Information overload? Tech firms want to help

Another DEMO presenter, Kaboodle, also is aiming to make online searching a social activity — but with a focus on shopping. It's currently available as a free public test.

"The trouble with online shopping today is there are too many choices," said Manish Chandra, Kaboodle's founder and CEO. "You have to visit multiple sites before you make any decision. It's hard to get all that information in one place."

By clicking a button on a Web browser's toolbar, a user can add a page of interest to Kaboodle. On e-commerce sites, Kaboodle grabs the price, a picture and description of an item and stores it on the user's Kaboodle page.

If the creator makes the pages publicly available, they can be found by others either through Kaboodle's search box or other search engines. Users also can post notes and comments to their Kaboodle pages.

"Kaboodle.com is a great example of people-powered search, allowing the work of one to be leveraged for the benefits of others," Shipley said.

Another company at DEMO, Riya, is trying to tackle two headaches: the difficulty of sharing information and the fact that photos can't be searched very easily unless they've been properly tagged with text descriptions.

The free service, which is expected to open for public testing this month, relies on face and text recognition to look inside the photo. It keeps a copy on its servers, which the user and others can search by typing in a name of someone in a picture.

"There are a lot of online services for printing, sharing and organizing your photos but not one that automatically searches them," said Riya co-founder Manjul Shah.

After users upload their pictures, the system scans the images for faces. Those that aren't identified — likely all of them at first — are displayed. The user can then manually identify a person by clicking a box that appears around the mug and entering the name.

It also can scour a user's address books for contacts who have used Riya to identify faces. If any are found, their previous work in training the system to recognize faces is automatically inherited by the new user.

During a demonstration of Riya's search capability, Shah typed in his son's name and the system returned hundreds of hits, with very few mistakes. In one case, it found the boy's face even though it was in a picture hanging in the background of a photo.

From the brief presentation at DEMO, it's impossible to tell how well Riya will perform in the real world, or how it might compare to other face-recognition technology used by some police departments and government agencies with mixed results.

Shah admits there's room for improvement.

"Riya is but a 2-year-old child in terms of its recognition ability," he said, "but it is ready for you to try it."

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