Image search engine is Imense

Rating: Upload and categorise your cameraphone snaps

Trawling the web I came across the mention of another potential search engine that I’d never encountered before. This time it was Imense.com which is hoping to build up an image search engine.

A clue as to the amount of processing power required is not only provided by the name – a play on immense – but also by the fact that it has to borrow a network of 8,000 computers to get itself going.

For this particular revelation, I’m indebted to Richard Tyler of the Sunday Telegraph who article appeared here.

Tyler says that Imense is the brainchild of two Brits – David Sinclair [no relation to Sir Clive] and Chris Town.

When it comes to claiming what the software can do, the sky is the limit apparently. The company says it can “recognise the colours, shapes, objects and scenes within the frame.”

If that weren’t enough, “It can even tell the skin colour, sex and age of the person in the image, whether it contains a beach scene or a celebrity walking down a red carpet.”

Now the applications for the mobile world are obvious. While there might be 15 billion images already on the internet, there’s must be billions of new pictures being taken on cameraphones each month around the world.

And most cameraphone users haven’t a clue where there pictures are stored and what their content is. So the obvious thing to do is upload them to an image search engine like imense and have they automatically categorised.

There’s only one snag. Every time you type the company’s name into a wordprocessed document, the in-built dictionary corrects it to being spelt with a double ‘m’.

Hopefully that won’t happen with the URL for the company too often!

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