Riya and Google - from the inside

Many commentators have picked up on the hidden story in the Neven Vision acquisition - that this rather closes the door on a Google / Riya hookup.

Munjal, the Riya CEO, has responded to the questions with a second blog post.  He states that he is under NDA, so can't say all he wants to (but will be checking as to when this expires, so that he can tell all then).

In the meantime, he gives a timeline of

a) In Nov'05 you heard a lot of rumors about Google and Riya
b) In January'06 you heard me say that we are still an independent company
c) In January'06 you heard Riya announce it just raised a large series B financing of $15.5M - large rounds are usually pre-cursors to fund large new bold (and risky) strategies.
d) In March'06 Riya launches Riya 1.0
e) In May'06 Riya launches an expansion of it's vision to Riya 2.0 Visual search for the web = bold big strategies
f) In Aug'06 you hear about Google buying Neven Vision to deliver Riya 1.0 functionality to Picasa

He then goes on to discuss what this means to Riya going forward.  He makes 3 points

1. Google is often not the best of breed solution outside of its core search competancy
2. Adding face recognition to Picasa adds a feature that Riya have now all but abandoned anyway
3. Now that Google is openly in competition with Riya, the partnership potential at Riya with other firms is looking increasingly rosy.

It's a positive message, but I think he may be missing the point.  I don't think that Google bought Neven Vision just to allow Picasa to catch up with Riya 1.0 (client side face recognition, with upload ability).

I think it more than likely that Google will be introducing "machine vision" (not just face recognition) driven features across far more of their services than this.  This puts them squarely in competition with the refocused Riya 2.0 - which is now positioning itself to be a visual search engine, based on similarity of images.  With the expansion of the Picasa brand into web galleries at Picasa Web Albums, images are just as likely to be subject to machine vision on the server as they are on the client.

In addition, Neven Vision has a strong presence in the mobile phone market (and the patent portfolio to back it up), and Google is increasingly making strong moves in the mobile data market.