now of course I love it!!

The segment on Tagcow’s image tagging service runs from the 11:43 minute mark to 18:57 - over seven minutes…super rad!

Faceoff is your face-to-face web technology podcast. In this podcast Jade Robbins and Mark Sanborn talk about various aspects of web technology such as web development, social media, and web entrepreneurship.

Listen here

Thanks guys!
-Michael Droz

Check this out!!

From Skate Life: Deck Designer