At first glance, Like.com looks like your ordinary, run of the mill e-commerce site, but the technology behind it has apparently caught Google’s eye.

"Combining the best in Computer Vision and Machine Learning technology with the expertise of designers who have spent decades in the fashion industry, we are solving hard problems unique to buying shoes, apparel, jewelry, accessories and home decor online," Like.com says on its about page. "While hard goods such as books, electronics and DVDs are bought based on reviews, product specs or merchant ratings, soft goods (what we, at Like.com, focus on) are purchased based on everything from the consumer’s personal style and whether the item matches an outfit to current trends and opinions of the fashion elite."

The company says it has developed technology that lets it understand what terms like "red high-heeled pumps" or "floral patterned sleeveless dress" mean, and has created algorithms to understand whether or not items will complement or clash with one another. The company also operates personalized shopping site Covet.com, user-generated fashion site Weardrobe.com, and Couturious.com, which it says "pushes the envelope on Rich Internet Architectures."

"Like.com is fast-growing in both traffic and revenue and very well-funded, and our management team has multiple startups under their belt as well as a track record of success at companies such as Real Networks, Oracle, AOL and Nextag," the company says.

As Arrington points out, Google almost acquired the company back in 2005 when it was called Riya.

I have been thinking about community lately – and how community is involved in PR (and how we have lost our way in community). And the real interesting thing for me here at the TC40 is the community of TechCrunch. We all know that if your client / company is on TechCrunch (the site), you get an immediate bump of 100K+ members / views of the site. You potentially get those people to sign up for your beta preview, or to try out your service (it’s a number game). So, the TechCrunch community (CrunchNotes, MobileCrunch, Crunchgear – and all its readers) is an early adopter community – or one of a lot of MBA students – that is looking for the next cool thing.

But, well, is that community enough? Thinking back to two sites that had a big push on TechCrunch – Riya and IILWY – do you really hear much about either? As a PR person for a start-up, or Web 2.0 company, you really do need to court TechCrunch for that bump, but it is not a long term community. These are not necessarily the people that are going to continue to use your site, but are the first (albeit big) push into community. Look at Riya – they never really moved into the photo community (one I know quite well from Kodak and Ofoto) and that could have kept the company, well, relevant.

The point here, though, is to look at the TC40 companies, and to see what they are doing for the various communities and how they are doing their pitches.

Powerset: an interesting idea – real search via real words – but going up against a powerhouse in Google. Is there an opportunity for a non-niche / non-vertical search engine (there’s a reason I’m bullish on TheFind, SimplyHired, etc – they fill a need that is not fully met) – but not sure about

Cognitive Code: pretty cool AI application that responds to voice commands, and talks back to the human. Think HAL, but not sure if it’s going to kill people. (Just a joke). The demo ran through working with the AI application on the desktop, but talked about CES announcements. Om Malik picked them as a survivor on their own.

CastTV: search for video across the Intenet, up-to-date of the latest videos. Like I noted prior, I like vertical search, and this one aggregates various video sites per term. A supplementing of metadata goes into the search and program. Om thinks they are an acquisition target.

Faroo: P2P search engine. From what I could gather, it’s search powered by a P2P network (like Skype? like the UFO project?) and decentralizes the Internet. I think.

Viewdle: Another video search engine – "it’s in the cut" – that is based on video-on-demand. No more tagging, etc. It’s automatically done with the searching and recognition. So, it’s facial recognition in video, that can aggregate other videos that the person appears in. Om thinks they are an acquisition target.

Cubic Telecom: Roaming for mobile phones, but gets rid of the mobile roaming costs via Max Roam that charges only the local rates for international calls, no matter where you are. Cool idea, but can see the carriers killing it. It’s minute stealing, as noted by Om – and an outside chance that they are going to be around.

Yap: Speech-recognition for the cell phone, that does involve an aspect for vocal search. So, think of text messaging that can be done via speech to the phone – so convert to text your speech (like for Twitter or to friends). Prety cool idea but not sure the viability, or how it can be done with other speech recongition companies.

Ceedo: Mobile virtualization. See all your images, etc from a PC-based program (like Picasa). Or, make edits from your phone on PC-based applications, a full browsing environment on your mobile phone. You can use PC’s as a terminal for your usage, via your mobile phone. First thought is that unless you’re on an iPhone, isn’t the screen too small to really do anything?

