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While company President Greg Heuss said Eyealike could transform the online dating business -- allowing people to find mates by the geometry of one's face, hair color or skin tone -- he acknowledged that the concept does rub some the wrong way. But Heuss said online dating sites are intrigued with facial search as an extension of personality questionnaires and other matching techniques.
"They want to use this to add on or enhance those, so when you are looking for the physical side ... you can start with an image, because everybody is basing their search on images anyway within the sites," he said. "I know it does sound kind of weird. But that is the way it is, fortunately or unfortunately, out there."
Heuss calls the online dating industry the "low-hanging fruit" and a "great showcase" of what Eyealike can do, but he said the facial recognition technology has applications ranging from homeland security to online video copyright protection to online photography (potentially automatically tagging photos by faces that appear in images).
ActiveSymbols has not struck any licensing deals with online dating sites. But Heuss, who previously worked in executive roles at Seattle online dating startups Kiss.com and PerfectMatch.com, believes there is interest in the industry to move beyond text-based search.
"If you are typing in, 'I am looking for a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy who lives in Seattle,' for example, why not enhance that search by actually allowing those users to upload a photo of somebody they know or somebody off the Internet and start matching and playing around with search results based upon what that image is?" Heuss said. "So if it is blond hair or if you like this set of eyes, or whatever it is. ... Again, as trivial as it may sound to actually base a search on that, for these dating companies this is their bread and butter."
Several startups already focus on image search, but only a few are attacking the facial-recognition element. One of the best known and most heavily financed was San Mateo, Calif.-based Riya, though it switched gears last year and started to focus on a shopping service called Like.com.
Although Eyealike could be used in online retailing product searches as well, Heuss said that is not at the top of his list, and he sees bigger opportunity in the online dating arena.
"We are going at it in a completely different direction than the way (Riya) tackled it," Heuss said. "I think there is plenty of the market to go around. And, frankly, I think we have a better product and stronger team to push it through."
Now, the closest competitor to ActiveSymbols is probably Polar Rose, a Sweden-based facial-recognition startup that raised $5.1 million last year. Heuss said Polar Rose has a solid product, though it leans more toward the security market.
ActiveSymbols, which spun out of Logicalis earlier this year and has raised nearly $1.5 million in angel financing, has filed for a half-dozen patents on the technology.
Heuss, who doesn't plan to make money from a consumer offering at this time, admitted that the celebrity matcher is a bit of a gimmick to get people engaged with the service and show off the face-recognition capability. Eyealike boasts more than 4,000 celebrities, with images pulled from the Internet Movie Database and other sources.
The six-person company also has scraped more than 250,000 images from online dating services to use in its database. Heuss said he believes they are permitted to do so since they are not storing the data.
Eventually, he hopes to license the technology to online dating sites and social networking sites, noting that the "technology can be pretty beneficial to those guys."
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