Eyealike, a startup in the image recognition and video search area (http://www.eyealike.com/) has several products that could help those looking to find a date based on similarity of looks, manage digital copyrights on CGM sites, as well as serving up ads based on the image on an add.
The ad technology, which was announced today (http://www.eyealike.com/news.php?spgId=pr_13102008), could help match ads with images or videos on a site ... if I have a picture of my cat on a site, the technology may decide to serve up furball removers or other relevant ads for felines.
This is a pretty cool technology; I'm most interested in the ability of the software to recognize trademarks, and other non-facial images. In addition, I'd be interested to learn if their Eyealike™ Copyright product could also be leveraged to detect duplicate videos posted on CGM sites (how many times do we need to see the same corporate spoof video ... do a youtube search on any popular ad campaign to retreive a flood of duplicate videos). While this it is important to know about these videos, media monitoring apps don't really need 20 copies of the same video in their database, just a link to one video, with metadata telling how many times it was posted on the web.
As I've noted in earlier posts, video/image search is a good opportunity for startups ... Google doesn't really do it that well (yet).