The Kamla Bhatt Show: Riya's Munjal Shah on Visual Search

12:56 | Kamla Bhatt | Sep 28th, 2006 2:17pm |

Silicon Valley-based Riya created quite a wave when it launched its Web 2.0 site in March 2006. Riya became an instant hit with users for its technology, which is based on facial and textual recognition. But that’s not how it started.

Within the first 10 weeks of its launch, about 10 million photos were uploaded to Riya’s site. In spite of its initial success, Riya’s CEO Munjal Shah and his team realized that they had to reassess their business model.

In this intervie, Munjal, previously the CEO and Co-Founder of auction management service Andale, talks about his new company and how it has changed since then. Most significantly, since many of their users were using Riya to search photos from the very beginning, they adapted the site to visual search. Says Munjal, “We followed what was working.”

The company plans to launch their search tool by Thanksgiving and tap into the Christmas shopping season. So watch out for Riya’s new tool.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Enterprise 2.0, India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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