Lyons said the Internet is ripe for an alternative to the banner ad, which he dismissed as less effective than direct snail mail and cluttered with too much message that makes it too hard to buy. Ideally, that new money would come from a U.S.-based venture firm and from media companies that control valuable proprietary picture content. Calif. Its founder was an Army brat who collected a political science degree from Utah State University, an MBA from Boston University and the rank of captain from the Army, where he learned applications development. Then Ditto uses image recognition software to sort out its catch. It distinguishes between black and white and color images, between illustrations and photographs, people and things, and it weeds out pornography, banner ads and other detritus.
People are the hardest ones in terms of getting it right.
Smut still is the Internet's most successful business. All told, the image recognition filter rejects 96 percent of the 60 million or so images initially gathered, leaving a cache of about 2.5 million pictures. Next, software reads the text surrounding photos and ranks them for relevance. For instance, Sammy Sosa in the heading of a picture caption would give it a higher relevance ranking than the slugger's name buried in the body of the caption. The key is lower numbers and higher relevancy.