Some of you may be growing tired of hearing about companies described as the “Kayak of _____” but if the analogy fits, we might as well abuse it. So without further ado, I give you DoNanza, the Kayak of online freelance project search. With 70,000 projects on offer, there’s a high chance there’s something for you as well so you should consider giving it a whirl if you’re looking to make some extra money on the side in these tough times.

The one thing you have to keep in mind about DoNanza is that it keeps clear of offline gigs, so if you’re looking for an office job, DoNanza isn’t for you. It does however have 70,000 projects available right now, with 30,000 new projects added each week, or about 4,000 a day. There are 12 main categories with more than 400 sub-categories. The most active in terms of user-interest are (in the following order): Writing, Web Development, Graphic Design, Virtual Admin. Support, Translation, Marketing, SEO, and Programming.

DoNanza currently aggregates its freelance and crowd-source projects from 300 websites, with another 300 sites to be added in the coming months. Amazingly (or maybe not, really), 99% of the projects are indexed via scraping, with only a handful added manually.

There are a couple of main features I really like about DoNanza. First, its filtering tools are very clear and effective—nothing innovative, but often common-sense discovery tools are misguidedly cut from a public launch for some reason. On DoNanza, searches can be fine-tuned wit sliders on several levels, from Budget/Reward (Fixed/Hourly/Revenue-Share), to Project Type (Contest/Bidding/Other), to Time Left and Date Posted. The second useful feature is that each project’s details are displayed in an easy to skim form (see screenshot below). Again, not rocket science, but it makes the sometimes cumbersome chore of going through a myriad of search results a breeze.

DoNanza is also jumping on the ever-growing Twitter bandwagon by tweeting out new project notifications. Handles include: @dnzSEOfor SEO, @dnzWriting for Writing, @dnzPHP for PHP, @dnzDataEntry for Data Entry and more.

Demonstrating that it believes in freelancers, the DoNanza team outsourced much of its site development, including the UI, search engine, crawlers, as well as the indexing and data evaluation mechanisms. The company has yet to start making money but is planning on introducing sponsored links and projects in a couple of months. In the meantime, it’s pretty much a traffic and retention game.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

The granddaddy of all venture capital funds, Bessemer Venture Partners, keeps a tally of the mega-successes it passed on in a list known as the Anti-Portfolio. In it, renowned VC David Cowan is attributed for passing up on eBay:

“Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.”

Good news David, lightening may in fact strike twice for you because here’s your chance to invest in Colnect, a community site for collectors of coins, banknotes, stamps, phone cards and bottle caps. And no, I’m NOT kidding at all.

Colnect (Collect+Connect) is a collector’s community site that assists its users to organize, share, trade and sell their collectables. There are no fancy algorithms, the UI is modest—old school some may argue—and it’s literally a one-man show having been founded, coded and operated by 29-year-old Amir Wald. He’s still the only employee(!)

The core of Colnect is a community driven wiki where Contributors add content (collectibles), Editors make changes to existing items, and Coordinators supervise content contributions and provide permissions to Editors. Wald also employed crowd-sourcing to translate the site to 35 languages.

Colnect’s catalogs currently encompass 158K phone cards, 68K stamps, 15K coins, 15K banknotes and 5k bottle caps. Users have marked 11M items so far: 6.6M collectibles in wish lists, 4M in collections, and another 800K in swap lists. Wald tells me that in the last month alone over 650,000 items were marked in the system. He plans on continuously adding categories, with upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—barf bags. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Part of Colnect’s charm is that it really doesn’t try to impress you, it just aims to provide basic but critical utilities for collectors of mass-produced collectibles. Collectors can easily manage their inventory with personal collection, swap list and wish list management tools. There’s also auto-matching between collectors’ inventory and wish/swap lists (huge time saver I’m told). Then of course there are the run of the mill social features such as personal profiles, ratings, friends and private messages. These are all on top of the actual catalogs which are continuously updated and therefore a godsend to collectors.

All trades on Colnect are currently free of charge for now. There is however a premium membership option starting at just over $6 per month with the purchase of a one year subscription. Benefits include Custom Personal Lists, Premium Member Highlighting which helps member profiles and their items stand out, and the removal of ads across the site (AdSense and eBay ads are plastered everywhere).

