Apply HN: Datalba – Your personal media search engine

8 points by jeads 10 years ago | 11 comments

Datalba’s mission is to make sure all of your personally relevant media stays organized and searchable.

First and foremost: Knowing what matters to you. Datalba comes to know your preferences with a minimum of distraction. An occasional question or confirmation is enough to organize a mountain of data according to your tastes, and if you ever change your mind is easy for you let us know.

We make your images and videos searchable by content. You can search through your photo, article and video collection by who was involved, what was happening, where it was or when you were paying attention to it.

“What color was my birthday cake again?"

“Show me my little Sophie!"

“What happened last night?"

Have you ever been frustrated that you just can’t seem to find that video again? No matter what you come up with to search for it it just won’t come up for you.

You can save images and video that you find online or on services like Facebook in your collections, and retrieve them anytime with half-remembered descriptions.

“You know, that one movie… with the guy who had the hair, and that thing that happened with the car..."

Are you tired of spending so much time sorting through folders and sifting through links to manage that ever growing body of unmanaged things? You don’t have to lose your stuff.

Typical search show undifferentiated piles of junk you’ve never seen or heard of. Why bother with that when you can pull up exactly what you need, what you care about.

Try Datalba: Your personal media search engine.

kartikkumar 10 years ago |

I definitely find myself having to wade through my photo and video collection just to find that one that I remember I took a few years ago but for the life of me can't remember exactly when and where (which is the easiest way to sort and find). I think the key for me would be how much training/how many questions it would take for the search to become accurate. It would also be important to me to be able to use this offline. Don't fancy having to upload all my personal photos and videos.

Have you done any user testing yet?

I can imagine that if you get the algorithm to work robustly that there might actually be an entirely different, enterprise market.

Do you have a proprietary algorithm? Or are you using something well-known, published/publically available?

Would this simply be a product that the end user pays for? Or do you have another revenue stream in mind?

jeads 10 years ago | |

I am very familiar with that process myself. :)

While a cached intermediate for offline use is a very real possibility, providing top quality service without use of our server system would not be feasible with the current device market. Server-side we can use hardware that is optimized for this kind of processing, without being constrained by device or browser limitations. Without that the service quality would degrade sufficiently to tarnish our product’s image and turn people away.

One example of this is the one you provided: the quantity of training required for accurate answers. If we need to keep this metric tight, relying on random ARM processors and sandboxed single-threaded javascript is not the way.

Datalba’s CEO is in the process of collecting early test users, and has been receiving large quantities of test media for use with the prototype from several of them.

Yes, there are many opportunities in the enterprise market for this. The immediate interest is in bringing a quality service to the world that many people will benefit from. The needs of enterprise customers are largely a subset of that goal, and the parts that aren’t can be handled in a given contract or agreement.

We have been working with and building on the latest in deep learning research, and have become quite proficient with designing and building these technologies.

While we will undoubtably be exploring payed options, I fully expect that to make this product a real success that there needs to be as few barriers to access as possible for the user. Degrading accuracy based on a paywall, the most seemingly economical choice, would alienate the majority of users before they have a chance become highly engaged.

Additional value-adds such as auxiliary services could be monetized, but so far we have managed to collect a number of expressions from consumers that this leads to a very ‘pushy’ presentation. While more market data is needed, it is clear this is territory that should be tread lightly.

The remaining option that is most clear is to monetize in ways that don’t directly make demands of our customers. It would be possible to produce very sophisticated market data from the information our service will collect, something that our partners are likely to find very valuable.

merterdir 10 years ago |

Well, this is awkward.

http://remember.ai

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483510

garoh 10 years ago | |

Looks like the same idea ha

jeads 10 years ago | | |

There is something of a resemblance, certainly. Nothing like a little healthy competition.

ryderj 10 years ago |

Interesting idea but what about the privacy of the information? I wouldn't want my life to be in the hands of anyone else, all in one place, due to the risks involved.

jeads 10 years ago | |

Customers who are not using our cloud storage service for storing content and who are concerned about security and privacy may have the option to have only metadata stored on our system. Once the images and other content have been processed the needed metadata has been largely collected, and can index remote storage. The media does need to be stored somewhere accessible to be searchable.

benjenkinsv95 10 years ago |

Datalba sounds like a fascinating idea! If it could run as a browser extension to tag media effortlessly, it would be immensely useful.

jeads 10 years ago | |

A browser extension is planned, but only as one of several clients including a phone app and a website.

chris2chris 10 years ago |

Google competitor

jeads 10 years ago | |

Google is very unfocused. I've heard very a capable serial entrepreneur say "Google competes with everyone.” I understand his consternation. But I certainly don’t feel like Google has solved this problem for me when I’m fumbling around in Android Gallery.