Viewdle, a video search engine, launched recently, and won the 2008 LeWeb Gold prize . It’s very similar to a technology that casinos have had for years. In previous times they’d look up your face in the five-volume Griffin GOLD book, a litany of cheats. Machine vision has surpassed the book, by far.

I’ve long been fascinated by casino security. Only the military and casinos have access to massive budgets used to track, identify, and secure locations. While other corporations may have similar budgets they lack the zeal of the casinos and their lust for security technologies.

This application is essentially video facial recognition, combined with crowd sourced tagging. The casinos did this, but shared data between themselves across the Internet. Viewdle opens up this possibility to the public.

A nice flowchart of their process is here…

They appear to have close ties with Reuters, and Reuters is using Viewdle for theironline people search.