So there you have it Mr. Cowan, your second opportunity to invest in stamps, coins and barf bags.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Yahoo’s purchase of FoxyTunes for a rumored $30M legitimized the add-on play as a product strategy for Israeli startups.I see new startups in this category almost weekly. We’re bearish on add-on plays because the “get them to download, install and use” parts are tricky - and monetizing those users is nearly impossible. In recent months, though, SimilarWeb’s name keeps popping-up and the reason may be the technology it’s spent two years building out. Sequoia Capital Israel, we’ve heard, is spending extra time looking into it and your typical add-on play doesn’t normally make their cut. So what is it about this little company?

On the surface SimilarWeb is everything you’d expect from a discovery Firefox/IE add-on. Once installed it docks to either side of the browser and displays similar sites, displayed as thumbnails or as a list. Users can rate each result with a thumbs up or down, the latter removing the result all together. Users can also suggest a site by pasting-in a URL. This not only customizes the user’s own results, it also impacts global results for all users. If you don’t want to install the add-on but still want to see it in action, try SimilarSites which pretty much mimics the experience in a web app.

Or Offer, CEO, was visibly uncomfortable every time I tried prying details about their technology, but finally relented with some general explanations: The backbone of SimilarWeb’s technology is based on multiphase analysis, which in plain English means that there are several engines running in the background, analyzing websites based on different mechanics, metrics and workflows. These include: user browsing trends, user ratings, tag analysis, ecosphere analysis, semantic breakdowns, and automated background research.

The company claims to have mapped millions of sites, and adding tens of thousands daily. This means that it will always suggest other sites, regardless of whether the site the user is currently on is a popular one, or one much further down the tail.

Nothing of the above stands out particularly or sheds light as to what’s so interesting about this company. A technical due diligence may be what’s necessary to truly understand SimilarWeb’s edge. No matter how you look at it though, the company is doing what it needs to be taken seriously… It has amassed thousands of users in the three months since its launch. Dr. Yossi Vardi is an investor and they seem to have Sequoia’s attention. Must be satisfying after two year’s worth of coding under the radar.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

my6sense is announcing it has raised $2 million in Series A financing from private investors. The company is pioneering ‘digital intuition’, artificial intelligence designed to assist everyday users separate the signal from the noise. This is a problem that has grown in magnitudes of severity since the introduction of blogs and RSS into our lives, and compounded even further by the recent rise in popularity of streams (thank you Facebook & Twitter). In my initial review I tested my6sense’s technology which they chose to apply on an iPhone web app that basically acted like an RSS reader with, well, a sixth sense. The magical part was not only that it worked, it required me to do nothing but consume the content (in my case, blog posts). I didn’t have to rate content-to-interest relevance or assist the application in any way. It took a couple of days to achieve what I described as my “A-Ha Moment”:

Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main “TOP MESSAGES” pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.

my6Sense will use the additional funding to advance R&D and its marketing efforts. It will also continue to focus on applying its technology in mobile applications. To this end, the company plans to release a native iPhone app in the very near future which we will be sure to cover.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Semantic ad technology provider Peer39 is announcing the closing of its Series C round to the tune of $10.5M, pushing the total amount of funding raised to over $22M. The round was led by Israeli VC Evergreen Venture Partners and was joined by the company’s existing investors Canaan Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and JP Morgan.

Since taking an in-depth look at Peer39 nearly a year ago, the company has shifted its focus from developing its own ad network to leveraging its semantic ad platform to transform publishers’ remnant ad inventory into a premium one. The company claims that 70-80% of publisher impressions are sold today as remnant inventory, and that its technology is perfectly suited to analyze these pages so they can instead be used to serve top-tier advertising inventory.

Take news sites as an example: These will often categorize themselves as “News” in ad server profiles but in reality they publish content that varies in categories—finance, health, travel, etc. Peer39’s SemanticMatch technology analyzes these pages in real time to determine what they’re really about. Amiad Solomon (CEO) tells me that they are able to shift up to 70% of news content into more sellable categories. Peer39 also offers SemanticProtect, a collection of ‘brand-protecting’ algorithms that can identify whether pages possess content that can be classified as objectionable or sensitive to advertisers (i.e. crime, terror, politics).

Integrating with Peer39 requires publishers to add a small piece of JavaScript on their site. On page-load, a request is made to Peer39’s servers, which analyzes the data semantically and assigns the most relevant and profitable advertising channel for the given page. This is where much of the company’s semantic and data mining algorithms come into play. Results are sent back instantly to the publisher and integrated within its ad serving systems allowing the most profitable semantic ad (display or text) to be displayed.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

The fundamental shift we are experiencing in how the Web is consumed (streams vs. pages) is also impacting our ability to engage with those we thought were beyond our reach. Consider this anecdote: When I was a teenager there was no chance I would have been able to communicate with a Jordanian monarch, and the closest I got to my favorite rock band—Guns n’ Roses—was getting crushed in the first row of their concerts in Budapest and Vienna.

