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New Approach To Multimedia Could Spell Doom For Top Engines - Part 1

On August 28, music fans will tune in to the MTV Video Music Awards and on September 18, TV fans will tune into the Emmy Awards. Millions of viewers tune in and log on to watch their favorite stars arrive and win awards. More often than not, theyre interested in what celebrities are wearing or what their latest hit song is. What if viewers could easily identify the designer of Lady Gagas outfit as she walked the red carpet or even found similar colors, styles and fabrics to purchase in real time, all at the click of a button on the remote?

As TV product placement investments flow from automotive, fashion, electronics and consumer packaged goods brands, specialty and mainstream products of all types saturate our televisions. Real time multimedia search could deliver superior returns for brands and content providers alike. Viewers could instantly request more information or connect with local businesses selling thousands of different wares.

More immediately, as online news publishers move away from the written word toward more video-based content, each video could serve as a curator of content for the page that surrounds it. Videos could deliver ads, coverage and content to each user that is entirely relevant to the user experience without any human intervention. These futuristic scenarios may be closer than you think. A new and innovative approach to search is underway at Santa Clara, CA-based startup Haileo (http://www.haileo.com/). The company has developed what its executives call the Haileo Brain.

I recently spoke with co-founders Vwani Roychowdhury and Nima Sarshar to learn more about the technologys immediate potential for product marketers and its future potential as a media game-changer.

Defining Context through Entities, Objects and Concepts
The Haileo Brain is a machine representation of the real world, and is modeled after the real brain. It comprises images, audio signals and text phrases that capture different attributes of objects and experiences; in addition such attributes have links among them that capture similar intent or functional and contextual relationships. Then, just as humans experience or understand a video or a movie scene by recognizing familiar objects and reliving the external signals inside their brains, the Haileo Brain understands multimedia by first recognizing familiar signals in the video, and then stitches together a wide range of elements (already stored inside it) to generate a contextual, intent-driven and sequential summary of the content. This contextual summary, in conjunction with other data such as users profile, can then be used to target ads or related content at the right time and right location as the video is watched.

How does one create such a versatile brain? Currently, search engines such as Google and Bing get help from the thousands of marketers who bid for search terms and perform SEO, and also from the 100s of millions of users who perform queries. All this data help them to create an associative database of what phrases and images people choose and what are some of the related products and services. With the visual signal playing a dominant role in a video-centric world, the current paradigm may not be that useful and alternate means of processing multiple signals in a common framework are considered to be too futuristic. This is where the Haileo Brain aims to take a giant leap. Like Sarshar says, Most objects and experiences are documented on the web on multiple sites, complete with images, text and audio signals. We crawl the web and automatically aggregate the relevant visual signals and link them to related visual, audio and textual signals. Roychowdhury adds, This is a new kind of science distilling entities from the web that allowed us to make a breakthrough.

To fully understand this technology, lets address Haileos definitions of three critically important terms:

1. Entity: the underlying tangible thing that exists offline (a PlayStation Portable 3000, for example)
2. Object: any atomic multimedia signal (for example, a caption or other text source, an image, a video frame, an audio file, etc.) that is an attribute of an entity (for example, an object relating to a PSP-3000 could be an image of a game, a video file of an advertisement or customer review.)
3. Intent Categories: A group of entities that have similar intent or represent the same category of experience (for example, entities such as a scene of a fashion runway, luxury apparel, and jewelry would fall under the intent of fashion; similarly, entities such a stadium, tennis court, and rackets would fall under sports).

Like Sarshar explains it, "The challenge is to understand what an image or a video segment is on many different levels." Sarshar further explains, "Object level understanding may not be enough in many occasions. An image about a basketball court even when correctly identified at the object level does not tell the complete story: one also needs to know that one can show ads about tickets to local games, jerseys, sports shoes etc. This is where the Haileo Brain kicks in and provides a contextual map of the intent space."

Haileo - www.haileo.com

Pioneering Multimedia Ad Technology Startup Provides First-of-its-Kind Advertising Solution for Digital Entertainment Company.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) July 12, 2011 - Haileo, the pioneering ad technology startup that helps advertisers deliver the right ads at the perfect moment, announced it has been selected by leading digital entertainment company Busca Corp. to provide display advertising for Buscas video and photo-sharing property MetaTube. Haileos service delivers non-linear, in-video ads targeted against MetaTubes visual content and context a first-of-its-kind solution for online video ad placement that will reach the sites user base of more than two million viewers across Mexico, Latin America, and the U.S.

One of the biggest challenges facing online advertisers today is finding delivery solutions that ensure ads reach the consumer with the right offer at the most opportune time, said Nima Sarshar, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Haileo. With Haileo, leading video sites like MetaTube will finally be able to provide their advertising partners with guaranteed, targeted impressions. We are proud to partner with Busca to offer this incredible delivery system for MetaTube and its users.

Modeled after the human brain, Haileos proprietary technology breaks new ground by reading and interpreting multimedia elements in order to target the viewer with the appropriate ad content. This arrangement greatly increases the ad impressions per video view, making the power of Haileos video ad system comparable to advertising on television. In addition to its partnership with Busca, Haileos technology is also live on other partner sites throughout North America.

