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8/2/10
Milabra's CEO Sam Cox on "Crossing the Content Gap With Visual Data" from Adotas.com
"As an industry we’ve focus most of our targeting efforts on creating media and audience opportunities through contextual and behavior data. But now there’s a new variable — visual data, which can be added to your contextual and behavioral programs to increase audience engagement. Visual data is the next key tool to help networks and exchanges get improved return for their customer's ad dollars."
View the article here
7/21/10
Ads that Match a Web Page's Images
Using the contents of images or videos to target Web ads could
improve click-through.
By Tom Simonite
Web ads help subsidize free content and services, and have made Google into the behemoth it is today. But the software used to tailor them to a user's interests can only do this by analyzing the words on a webpage.
Qiang Yang at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology wants to change that. He has developed software able to select contextual ads based on the contents of images or videos on a page. Yang and colleagues from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China presented their work at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Atlanta last week.
Many fast-growing parts of the Web, such as Facebook or Google's Picasa, are populated with user-generated images. They could become a rich advertising opportunity with the right technology, says Yang. "Many photos in online photo albums and video scenes do not have texts to describe them," he says. "People browsing through their own or others' online photo albums are a potential audience for adverts." Today, he says, it's impossible to reach people where there is no surrounding text.
To match an advertisement to an image, the group's software first converts the image to a collection of words. The software was trained to do this by crawling around 60,000 images on Flickr that have tags added by users.
Any new image can then be roughly summarized with a few words, and a second algorithm uses those words to select an ad to display. In trials of the technique, ads were matched to more than 300,000 images found through Microsoft's MSN search engine (prior to its rebranding as Bing) using popular search terms. The results were good, says Yang. For example, a photo of a tree frog caused ads to be selected for pet supplies. One of a boat and a beach called up ads for sailing holidays and boat shoes.
The approach is an example of a machine-learning technique dubbed "transfer learning," says Yang. "Transfer learning tries to learn in one space (text) and then apply the learned model to a very different feature space (such as images)," he says. "It aims to imitate human learning when we can apply our learned knowledge in, say, playing chess, to a seemingly different domain such as strategic planning in business."
A panel of volunteers was asked to look at images and the ads chosen to go alongside them and evaluate which ads they considered relevant enough to consider clicking on. "That test shows that we can, on average, produce one correct ad per three suggested ads," says Yang. He believes this is a high enough success rate to suggest the approach could work commercially. When the same users were shown randomly selected ads with images, only one in 50 was deemed relevant enough to be clicked.
Researchers at Microsoft Research Asia previously developed a system that used image analysis to classify photos into a handful of categories in order to refine the text-based selection of advertising. Yang's goal, he says, is to bring contextual advertising to pages with little or no text. This would require software capable of classifying images using a larger vocabulary, like the one he is developing.
The team is currently working to add thesaurus-like capabilities to its system, so it can generate multiple words to describe the same feature in an image, thereby increasing the number of relevant ads that can be found. It is already possible to have the software work on individual video frames. The group is also working on customizing it to work on video footage.
"This approach to contextual advertising is potentially very interesting for advertisers," says Debra Williamson, a senior analyst with the digital marketing and advertising research firm eMarketer. "On the Web today, advertising is built around the text on a page, even when the media at the center of people's attention is imagery or video."
If the technology is reliable enough, applying it to video would likely have more potential than for still images, says Williamson. For a long video, she says, "a short description can't represent everything in the footage. If you can scan what's in the video, you could choose adverts to display minute by minute based on what appears."
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
More information here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/25833/page1/
6/14/10
Milabra Wins AlwaysOn East Top 100 Honors
New York, NY - June 14, 2010 - Milabra has been named to the annual AlwaysOn East Top 100 private companies list, selected from hundreds of Nominees, Milabra is one of twenty one winners in the Digital Media category.
From their site: "The AOE100 represent the top emerging companies from the East Coast that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.
The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at the Blackstone Group, KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank, Sonnenschein, and industry experts across the globe, scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of doing things and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value-creation opportunities.
"After examining the companies that are on the AOE100 list, it's obvious that innovation is not only alive and well on the East Coast, it's accelerating in economic power and scope." says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. "The companies certainly represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the private company marketplace."
The winners of this competition will be officially honored at:
Venture Summit East 2010
June 21st-23rd, 2010
Harvard Business School
Boston, MA
Read more here:
http://www.aonetwork.com/AOStory/Introducing-AlwaysOn-East-Top-100-Companies-0
Milabra brings efficiency to the online ad marketplace by increasing the amount of high-quality, premium inventory available for purchase across the internet. Milabra uses their Visual Intelligence Platform to take non-premium inventory and analyze the visual content. This allows MIlabra to append this non-premium inventory with targeting data based on visual characteristics of the page and opens up a whole new source of premium inventory for advertisers. The Milabra Visual Intelligence Platform operates at the exchange level and allows advertisers to leverage this visual targeting capability in a real time bidding environment.
