Riya in Healthcare

Recently, I read about a photo search startup Riya.com (See, The Birth of Riya.com at Peter Rip's Blog). It is an interesting startup and more interesting is the marketing strategy they adopted - a good case study how web logs can be leveraged in promoting a company, product or service. And I guess by writing this entry, I became another cog in their wheel.

My interest in learning more about development with Riya's technology is little different. Usually, when, I read about new products and services being launched focusing on web, I try to explore how they can be extended in to enterprise or incorporated in to vertical industry applications.

Reading about Riya actually crystallized a thought, I had during flickr acquisition by Yahoo!. I have been reading several blogs and comments about how Riya can be used for face recognition/comparison and for security purposes.

But I see some potential for such technology in healthcare industry. Over the weekend, I refined these thoughts and the specific problems it may address. I was going to write a blog entry describing these ideas. But as a fact-checking before writing, I decided to take these ideas to a trusted source at an healthcare client. During the discussions, we came up with few more potential applications. And in the process ironically I landed up with a request not to publish further details. Hopefully, at a future date I can share them with the world. :-(