Loudtalks: Walkie Talkie for cell phones. It’s a wanna-be Skype. I think. Or, an IM program that is voice / talking. Ryan Block noted that it can just be a plug-in, or maybe as a widget on web pages as push-to-talk.

Trutap: Targeting teens – I love when middle-aged white men target teens (okay, sounds creepy) – in an all-in-one social network that extends all carrier networks, so all your friends are in one community. Mobile-based, only – but with a Web-based aggregating of the information, logs, etc. A sorta Facebook Mobile competitor, with more instant chat capabilities. Om notes them as most likely to be acquired.

Storyblender: Videos together – how to create videos with a bunch of other people. Comes from the creators of Cyworld, so, there is some street cred (and a US-client for disclosure). It’s online video collaboration, where you can add text, information, etc.

Tripit: The goal is to make travel "dead simple" and make the itinerary simple and easy – without all the pages to print. It’s not about booking, but managing your travel information. You email your confirmations to the site, and it aggregates all your information for one travel itinerary – and then does weather, directions, etc for the user. It’s a personal travel assistant online.

Flock: Um, why are they are here? I thought it was a start-up only conference, and Flock can’t be considered an unknown startup. I stopped listening, because it continues to be half-vapor. Ohhh, they are finally in a 1.0 version.

Musicshake: It’s about user generated media, in an easy way that belies any musical skills. You can add different sounds, vocals, guitars, etc to create your own music, as well as record your own voice for vocals. And, you can sell the music if someone finds it on one of the sites, as shared revenue.

8020Publishing: The rebirth of the published magazine, and modern publishing is the best of Web and the best of print to come together. They are the founders of JPG Magazine. Launching the new Everywhere magazine, a group travel magazine.

AOL (special preso): Share multimedia memories in a new way with Bluestring. The way I read it is as online scrapbooking, with the AOL twist. I have a special place in my heart for AOL, so I think I’ll give it a benefit bc they are an amazing community that gets the short shrift online.

Cake Financial: The power of the community to invest. What are your friends investing in, and should you. Also aggregates all your investment information onto one page (if you have multiple accounts at various brokerage houses). Business school guys will go nuts for this, the average consumer would likely not want to get involved in opening their own kimono.

Docstoc: Finding the documents you need quickly and easily. For free. The examples given were sample business plans, presentations, etc. Most likely user: college students looking for papers. Think of it as the online file cabinet from the fraternity house.

Teach The People: Peer to peer collaborative education. Running a learning community that shares in the advertising revenue generated, or charge people for classes. Interesting way to do things – the collaborative nature of education where people share their knowledge (or them smarts) with others.

CrowdSpirit: Crowd sourcing from France, but for products rather than just Websites. It’s all about consumer electronics rather than just Web 2.0 / Websites. Interesting take on crowdsourcing, but going up against the large manufacturers and new economies.

Ponoko: Make your own products, toys, jewelry, etc and have them delivered to your house. You upload the images, etc and you get the final product. So you create it, we build it for you. You can also sell your idea / designs to other people, so they can order the product.

The interesting thing to note from the first day at the event is that many of the companies emphasized the community aspects of their sites. Community has become a comfodified buzzword (like they were all told to emphasize their community aspect), and not sure if they really understood what the community should be. Yes, these companies today are going to get a bump at the conference in users, but at the same time, can they keep that interest for the long-term beyond the bump….

Oh, you can check out the rest of the Flickr photos here.

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These conditions are outlined in a case study presented by former Oracle engineer Deepak Thomas and BlueRun Venture Principal and co-founder of Riya, Vineet Buch.

It would have been fun to see what a fortuneteller might have predicted for the would-be startup back in 2005, to see if there really were some set of magical, esoteric conditions driving it long before the hindsight of 2007 set in, relegating those conditions to mere anomalous synchronicities – or "coincidences," to the less pretentious.

Rather than any of these terms, Thomas and Buch referred to it as a "perfect storm of environmental factors." Among them:

• Cheaper bandwidth giving way to higher broadband penetration, allowing an audience impossible in the years before.
• A state of online video limited by the speed of downloads on file-sharing sites, un-sharable, un-linkable, un-sendable, un-commentable, un-showable. Videos on the Net existed in isolation as files cumbersome to access in more than one place at a time.
• Cheaper production technology: digital video cameras, camera phones, editing software, USB cables.
• Growing numbers of users looking to the Internet for entertainment, rather than information alone.
• Cheaper from the platform side "to store, manage, and serve large repositories of content."