Seventeen years later I am able not only to reach out to Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, I am also one of the 46 users followed by Duff McKagen (@duff64), Gn’R’s former bass player. What made these things possible was Twitter (of course). The piping for 140-character thought bursts is what today connects an everyday, common Israeli, with the Queen of Jordan and a rock star.

In a recent post we wrote about Her Majesty joining twitter (follow her handle @QueenRania). We followed up with an interview request to find out how she is using Twitter both personally and to help change the world, and she graciously accepted. “Of course, I tweet,” she says. But unlike most of us, she tweets about taking her family to meet the Pope and working to give every child an education.

If you are unfamiliar with Queen Rania’s work, here’s what she’s been up to lately: Among her many activities in Jordan, Queen Rania focuses on promoting excellence and innovation in education. As UNICEF’s Eminent Advocate for Children, she is a staunch defender of children’s welfare. Queen Rania has also been vocal about the importance of cross cultural dialogue in fostering greater understanding, tolerance and acceptance across the world. Her YouTube initiative exemplifies this.

Below is the email interview I conducted with her:

TechCrunch: Could you tell us how you came to know of Twitter? Is it really you tweeting? And why do you prefer using Twibble and TweetDeck over other applications?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I guess I first heard about it following the US election campaigns; there was quite a buzz around the creative use of social media in mobilizing people behind a common cause.

Since then, I’ve seen Twitter evolve into a dynamic and diverse medium for action as well as communication. Whether it’s raising money for malaria nets or promoting your company brand, Twitter answers much more than just “what are you doing?” It’s expanded to “what is the world doing, and what can the world do?”

Of course, I tweet. Tweeting is a very personal form of expression. Who else could talk about my son refusing to wear a suit to meet the Pope, my husband flying a helicopter, or take a twitpic from our home?

Tweetdeck was recommended by a friend, and that’s what I’m used to. And the same with Twibble; it works for when I’m on the go.

TC: My wife is still (grudgingly) coming to terms with my tweeting about our family… I’m curious as to how your husband, King Abdullah II, accepts Twitter now being fused with the everyday life of your family? Is your daughter, Princess Salma, aware of it?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Well, my husband is supportive of my work, like advocating for dialogue between cultures on YouTube. Last summer he was really proud of the millions of views my YouTube channel was receiving. He’s a bit of a techie himself with his gadgets and gizmos, so he’s very intrigued about all my twittering. Like me, he knows we’re just like any other family and so opening a window into our world shows people that, regardless of titles, we’re human, too. Ever since YouTube, my children aren’t surprised by me joining Twitter and Facebook. Really, as part of the digital generation, they’re probably wondering what took me so long!

TC: Do you view Twitter solely as yet another social medium to use for spreading your message, or will it replace an existing tool? Who do you have in mind when you’re tweeting? Jordanians, or an international audience?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Twitter’s a great way to tell people across the world what I care about and, hopefully, motivate them to join me in furthering my causes. It’s also a fantastic medium to hear the ideas and opinions of people I might not otherwise get to meet.

I want to tell people more about Jordan, about my life and work, but also to campaign for quality, global education. Not many people know that there are 75 million children out of school in the world…and two thirds are girls. And there’s just no excuse for that. We know what to do, we know how to make it happen, but we lack momentum from the masses to push politicians into action. It’s only when we have a critical mass of supporters behind this issue that we will put every child behind a school desk.

Twitter’s one way we can do that. It’s about using social media for social change: creating a community of advocates who can use their voices on behalf of the voiceless, or leverage their talents, skills, knowledge, and resources to put more children into classrooms, or pressure their elected representatives to get global education top of the agenda.

Who am I tweeting? Anyone who wants to learn more and help make a difference.

TC: You have a very progressive approach, even by Western standards, to transparent communication. How do you view restrictions imposed on the Internet in Middle Eastern countries?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Just to clarify, not all Middle Eastern countries have restrictions on the internet. Some do, but I’m not in a position to comment on policies in other countries. I can tell you that in Jordan we don’t impose restrictions on the Internet.

