I've decided to start a podcast series that I'm calling 10 Questions. I plan on talking to folks (usually entrepreneurs) who are doing interesting things with the consumer web.

The first in this series is an interview with Riya evangelist Tara Hunt, who was very gracious to take time out of her busy schedule to chat. Riya has some very impressive technology that allows you to train it to recognize faces by associating a name with a face in a photo. When you upload new photos, it then recognizes the faces you've trained, and it does this quite well (I've been using the alpha since it launched).

In fact, it works so well that there have been rumors about Google acquiring Riya for $40-60M, and this is before Riya has launched to the public.

So, in the podcast, Tara and I cover:

• What Riya is, and why it's different,
• How Tara has done such a tremendous job generating awareness about Riya,
• What has informed her marketing philosophy,
• What Riya's business model is (Google rumors aside)
• How Riya assuages some of the privacy implications of its photo recognition technology,
• What kind of personality Riya has, and
• What might be down the road for Riya.

You can listen to the podcast here, and you can subscribe to the 10 Questions podcast feed here.

I'm new to the podcasting game, so all comments, criticism, and suggestions are appreciated--please leave 'em in the comments or email me-- kareem - at - reemer . com.

(Apologies for the echo; I need to figure out if there's a better solution than Skype and Pamela. If you know of one, please comment and let me know--thanks!)

Related Posts

• Web 2.0 Conference Teaser Podcast