And while all of those things came to being at the same time YouTube came into being, along with some other acts of God like the Southeast Asian tsunami and Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl Nipplegate, there was one other tide rising that would carry YouTube to the promised land of a Google acquisition:

MySpace. Thomas and Buch point out that the without swelling MySpace, YouTube’s video widget allowing social networkers to embed videos on profiles, or without the copious amounts of YouTube links appearing there, it’s hard to say if YouTube would have become as successful as it did. YouTube made video sharing easy, while MySpace provided the place to share the videos.

And while that’s all well and good, the history and conditions of things leading to a startups mega-success, what does it mean to the ambitious of 2007 – eons later in the evolution of the Web – who want to take video to its next level. When is the next perfect storm?

Thomas and Buch have their own ideas, centering on higher video resolution, continually declining bandwidth costs, WiMax, and the transition from the computer to the television.

That prediction is quite technical, and most likely correct. But here’s what I think, from a consumer point of view:

If you want the masses to become as entranced, as zombified as they are now with television, where time spent as well as numbers of viewers matters most, then the next revolution should center on ways to make it even easier to watch online video than it is now. That ease of viewing, besides the great timing of MySpace’s success, was the biggest factor in YouTube’s success.

If you can create a platform that makes it as easy and as seamless to watch online video as it is on television, then you’ve got something. You’ve got tried-and-true monetizable channels of content flowing in a way that is familiar to the bulk of consumers – even the latecomers.

At some point, while search will still be a valuable tool for users, most will grow tired of always having to search for content or having to hear about it through the grapevine or paying attention to tags. They still will do these things, but one-stop, effortless viewing will push whatever this platform is to the next plateau.

And if you ask me, Blinkx is ahead of the game on this one. Though searchable video is the bread and butter, the videos on Blinkx stream from one to the next in succession. And that’s nice. In a few years, we’ll look back at it and think how rudimentary a platform like that was, because there is farther (much farther) to go with online video delivery yet, but we’ll see it as the first crack of a breakthrough.     

But definitely don’t count the big dogs out. Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft are already have relationships with the right people – the networks, the motion picture industry, the access providers, the technological innovators. Chances are, unless some sprout of a startup beats them to it (or is swallowed up by them) these giants will be the ones to make that final breakthrough.   

Just eight months after the launch of Riya 1.0, the company released the new visual search engine Like.com at the Web 2.0 convention.

Like.com is a visual search engine, meaning that instead of queries returning words to describe a site, it returns results in picture form. According to the CEO of Like.com, Munjal Shah, Like.com is, “the first visual search engine where you can click on / submit a photo as your search query.” It was created specifically for searches that are hard to describe linguistically, such as a china pattern or t-shirt design.

Once results of the query are returned, the user may also click on the likeness search button and see items which are similar to their search in a range of prices. For now, the categories, which can be searched are shoes, jewelry, handbags, watches and celebrities. Representatives say that they do intend on expanding the content that can be searched in the future, but that items like jewelry and clothing were easiest to visually search.

I did a little searching of my own on Like.com and was very pleased with the results. While you can’t search for a brand specifically, such as Louis Vuitton, you can search for specific details you desire. In a search for handbags, I selected the sub category “women’s leather satchels” and received 953 results. For several of the pricier results, I did a likeness search and found 110 results in more desirable price ranges.

Some of the features of Like.com include:

Likeness Search - the ability to search by image instead of text.

Like Detail – finds items that have a specific feature you like (such as a buckle, straps, bezel, etc);

Like Color – find color variants of the item you desire.

Like Celebrity – find clothing, shoes and accessories similar to those worn by celebrities.

Like Upload - the ability to upload a photo of your favorite item and find similar, which is coming soon.

Like is currently adding over 30, 000 items and numerous merchants a day and is kicking its plans to add new categories into overdrive. Will this revolutionize the way we search? Only time will tell.

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

A better way to find stuff. A way better way.

Just don’t tell Maryam, OK?

Why not?

Well, it’s the first time you can search for “red strappy shoes” and have every type of shoe show up VISUALLY.

This is cool stuff.

It’s called Like.com.

TechCrunch has a report up.

I interviewed Munjal Shah, Riya’s CEO and here’s the interview. Here’s a demo of Like.com. They are both videos published to my ScobleShow video blog.