TC: Do you foresee the use of the Internet in education to become as pivotal as it is in Western countries?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Absolutely. Jordan is committed to ensuring that every child in our schools has access to, training, and proficiency in ICT. I believe that if we want our children to understand the world beyond their classroom, we must bring the world into their classroom. And teachers are also part of this equation. We’re using the internet in schools to upgrade their skills, mobilize resources, and encourage joint learning through online communities.

With a youthful population, we know the importance of a strong and innovative education sector, one that prepares our young people for the 21st century’s global marketplace and equips them with a 21st century skills’ set. By inspiring, engaging, and igniting their imaginations, we’re encouraging our children to be life-long learners.

TC: Do you see technology as key to the advancement of women’s rights? Is there a conscious effort on your part to become a role model in this sense?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Social media are a catalyst for the advancement of everyone’s rights. It’s where we’re reminded that we’re all human and all equal. It’s where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular or specialized, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.

It’s not about me being a role model, but about empowering people and making them believe that they can be role models and leaders for change.

TC: Have any of your tweets gotten a particularly large or surprising response?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Well, I’ve only been tweeting for a week or so, but the Pope’s visit got quite a large response. I noticed people were quite interested in this one: @QueenRania: Hoping he cn get both sides 2 recognize their common humanity, then we cn start building frm there.

TC: Did your son end-up watching “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” or was he spared the agony of the “chickflick”? (your husband’s words, not mine )

Her Majesty Queen Rania: No, his father got to him before I did!

TC: Has anyone from the Twitter team contacted you after joining? Do you know of any other royals that use Twitter (perhaps privately)? Does anyone else in your family use Twitter besides you? Will we ever see the King tweet?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I follow Biz Stone, but he has yet to DM me! As for other royals, I don’t know of any, not even His Majesty… If His Majesty ever decides to tweet, I’ll let you know on Twitter!

TC: What is your position on Holocaust denial groups on social networks specifically, and what should be done about hate speech in general?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I think that, as is the case offline, we should not be tolerant of hate speech, racist comments, or groups that promote hatred or intolerance in any shape or form.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Ask your average Israeli venture capitalist to name a few companies they’re keeping tabs on and Fixya usually makes the short list—so do Benchmark’s Conduit and Sequoia’s Kenshoo. If you haven’t heard of Fixya, the concept is real simple: It’s a post-sale tech support site. On the one side you have users who ask product support questions, and on the other are users who respond and help resolve said problems. In short, Fixya has managed to build itself up as a UGC powerhouse and is systematically milking the cow for all she’s worth. And now it’s adding yet another udder to milk—Product Recommendations and with that it’s delving into new territory, that of pre-purchase support. Not blown away are you? Understandable. That’s because you need to step back to appreciate just how big this here cow can grow and why VC’s are enamored with it.Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart below). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones.

With its new Product Recommendations Fixya is leveraging the large amount of consumer feedback users are providing about products they already own in order to help other users considering buying the same ones. Recommendations are indicated with an overall thumbs-up/down, along with the number of users whose recommendation was rated as a thumbs-up (Fixya weights the user’s vote on product reliability, ease of use and overall value). There are also written recommendations that help users with deeper insights. The information is all there, but they could do a better job displaying it by taking a cue from Amazon.

The end game, explains CEO Yaniv Bensadon, is to establish a type of Net Promoter Score (which is a measure of customer loyalty) for products and their manufacturers. Assuming it can pull it off and traffic comes flooding in, Fixya can turn on an additional revenue stream by allowing its community of 250,000 experts to offer pre-sale support for a premium—this shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as it already does this with post-sale support. Theoretically should Fixya be able to establish the critical mass necessary, it could form a social commerce network, where consumers collaborate with each other on product-specific issues.

Back to why the VC’s are hot for Fixya. What’s admirable about the company and what keeps it glued to VC’s radars is its revenue potential. Here are a few fun Fixya facts:

• SEO – Due to its spanning across so many products it’s managed to institute some extraordinary SEO juice for itself. I Googled four electronic devices that sat on my desk using their name and the keyword ’support’ (i.e. ‘hp l1706 support’, ’seagate freeagent support’) and Fixya came-up in the top 5 results for all.
• Advertising – 50% of Fixya’s revenue comes from a variety of ad formats (ppc, sponsorship and display). Here’s something that blew me away… Again, thanks to its broad product catalog, Google AdSense actually generates real revenue for Fixya. Just how real? They’re generating eCPM’s of $2-3—that’s eCPM, not CPM and on AdSense no less. No one else I know is pulling these numbers off AdSense.
• Premium Support – Fixya facilitates live support between its experts and users. Incidents are priced between $10 and $20 and Fixya cuts a commission for the facilitation.
• Lead Gen – Fixya generates leads for local providers of support, warranties and parts. Commissions is the name of the game here as well.
• Future Directions – In the works are a self-serve ad platform which will allow targeting based on products, categories, brands, and geo-location. Fixya is also planning on white-labeling portions of its services. Doing so will allow it to approach the likes of Sony and offer to reduce costly outsourced tech support by instilling crowd-sourced features (and even generate additional revenue along the way).

