Picollator and the big competition: Update

Due to the number of announces about new start-ups offering ‘image search’ or ‘automatic image tagging’, ‘new opportunities for customers’ and ‘new approach to web search’, a user is hesitating what to choose. I would like to provide the list of simple questions, which the user should ask evaluating new offers.

Q1: Does it (the announced service) have the online demo?
No=0, Yes=1

Q2: Does it allow to put a user’s query to try?
No=0, Yes=1

Q3: Does it allow to submit user’s picture to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q4: Does it work with grey-scale images and good artworks?
No=0, Yes=1

Q5: Does it allow to submit picture and text together to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q6: Does it search for similar objects rather than identical?
No=0, Yes=1

Now please calculate the Sum from all answers. If you obtain Sum=6, pay attention on this new service.

Comment on ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ by Newsweek

Newsweek has published an interesting article ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ about fighting against the adult and other unwanted content at Facebook and its biggest competitor MySpace. The article is very fresh and its reflects main issues with content moderation at social networks. However, one important thing attracted my attention. Nick Summers, an author of that article, made an example on the typical work of the content moderator at Facebook. The example contains following phrase:

After delivering a verdict on 75 of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by Facebook users… …Axten is off to a meeting. It’s just another day at the office of the world’s fastest-growing social-networking site.

And another one:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.

In my words, it means following from the point of view of CEO, COO, CFO and CMO:

1. 150 people are paid regularly for doing the manual work and Facebook pays all taxes, social insurance, operational expenses and overheads for the team of 150 people.
2. No doubts, 150 people can do much more for Facebook than doing that very monotonous work
3. 150 of 850 people are in content moderation, which means that more than 17% of the whole team is making this strange manual work.
4. Those 150 people can moderate 150*75=11,250 images of  more than 400,000 outstanding images, which is less than 3% of daily demands. If you know ISO9001, it is 3x times less than 10%
5. The results of their work are far from what is good, because of the performance and because they process images which flagged by Facebook users. How many other images among billions at Faceboook are not flagged?

I am not criticising Facebook. Same issues exist in all other companies running public web services, including MySpace. It reminds the history of the industrial progress: in 18 century most of the work has been done by people. Then machines arise. It is very strange that managers in IT still think in terms of 18 century.

So I would recommend a simple thing for them: just count everything and finally think that maybe it is better to use piFilter as the automatic detection tool, which covers 100% and does not need social taxes, overheads and operational expenses.

Adult image detection service piFilter is ready

You may plug-and-play with our new porn detection service www.pifilter.com . As I reported before, porn and adult content in images can be one of the big issues for online media, ISPs and search engines because it cannot be detected automatically. Now the time is changing, and we installed the online service which you can easily use.

pifilter website capture

If you have a social network, online albums, file sharing or provide ISP, you may set up your system to query our engine on each image being viewed or uploaded in your service. piFilter provides the simple API to send the query and receive the response in the form like ‘porn’, ‘no porn’ and ’suspicious’. It does not filter out images – it works much better offering the user the opportunity to manage the situation by himself. 

The technology is a part of our strategic development with www.picollator.com, so make sure that we implemented best pattern recognition algorithms to analyze images by piFilter. The service does not analyse text (maybe, yet!), it recognizes image content itself, so it is 100% language-independent and can work at English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, German, Korean, Estonian – at any website.  piFilter does not care about the language, because it sees the image, not reads the texts.  Such advantage is one of the key feature for most of social networks, blogs and ISPs, where there are many pageviews or uploads with no associated text content. The quality of the detection is above 80% and piFilter can process all image sizes and types in the Internet.

piFilter works by the analogy with 99% of manual content moderators, but performs much faster and does not need overheads, administration and operational expenses, and it is much cheaper in terms of direct costs. The commercial model reminds best cases of SaaS – you pay only for usage, not for time! So you subscribe to the particular traffic in number of requests, and may spend this traffic as long as you want. Something like pre-paid cellular tariffs, isn’t it? piFilter tariffs are made so any small or average site owner benefits up to 10x times subsribing to piFilter. Especially if calculate all direct or indirect expenses on content moderation or legal issues.

It is the unique market offer, so try it and be flexible and safe.