More shortly.

Like.com is up now.

This is a lot of fun.

Some stories about Like.com.

1) The URL cost him $100,000. In the interview he explains how they bought it. It involved finding the guy who owned it, jumping a fence, and leaving a bottle of wine with a note on it (he wouldn’t answer his email).

2) Riya was pretty close to being sold to Google. If it had been, they never would have worked on this search engine. So, by getting turned down by Google Riya came back with a much better business.

3) Just the jewelry set takes 20GB of RAM.

4) Munjal still believes in blogs, but for this launch Riya talked with fashion bloggers, and journalists outside the tech world like at People magazine. Why? Well, this site – in its current incarnation – will be most interesting to women and non-geeks. If you’ve looked at who participates here, it’s heavily male.

5) Why not keep working on face detection? Because they learned through user testing that they’d never be able to make it good enough. They found that by focusing on visual image searches they can get a much more satisfied user base.

What do you think? It is the most interesting search experiences I’ve had since I first laid my eyes on Google about eight years ago.

UPDATE: Liz Gannes of GigaOm has a report too, but isn’t as impressed. “I do think this is a cool idea but it’s not dazzlingly good yet.”

UPDATE 2: Dan Farber has a report too. So does Rafe Needleman over on his new Webware blog.

UPDATE 3: Andre Ribeirinho writes “What I like most about Like is that being a shopping comparison site they are targetting a specific target, Women and pursuing a market worth of $15-$30B.”

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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Jeremy’s right. Riya needs to focus Like.com to fashion and clothes buyers (although I think he underestimates just how much men do play a role here). One thing, though. Most guys I know have women in their lives. Like me.

I might never use Like.com again. But I definitely told Maryam about it. I bet she uses it (although she doesn’t like buying things on the Internet, she told me, and would rather go into a store).

So, by hitting all these geeky male-oriented blogs I bet that Riya sees quite a bit of passalong and hits today from women.

Also, there’s another effect that’s good. We (the audience) just beta tested and stress tested Like.com. Now we’ll move onto the next cool thing to come up TechMeme. That’ll leave those 250 servers waiting for the PR from all those fashion and consumer blogs and magazines. They typically are a bit slower, so now the site is tested out, the engineers can tweak things based on the load we all threw at it this morning playing around, and it’ll be ready for business.

It’s a brilliant marketing strategy if you ask me. Not to mention that now we are doing a second wave of conversation about whether or not the strategy itself is brilliant or just totally lame.

Well played Munjal!

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Like a lot of people I uploaded a bunch of my photos to their site. I really liked their bulk uploader, found the site’s navigation nice, and then proceeded to spend hours and hours and hours “training” Riya on the faces that I uploaded.

The promise in Riya’s technology for me was that by training Riya on some of my photos that Riya could then find other photos of mine of the same people and auto tag them for me. Since I take a *ton* of photos, this technology held particular promise. More than this though the technology that held the most promise to me was that of my training Riya on me, my family and friends, and then being able to use it to search the internet and find photos of me, my family and friends that I did not know existed.

I was particularly excited about the idea of combining Riya’s facial recognition technology with social networking at the time and sent a bunch of emails to Tara Hunt back when she worked there about how cool Riya would be as a platform for a social network. Given the early enthusiasm for the site and the massive uploads they were getting, building a social network around Riya seemed like a no brainer to me.

I then was *really* intrigued when I heard that they were in play with Google and this made me think that their technology really might work.

Unfortunately their technology did not work very well. Even after training Riya on multiple instances of faces it did a poor job at finding other photos of those individuals within my own library, let alone out on the web.

Where some people get excited about sports or celebrities or cars or politics, I on the other hand get excited about image search. I get really excited about image search. And so I figured that it would just take time for Riya to continue to refine their facial recognition software and get it to a point where it was good enough to use it to effectively use it for image search.

And then today we get the news that instead of focusing on people search Riya is turning themselves into some kind of a shopping site — allowing you to find photos of black purses with suede handles or something like that and then buy them. They are calling it Like.com and it’s up right now and you can try it out.

While I can appreciate that Riya had to come up with some kind of a business model to justify all the money that has been invested in the company, I still find this very personally disappointing. I find it disappointing because 1. It means that facial recognition search technology likely cannot be automated in the short run and 2. I just have no interest in finding photos of slip on red loafers with black tassels or Paris Hilton’s latest watch to buy. According to Shah, “Like searches merchants sites for Jewelry, Handbags, Shoes, Watches. 200 merchants 2M SKUs.”