So there you have it… A company that is able to transform user-generated content into a money making machine. It’s no wonder that Bensadon smiled and said ‘much higher’ when I mentioned to him that I keep hearing $60M as the company’s expected exit mark. You would be smiling too, wouldn’t you?

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Israeli startup innerActive has been chosen by ICQ to power the service’s offering of free mobile content to its worldwide users, now amounting to 42 million. The content—videos, games and applications—will be subsidized using innerActive’s in-content ad injection technology.Over the past year and a half, innerActive has been busy carving out a name for itself as a company aggressively pushing its monetization offering to mobile carriers and portals in Europe. The company’s core technology is the ability to dynamically inject advertising into mobile games, applications and video—content which has strong user engagement, but has yet to live up to its revenue generating potential (at least in the amounts players in the mobile industry hope for). The company has strategically chosen to stay clear of any attempt to monetize the mobile Web and focuses specifically on the monetization of content.

innerActive describes its solution as an “Ad-funded AppStore,” a sort of agnostic platform for mobile operators that provides everything from the hosting and delivery of the content, to the campaign management and media planning, to the actual ad serving. The company also works directly with content publishers to create an ad-funded catalog. Co-CEO Offer Yehudai explained to me that it was this end-to-end solution that was key in having ICQ select its solution over alternatives. Under the terms of the deal, both innerActive and ICQ can sell ad space and there’s a flexible rev-share model to support such an arrangement.

The content requires a certain amount of prep work in order to be “innerActive ready”. An SDK is available to publishers, allowing them to tag areas inside their content for ad injection (view the video embedded below to see a typical end result—billboards in a game with real, clickable ads). The SDK supports all mobile OS’s and does not require any porting—”hundreds of handsets” are supported. Ads can be configured for click-to-WAP, calling, coupons, polling and the download of content

ICQ will make all this free content available to its community from its mobile client, from a soon to be launched ‘ICQ Mobile Portal’, and through the desktop application. The latter will require the entering of a mobile number and then receiving a free SMS with a link to download the content. No client will be required to be installed on the handset.

All-in-all this sounds like good news for ICQ’s users. The big question of course is whether offering ad-supported mobile content is a financially viable model. I guess we’ll find out soon enough because if innerActive can deliver CTR’s of up to 15% (as they claim), advertisers will be knocking on their door in droves and users will benefit from a growing selection of free content.

Straight out of the “why didn’t they think about this before” department, comes VidPay whose entire premise can be summed up in a single sentence: A white label platform for sponsored video campaigns. There must be more, right? Wrong. VidPay is as dead simple to use as it is to comprehend. One more thing… It started generating revenue from minute one. What more could you ask for in a startup?To appreciate my gushing enthusiasm over VidPay you must understand that one of the occupational hazards of writing for TechCrunch requires the deciphering of what startups actually do. Increasingly rare are startups like VidPay that offer straightforward value for its customers and have a CEO that knows how to intelligently communicate what the product actually does without overselling it or using tiring hyperbole. So let’s dive in:

The problem VidPay set out to solve is allowing small/mid-sized advertisers to promote their videos on sites such as Metacafe, Dailymotion and Vimeo. These sites usually don’t have dedicated sales teams to support such advertisers because they focus on larger, more budget-laden campaigns.

MetaCafe is VidPay’s pilot customer and through this partnership alone VidPay is serving ~50M sponsored video impressions per day, or ~1.4 billion per month. Current click-through rates are between 0.1% and 1%, depending on how many video ads are displayed in the sponsored video sections, and whether campaigns are targeted for specific keywords or not.

VidPay’s solution is a self-serve advertising platform for sponsored videos. It is similar in concept to YouTube’s “Promoted Videos” offering, differences being: 1) It allows campaigns to be built for multiple publishers (video sites), and 2) Its interface can be integrated right within the publisher site. The second point is important because it means that any video site can integrate a fully branded self-serve sponsored ad platform with zero investment, and begin reaping revenue it was previously unable to bring in.