View the article: here
4/27/10
PerformLine Partners with Milabra to add Visual Recognition Capabilities to Campaign Verification Platform
"PerformLine is able to provide ad verification by monitoring and scoring images to offer additional brand safety and compliance monitoring for our clients," said Alex Baydin, CEO of PerformLine. "This partnership with Milabra is consistent with our commitment to offer our clients the broadest reaching verification platform so they can have the highest level of transparency available."
View the article: here
4/14/10
Milabra's CEO Sam Cox on Optimizing AD Targeting and Improving Brand Safety at AdExchanger.com
"Milabra's technology can see the image content, image quality, page layout and design and pass that data back to the ad server for decisioning in real-time. As a result, demand-side players have more safe impressions available to them and have visual data to optimize their buys. "
View the article: here
11/11/09
NVIDIA Tesla Helps Milabra Monetize User-Generated Content
"We're like AdSense for images," says Milabra CEO Sam Cox, who met recently for a video chat with NVIDIA VP of Business Development Jeff Herbst to talk about Milabra's technology (scroll to the bottom of the hyperlinked web page for the video link). The key is to get around what Cox calls "banner blindness" by making online ads more effective and enable publishers to monetize visual content.
View the article: here
10/26/09
Milabra chosen as one of the NVIDIA Names Top Five Companies From Emerging Companies Summit 2009
"SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - October 26, 2009) - Five of the 60 start-ups that participated in NVIDIA's recent Emerging Companies Summit (ECS) -- which brought together entrepreneurs with those who fund their ventures -- were today awarded the title "Ones To Watch" for their exceptional promise, by a three-member panel.
The companies that received the awards, which were based on technology value utilizing the graphics processing unit (GPU), market opportunity and potential impact include:
Milabra, of New York City, uses a multi-point visual recognition platform to target advertising based on visual content instead of text.
View the article: here
10/21/09
NY Video Meetup at NYU
Milabra demonstrates it's technology for the New York Video Meetup at NYU
10/1/09
NVIDIA Emerging Companies Summit
Milabra mentioned in insideHPC.com about the Nvidia Emerging Companies Summit.
View the article: here
8/15/09
"People need to stop thinking about the photos as images and look at them as digital bits of information, where pixels in the frame actually mean something."
From http://mediapost.com
"People need to stop thinking about the photos as images and look at them as digital bits of information, where pixels in the frame actually mean something. It turns out that consumers rely on images in search engine result pages more than Google and Microsoft execs thought. R.J. Pittman, director of product management for global search properties at Google, says people need to stop thinking about the photos as images and look at them as digital bits of information, where pixels in the frame actually mean something."
Read the story here
5/12/09
AlwaysOn picked Milabra as an East Top 100 Company
Milabra was selected to the East Top 100 Company in the cloud computing category. The list singles out "a new generation of game-changing players to the high-growth marketplace east of the Mississippi." The criteria evaluated include innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value creation and media buzz.
Read the story here
2/06/09
EContent says "Milabra's engine automatically "reads" actual images."
"Milabra's engine can learn to recognize any class of images, works with different kinds of image content including photos and video, and is delivered as a suite of web services."
Read the story here
2/05/09
Beet.tv interviews Milabra CEO Sam Cox
"A new start-up, Milabra, which launched and announced $1.4 million in funding on Monday, has some of the most interesting technology we've heard about."
Read the story here
View the video:
2/03/09
Milabra reads and labels image content for online media companies
Milabra launched a web-based image and video-recognition engine for online media companies today at OnMedia NYC and announced a $1.4 million financing round from private investors.
Read the story here
2/02/09
Milabra: B2B Image Recognition Service Learns To Find Anthing From "Puppies To Porn"
"Rather than trying to identify photos based on their similarity to a template image (for example, using a portrait of the Mona Lisa to find identical matches or slightly modified versions of the famous painting), Milabra can "learn" to recognize certain scenes or objects without having to refer to a source image."
Read the story here
2/02/09
Think Innovation
Tell a CEO like Milabra's Sam Cox that New York's job market is totally dead, and you might just get an argument.
"We live in a time of innovation," says Cox, whose company recenty won venture funding and is looking to add a few brilliant minds.
Read the story here
1/27/09
International Data Corp.'s new "watchlist" profile on Milabra
IDC analysts Susan Feldman and Ryan Patterson profile Milabra in a new IDC WatchList report, stating "Milabra's technology solves the problem of monetizing visual content (not text) by classifying it automatically.... monetizing image content could generate millions or possibly billions of dollars."
