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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> spike [mailto:spike@rainier66.com] <br><b>Subject:</b> old video<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>>…</span> It is too bad I have no known way of identifying any of the women in those old videos, or any way to collect old beach video in some central location to invite people who might have been strutting beaches in the early 60s to come in and try to find themselves and their friends. That might be a hoot.<span style='color:#1F497D'> </span>spike<span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Oh my, I am getting that tingly feeling I often get when an idea comes along and I know someone somewhere is going to make a toooonnnnnn of money if they are the first one to work it out. I got that feeling in 1993 when I heard someone describe this new thing that was coming, the World Wide Web. I had it again when I heard of PayPal. Here’s what is giving me the tingly feeling:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Imagine a website where anyone could submit photos of themselves from any particular year, say 1964 and 1971 for instance. The state of the art in digital image recognition is either already there or will soon be to the point where it could search digital video files looking for a particular person from their still photograph. Image recognition hipsters, do help me here. So if we had an old video archive where anyone could submit their still photos and have the software dig around looking in the crowd scenes in the archived video, we might be able to pick up some hits. We could email back a tantalizing description to the prole: “We found about 17 seconds of video of you walking on the beach in a yellow polka dot bikini in 1963, and oh my what a young beauty. Three stills from that file enclosed. We will send you the entire digital file, 344 frames, only $3.99, such a deal. PS the staff loves your walk.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>We could even collect old film video from devices often no longer serviceable, in exchange for returning a complete digital file. That’s what we have: the old film is in remarkably good shape, but the projector is worn out, the nylon cogs are worn and irreplaceable, and it is hard to find the old bulbs and so on. The projector still works but not well.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>So the challenge is to write software which can somehow take a still image and find that person in a digitized old home movie scene. Hipsters how close are we to that?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Oh my, just thinking of the potential profit makes my butt hurt.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal> <span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>