PolarRose beta - Discover people in your browser

By Vivek | August 3rd, 2007 at 12:48 pm ET         

After months of development, testing, waiting(on our part) PolarRose has finally started opening up it’s private beta to external users. Playing around with app for the past few mins, I think it is bound to get good deal of traction with the users.

The way PolarRose works is that the user have to install a Firefox extension to get started. Once that is in place, a Polar Rose icon shows up in the bottom right of your browser. From there on whenever you are viewing a photo with face in it, couple of things can happen - 

First - the icon lights up and on-mouse-over places a rose approximately where the pinhole of their shirt would be. A click on the rose will show the plugin overlay with relevant information, including name and other photos found of the same person. If PolarRose doesn’t yet know the person, you can help the app, which is the Second option - Tag the person - and make him/her discoverable.

Since the Firefox extension asks you to authenticate yourself before you start using it, all the faces you discover+tag or search+add get saved to your personal account. If you just want to do pure search of faces by names, sure go for it from the PolarRose clean Google like search engine(snapshot below).

All in all, a perfect people made people search engine in making. According to current stats 614 explorers have discovered 1,942,986 photos, containing a total of 967,880 people, of which 11,166 have been named. Okay the last number might sound real low, but hey, they are just getting started.

Later this year, PolarRose will also be launching it’s royalty-free APIs, which will allow for partners to integrate the Polar Rose functionality into existing sites.

Polar Rose had raised $5.1 million in venture funding from Nordic Venture Partners (Copenhagen)  last year.

Links:
PolarRose