Celebrity-backed Israeli start-up to launch visual search engine that gleans social media

Leonardo DiCaprio, Serena Williams, Lance Armstrong, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim among investors in Mobli Media

TEL AVIV: Israeli start-up Mobli Media Inc will be competing with Internet giants Google, Facebook and Yahoo with an online search tool that looks for pictures and video footage in real time across various social media, the company announced on Monday.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Serena Williams, Lance Armstrong and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim are some of the big names who have contributed to the company’s $90m funding.

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The location-based search would include images and video clips taken by people at concerts, sports events, demonstrations or natural disasters and then posted on social networks.

"We want to be the Google of crowd-generated visual content," Mobli Chief Executive Moshe Hogeg said in an interview.

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"Computers are very stupid, we need to give them very specific algorithms to detect what is the center of the event," he added.

Platform options

The company's EyeIn service is available as a search website, a downloadable mobile app or as an add-on for publishers to install within their own websites to complement text and other information. Partners for the add-on include AOL Inc's Huffington Post.

Mobli expects to share revenue with publishers from advertising as well as earn money from ads on its own site.

The company started as a photo-sharing rival to Instagram and attracted 20 million users. That was the stepping stone to building the search engine over a three-year period, with Hogeg recruiting experts in computer vision and natural language processing from the defense industry.

Hogeg said the biggest challenge was the relevancy of the results and how EyeIn determines which of the plethora of available photos are interesting.

Weighting what is important based on the location of an event is crucial to finding relevant photos, he said.

"If you want to see photos from the NBA (basketball) finals, you will probably like to see photos of players and less of the crowd," Hogeg said.

EyeIn can scan a story on a news website to calculate what the event is about and create an album of photos that will update itself as the event unfolds.

Mobli will partner some of Slim's companies, though Hogeg would not disclose names. Slim, who owns telecoms group America Movil, is the largest shareholder of New York Times Co.

Other investors in Mobli company include Vic Lee, co-founder of Chinese Internet firm Tencent, and Kazakh businessman Kenges Rakishev, who invested $22 million. Other investor stakes were not disclosed.