In 2005, Google almost acquired Riya.com, a consumer-oriented image recognition company. Riya had the ability to recognize clothes, watches, earrings, etc. from an image and show you similar items through online retail channels. Google decided to walk away from Riya. Riya re-emerged as a company called Like.com shortly after.

Like.com has some of the most interesting photo recognition technology embedded within their portfolio of websites.  One of Like.com’s most recent creations is Couturious.com.  Couturious allows you to pick a model from a variety of races and body types.  After that you can decorate the model with boots, lingerie, dresses, shirts, etc.  This way consumers can learn how an outfit would look on them without having to physically change.  Like.com launched in 2006 and raised $32 million in funding.  The company is currently valuated at about $100 million and is run by Like.com CEO and founder Munjal Shah. [TechCrunch]

Riya.com is a facial recognition service that was able to find similar images around the web.  Riya founder Munjal Shah wrote an e-mail to their users this morning saying that they are shutting down the service on August 21st.

The service launched about four years ago and almost sold themselves to Google but the deal fell through.  After the deal did not clear, Shah and his team decided to focus on a new service called Like.com.  Like.com can detect accessories that people are wearing and find similar accessories (if not the same) for sale across the web.

Below is the full e-mail that was sent out.

[via TechCrunch]