I was a fan of IQ Engines work. They had some class researchers from UC Berkeley working on their team. However, I always felt that theirs was a solution in search of a problem. Looks like that killed their venture. That said, Yahoo has acquired some legit team that was working on some hard problems of image recognition and CV.
Also a big fan of IQ Engines. They have a very smart team. Only alternative I know of @ the moment w/ something similar along the lines of an API is Rekognition @ http://rekognition.com
Please don't kill O-Moby yahoo!!! It is the coolest thing that I show young people to aspire them.
We were working on a product that used their SmartCamera product, seems like we will not be able to do that anymore. Their huge database and human recognition for worst case scenario were great. Does anyone know any good alternatives?
This is relatively off topic. I found a bug in the Yahoo auth system tonight. I tried calling customer support three times to explain it to them but they all literally hung up on me. In case any of you are Yahoo devs, let me know and I can explain it. This (as far as I know) is not a security hole; it's just a way to easily get customers permanently locked out of their accounts (which happened to me tonight)