Using Photos to Search the Web

By Mark Halper

It's easy to tell what inspires Jan Erik Solem. "I had a couple of years where I was really obsessed with polar explorers -- there are so many great stories," says the founder of Polar Rose. He's no longer plowing through books on legendary adventurers, but he's still full of admiration for guys like Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and his fellow Norwegians Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen because, as Solem notes, "they were also inventors and entrepreneurs."

Solem, 31, whose company makes software that allows Web users to click on a photo to search for other photos, is certainly an inventor. He developed a technique in 2004 that turns photographs into 3-D images. Now he's trying entrepreneurship. His algorithmic wizardry for deciphering visual information digitally became the foundation for Polar Rose.

Web users today lack visual-based image-search tools. Photo searches generally require entering a keyword for a subject and deliver plenty of irrelevant results. Polar Rose lets users click on a picture to link to more pictures of the same subject. In the process, it also builds an index of text and visual information that creates better results for the next search. The company is giving the software away as a plug-in to the Firefox Web browser and expects to be in the Internet Explorer browser soon. It hopes that the giveaway will seed a business model in which advertisers deliver ads on the basis of image requests. "There's the possibility of delivering relevant ads around something like a picture of a beach or a picture with a horse in it," says Nikolaj Nyholm, 32, a Dane who took over the CEO position from Solem (who remains CTO).

Solem originally targeted security companies for uses like spotting suspects in a crowd but now says, "It's a very slow business. Just the switch from analog to digital cameras will take them another 10 years." So Nyholm refocused the company on Web searches and changed its name from Ground Truth Vision. Polar Rose describes a mathematical diagram and echoes Solem's fascination with explorers. "It was a pretty easy sell for me," Solem says. The company now hopes to be an easy sell to advertisers, lest, like Nansen and Shackleton, it's left stranded in the cold.