By adopting Haileos technology, we ensure that targeted ad impressions meld seamlessly with our sites content, augmenting and enriching viewer experience and simultaneously allowing us to increase MetaTubes ad impressions and net revenue, said Ramon Toledo, CEO of Busca Corp. Its crucial to reach viewers with contextual ads that meet their specific needs, and were excited that Haileo can monetize our content in this way.

Haileo goes beyond text-based search terms and user-supplied tags to access the visual signals of an increasingly video-dominated online world. The Haileo engine distills information from the web to aggregate relevant visual signals and links them to related visual, audio and textual signals to generate a contextual, intent-driven and sequential summary of the content, which can then be used to target ads or related content at the right time and right location as the video is being watched.

About Haileo Founded and led by veterans of the online search and advertising industry, Haileo monetizes multimedia using visual reference and helps advertisers deliver the right ads at the perfect moment. Expertly versed in the latest research and methods of unsupervised machine learning and unstructured data mining, which is the basis of Haileos technology, Haileos team has created a multimedia processing technology that extracts user intention from the visual signals embedded in online content with unprecedented accuracy. Haileos full understanding of visual content and context helps increase advertising and ecommerce revenues for our clients. To learn more, visit http://www.haileo.com/

About Busca Corp.
Busca Corp. is a digital entertainment network for Mexico, Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic markets. Their primary property, (http://www.levelup.com/), is the leader in online social media and news for the exploding Spanish-speaking video-gamer market. Busca Corp. headquarters are in La Jolla, California, Tijuana, Baja California and Mexico City. Busca Corp. is a culturally rich and diverse corporation. Busca Corp is serves online Spanish-speaking social media via innovation and interaction. http://www.buscacorp.com/

Haileo - www.haileo.com

Haileo offers visually-delivered advertising and ecommerce solutions and technology. The Santa Clara-based company was founded in 2009.

SUB: Briefly describe the services you offer.

Gunadhi: Haileo offers products for online advertising and visual e-commerce. These products establish intent of the multimedia content from visual context to help clients monetize their underserved inventories.

SUB: What is the technology behind Haileo?

Gunadhi: Haileo's patent pending technologies utilizes visual context of the online digital content. The key capabilities of the technology include unsupervised learning of multimedia elements from vast and unreliable sets of data (web); advanced algorithms for automated and scalable processing of large multimedia data sets; innovative algorithms to understand images and videos and match their multimedia attributes; and detection and classification algorithms that use higher order relationships between content.

SUB: What is the value proposition Haileo offers to both advertisers and publishers?

Gunadhi: The value proposition for advertisers includes targeting ads using visual context of the images and videos, in addition to text; coverage expansion for advertisers beyond the traditional ad placements; an offering of branded performance ads that deliver higher return on investment and built-in brand loyalty by allowing the consumers to interact with the brand. The value proposition for publishers includes the utilization of visual context of online digital content; monetization of under-monetized or non-monetized multimedia content; creation of new advertising opportunities using visual context; and increase in user interaction with content to improve engagement with the site.

SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?

Gunadhi: There are many companies claiming expertise in understanding multimedia. However, most of them are using human resources to tag images and videos and some are trying technology. Haileo technology can understand various dimensions of multimedia in an automated fashion that can scale for large volume and does not require human intervention. Some of the competitors in this space include: Pixazza, GumGum, SuperFish and Like.com.

SUB: How are you marketing your services?

Gunadhi: We are currently marketing our services through a direct sales force. We are engaging with some partners who will resell our services.

SUB: What is your business model? How does Haileo make money?

Gunadhi: We have two business models, one for advertising that includes revenue sharing and fee for service. And the other is for e-commerce that includes SaaS offering and enterprise licenses.

SUB: When and how did the idea behind Haileo come about? Was there a distinct "aha" moment, or was it a longer-term process?

Gunadhi: The idea came three years ago while the three founders were working on a prior venture together. We saw firsthand the problems of search and understanding user intent, and believed that if we could incorporate multimedia cues, we would go a long way to solving these problems. We had a deep understanding of the approach and algorithms needed to realize our vision.

SUB: What were the first steps you took to starting the business?

Gunadhi: The founders have considerable start-up experience between them and could have raised money early. However, we were uncertain as to what the best applications were for the technology we were developing. Thus, it was decided that we would bootstrap the company, stay lean, talk to as many prospective customers as we could, and rapidly prototype solutions that we believed met their needs.

SUB: Have you raised outside funding to this point? If not, do you plan to in the near future? If so, do you plan to raise more in the short term?

Gunadhi: Yes, Series A Preferred from a group of angels. Yes, we plan to raise a Series B later this year.

SUB: As an entrepreneur who has started a business in the midst of an economy that is still not completely healthy, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs just starting out?

Gunadhi: Believe in what you have and persevere most of all. Try to stay as lean as possible for as long as needed. Meantime, follow the "fail fast" approach of developing the product or service for the intended customer. Interact with customers. "Stealth mode" is over-rated!

Haileo - www.haileo.com