For video sites, integrating VidPay functionality is a two step process. First, the video publishing site needs to send VidPay information such as visitor IP addresses, the category being visited, current item tags and the maximum number of sponsored videos to display. Second, the publisher site needs to receive a list of sponsored videos from VidPay and then display them of course. Completing these two steps should take no more than a few hours. Integrating the interface is optional and would require the use of an iFrame.

On each page view, the publisher site sends an HTTP request for sponsored videos to be displayed in pre-defined locations. VidPay returns the best-matching sponsored videos to display by taking into consideration the maximum cost-per-click, click-through rate and targeting parameters such as geo-location and language. The sponsored videos are all located within the publisher’s inventory so all traffic remains under its umbrella. Advertisers can choose the videos they want to promote manually, search for them through VidPay’s interface, or upload them to the publisher site right from the VidPay interface.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

If there is one feature on Facebook which delivers “social utility” magic even to the most average of users, it’s Photos. In fact the feature is so popular that by Facebook’s own account 1 billion photos are uploaded every month—a staggering number that makes it the largest photo site on the Web. However, as with all good things, there are also drawbacks, and in this case discovery is high on the list. While Facebook makes it super easy to discover photos in which you were tagged, there is no chance that every one of those billion photos are tagged each month. And that leaves a big opportunity.

Let me put it another way: How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends.

Once installed, the app will begin scanning you and your friends’ photo albums, a process that requires a bit of time to complete, but the welcome screen will immediately display photos that were ‘Auto Tagged’. Users can either accept, decline or identify the correct individual themselves. The only users that have veto power to alter or decline a tag are the person who uploaded the photo and the person tagged.

Facial recognition technology is taking off. Competing technology can be found in both Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, but those are limited to searching only your personal collection of photos (although iPhoto lets you upload them with the tags to Facebook). With Photo Finder, you are not limited to your own photo collection. Users can search manually for photos of friends or browse for recently tagged ones. Users can also track specific users by flagging them for the “Watch List”. Photo Finder will prompt hits via Facebook’s ‘Notification’ window.

The facial recognition technology was developed from scratch by the Face.com team over a year and half. It was designed from the ground up as a low-cost platform to meet two specific requirements: The first is recognition of “Faces in the Wild”. This applies to everyday photos that suffer from such issues as low resolution or bad lighting, or where faces are obscured with sunglasses, for example. The second requirement is to have the technology be scalable. In this respect Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines.

Photo Finder scans the photos of users and all their friends, along with “other albums in your wider network where there’s a high likelihood of your (or friends’) appearances.” To understand the sheer volume of backend work required, consider the following statistics: The first 150 users in Face.com’s system required 20 million photos to be scanned, resulting in 30,000 identified faces. My personal installation of the app required it to scan 79,449 photos which resulted in 11,933 tags of myself and my friends. Photo Finder will then go back and re-scan the albums after its initial scan to identify newly added photos.

The social tagging feature within Facebook Photos gives Face.com a major boost because it can use those tags to train its system. It is important to note that Photo Finder does not add or alter Facebook’s own photo tags. Tagging that occurs through the app is stored in metadata accessible through the Photo Finder app alone. Also noteworthy is the fact that from a privacy perspective Photo Finder piggy-backs on the users’ Facebook settings and does not alter them in any way. Also, none of the photos are stored on Face.com’s servers. These only perform the heavy lifting required for the facial recognition and the storing of tags added through the app.

Even though this is an Alpha version of the app and there are occasional bugs, it works remarkably well. I was quite surprised that it was able to correctly identify individuals in side shots, backgrounds, or in extremely poorly lit photos. It all depends on the amount of photos available, but as a rule of thumb the Face.com team aims for 90% accuracy. It seems that they have some real technology on their hands as evidenced by their scoring first place in the “Labeled Faces in the Wild” experiment conducted by the University of Massachusetts’ Computer Vision Laboratory (Face.com are identified as ‘Hybrid descriptor-based’ in the linked paper).

It’s clear that Photo Finder was designed for mainstream viral appeal and I must admit that I found the app to be VERY addictive, spending at least ten minutes tagging people every time I played with the app over the course of the past two weeks. I have a hunch that once made publicly available the app is going to be incredibly popular on Facebook.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.