Mobli Media Inc., the Israeli startup has decided to take on the likes of internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo by launching an innovative online search tool. This particular tool can be used by people for finding the latest photos and videos on different social media networks. This information was provided in the company announcement made on Monday. More than $90 million has been raised by the startup in funding. This company is backed up by Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire and some big US celebrities have also invested in it such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Lance Armstrong, Serena Williams and Toby Maguire.
Eyeln service is offered by Mobli that can be used by people when they wish to search for video clips and pictures that are taken by others at demonstrations, sports events, natural disasters and concerts as they tend to post them on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. However, the location-based and real-time search option that the company will now offer is a new twist for this well-established category. Typically, it will show you a flood of videos and photos depending on their popularity or other ranking techniques, which means that users will no longer have to wade through different social media networks for finding relevant images.
The top photo sites are the pioneer of photo-sharing called Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, Facebook, Google Images and Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook. Moshe Hogeg, the Chief Executive of Mobli Media referred to computers as stupid in an interview and said that specific algorithms have to be provided for detecting the center of the event. He added that their aim was to become the Google of crowd-generated visual content. Furthermore, he was also of the opinion that audience traffic and the time the audience spends on news websites will also see a boost through the Eyeln technology.
Eyeln is available as a downloadable mobile application, a search website or even as an add-on that can be installed on the website of publishers for complementing text and other information. AOL Inc.’s Huffington Post has partnered with Mobli to provide the add-on. It is expected by Mobli to use ads on its own websites for making money and it will also share the revenue from advertising with the publishers. The company had begun as a photo-sharing competitor of Instagram and had gradually achieved 20 million users. This turned out to be the stepping stone for creating the search engine in about three years.
Experts in natural language processing and computer vision had been recruited by Hogeg. He said that relevancy of the results was their biggest challenge along with choosing the most interesting photos. Hogeg said that in order to find relevant photos, they have to weigh the importance according to the location of the event. For instance, photos from the NBA finals should include more photos of the players than the crowd. Eyelyn can create an album of photos by scanning a story of the event and add photos to it gradually as they are posted.