Download the entire report here.
1/22/09
Milabra was selected to the 2009 OnMedia 100 list!
Milabra was selected to the 2009 OnMedia 100 list of top private media companies and will be a featured company and presenter at OnMedia NYC February 2nd-4th!
More on the OnMedia 100
http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/30893
More on the OnMedia NYC 2009
http://alwayson.goingon.com/ecom/productview/20968
11/15/08
Milabra was nominated today for the OnMedia Top 100 companies of 2008
Milabra was nominated today for the OnMedia Top 100 companies of 2008, presented by AlwaysOn in the category of technology enablers, with the official announcement of the winners to come on January 22nd, 2009. The OnMedia Top 100 is a prestigious list to be nominated for, as it is a list that requires nomination by industry peers, and is evaluated by a group of judges who come from Venture Capital, Technology, and the press. The OnMedia event will be hosted this year from February 2nd through the 4th at the Ritz Carleton in Downtown New York City.
OnMedia: OnMedia NYC is where cutting-edge technology CEOs from the back streets of Silicon Valley meet the global advertising and media establishment. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries. At OnMedia, our editors will also honor the OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies. Fifty of the top CEOs from the OnMedia 100 will pitch their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our "CEO Showcase."
Who Attends: Seven hundred technology, media and advertising CEOs, business development officers, media buyers, venture-capital and private-equity investors, and leading members of the press and blogging community will attend OnMedia. Over 20,000 webcast viewers from over 100 countries will also tune in and interact with the program. Executives attend OnMedia to identify and debate emerging trends, build high-level relationships and create new business opportunities.
For more on the OnMedia Top 100 please link to:
http://onmedia.goingon.com/permalink/post/29751
For more on OnMedia, presented by AlwaysOn, please link to:
8/12/08
Platrium and Online Chaperone Partner to Help Protect Consumers From Online Threats
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS156081+12-Aug-2008+MW20080812
BELLEVUE, WA and NEW YORK, NY, Aug 12 (MARKET WIRE)
Platrium (http://www.platrium.com) and the Platrium Playbar -- a toolbar giving consumers a break -- now helps keep the Internet safe from online predators and offensive content thanks to a partnership announced today with Online Chaperone (http://www.onlinechaperone.com). Online Chaperone, powered by Milabra (http://www.milabra.com) technology, is a unique safety tool that uses cutting edge research to automatically protect Internet consumers and children.
"Platrium is all about taking a break from everyday cares and concerns," said Neal Freeland, vice president of online marketing, Platrium. "But you can only do this if you know you and your children are protected from the constant threat of online predators and offensive content. Platrium, now with Online Chaperone, gives people peace of mind so they can enjoy the Web and not worry."
Online Chaperone, which is an optional component of the Platrium Playbar experience, has been developed by a team of neuroscientists and software engineers working in conjunction with former members of the FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Trained using real chat logs from confirmed online predators, it uses enhanced artificial intelligence to detect suspicious or offensive chat and instant messenger conversations, and limits access to offensive sites or content. Furthermore, it can automatically alert parents when concerning activities occur.
"Platrium is a perfect fit for Online Chaperone," said Sam Cox, COO of Milabra. "People want to have fun and relax online, but they need to first feel protected and safe. Online Chaperone gives people a break from Internet threats so they can take a break with Platrium. The two offerings work well together."
To learn more about Platrium and the Online Chaperone offering, visit http://hosted.platrium.com/lp/onlinechaperone/en/download.htm.
About Platrium
Giving consumers a break, Platrium and its online casual games -- the first of many content-specific channels -- entertains and enables you to take a few minutes for yourself and ignore the busy world. For more information, visit http://www.platrium.com.
About Online Chaperone
Online Chaperone (www.onlinechaperone.com) is a unique parental control software that is powered by Milabra's advanced neural networking technology. It was developed using real chat logs from real online sexual predators to make sure that the protection that it offers parents and children is real and not simply a keyword filter.
Online Chaperone is a product and service of Milabra (www.milabra.com). Milabra provides software that learns to find patterns in words and pictures as they occur in human communications and behavior. The Milabra team is comprised of researchers and software developers with backgrounds from MIT, Columbia University, and The Software and Systems Consortium. The company works in conjunction with former members of the FBI and U.S. Congress.
Milabra News

8/02/10
Mailabra's CEO on "Crossing the Content Gap With Visual Data" from Adotas.com
read more
7/21/10
Ads that Match a Web Page's Images.
Using the contents of images or videos to target Web ads could improve click-through.
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