Polar Rose is supposed to be face recongition software. Rather than trying to write algorithms to duplicate what the human mind does, they are doing something very popular these days - using the wisdom of crowds.
As far as I can tell, Polar Rose will scan any web page you load for images that contain what it thinks are faces. If it finds one it puts a little icon on the screen. You click the icon and it either gives you a form to enter who the person is, or if it thinks it knows, you can confirm or reject the name.
I am not sure what the end goal is - to be able to recognize faces in images on the web, or to come up with a complete facial recognition database - but whatever it is Polar Rose seems to be doing pretty well on getting there. I keep the Firefox plugin disabled most of the time as I load a lot of web pages with a lot of images and it slows the browser down noticeably. When I enable it it seems to recognize faces occassionally. Mostly I think it is someone else who tagged the same photo, but it seems to be a pretty solid approach.
How they plan to make money with this I have no idea.
Wuala
Wuala is actually still in alpha. From their site:
Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. It's a free desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that brings you a convenient and secure online storage. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This new technology has a number of advantages and it allows us to provide you a better service for free.Wuala is basically an online storage system. It works pretty well, the app crashes every now and then. I have never used the file sharing sections, but I do use it to keep files I want from different locations available.
My own gripe is that the 1GB of disk space it gives you is about what I can fit on my USB thumb drive, making Wuala not terribly useful to me. And everytime I load it it tries to let me know about new wallpapers and screensavers and such.
It seems like a pretty good product and it is definitely a good idea as people move onto using the web as an application platform. I have not yet had the need to try out the file sharing portions, but maybe I'll play around with that a little bit when I have some free time.
Update - On further reading the description of Wuala it appears that you can trade local hard disk space for online space. I guess it stores things on users machines to achieve it's decentralized structure. That makes it a lot cooler than I previously thought it was.
I have a couple more I will post about either later today or tomorrow.
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