I know that there is probably just a huge market for people who want to buy things this way, I’m just not it. I have no interest in searching Riya’s two million SKUs. I want to search “Las Vegas” for the best shots when I go and visit. And I want to ego search “Thomas Hawk” to see what images of me are up and out there on the internet. I want to search “Bruce Livingstone” iStockphotos’s CEO because I met him two weeks ago and thought he had interesting tattoos (do you know he actually has an iStockphoto tattoo?) . I want to search for beautiful shots of rain, and Brazil and Antartica, and Charles Bukowski and San Francisco’s favorite eccentric Frank Chu, and “public art” and Banksy images, etc. etc.

Robert Scoble has an interesting video up on a demo of the software as well as an interview with Riya’s CEO, Munjal Shah. He says the jewlerey search alone takes 20GB of RAM.

The problem is that I have no interest in doing jewelery searches.

Scoble also says that Riya just couldn’t get facial recognition software good enough to make it work. “Why not keep working on face detection? Because they learned through user testing that they’d never be able to make it good enough. They found that by focusing on visual image searches they can get a much more satisfied user base.”

And maybe this is the reason why a rumored $40 million buyout from Google never happened.

The question of how image search ought to best be done is an important one. Right now Google and Yahoo, the two primary players pretty much suck at it. Both Google and Yahoo are trying to improve though. Google with their Image Labeler game (that I’m not particularly fond of) and Yahoo with Flickr (which in my opinion is the best image search engine out today). Getty has some interesting search tools in the works which would hold promise to the extent that they have access to high quality image libraries. Ask and Microsoft are also trying to get into the game, but neither in my opinion are better than Yahoo or Google and both here too pale in comparison to Flickr.

So it would appear that social based image search still represents the best approach. This is what we are working on at Zooomr. In terms of people search we are using an approach called people tags which have you actually create a notation around an individual where you can people tag them. These images are then grouped with that individual on their profile and you can see photos of them. It does rely on the social network and manually tagging though vs. the promise that Riya held with facial recognition. Here is an example of photos that have been people tagged with Thomas Hawk so far.

Some of these are self portraits taken by me, others are photos of me taken by my friends and contacts. Over time this collection of images of me should grow and grow. I can also use SmartSets to filter photos further. If for instance I only want to see photos that Kristopher Tate and I are in together I can create a SmartSet of those images based on the people tags – which you can see here.

Much of this technology will be of more use to individuals as ways to organize photos of their family and friends than for general web search, but it will certainly have general web search application as well as cluster’s of photos of well known people certainly will appear.

Image search is going to get more and more important in the future. Particularly local image search that is tied to local businesses. Finding photos of a particular restaurant or night club that you are interested in for instance. Or photos of a park that you want to visit. We are working on these technologies too.

Maybe I’m just naive and shopping image search is really the most lucrative sweet spot of the image search game. But to me it’s not as rewarding or as personally satisfying as what I would have hoped would have come out of Riya.

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Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer.
He publishes the web site Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection and is also
the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site Zooomr.

Visit the Neven Vision website today and this message appears for visitors: “Thank you for your interest. Neven Vision was recently acquired by Google Inc. and Neven Vision product information is no longer available on this site.”

Information is available on Google’s Official Blog, in the form of a post from Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager. Terms of the acquisition, however, are not available.

Neven Vision’s technology enables sophisticated recognition of objects in images. Graham discussed this in his post:

Google isn’t ready to talk about their plans for Neven and Picasa, other than Graham’s observation that they and Neven Vision share the goal of making photo searches easier for people to do.

The purchase probably lays to rest any chance that Google will purchase Riya, a startup with a focus in facial recognition technology. Last year, it was rumored briefly that Google would acquire Riya for possibly as much as $30 million, but time passed without the deal taking place.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Facial Recognition And Web 2.0

The Riya site was launched in March, and over 7 million images have already been uploaded to it. After the upload is complete, the site uses “face recognition, text recognition, and more to look inside the photograph so you can find the photo you want.”

Behind this process is the Riya Team, which describes itself as “a group of determined face recognition and text recognition researchers and engineers who believe it is time for a new type of photo search that uses technology to look inside and automatically tag photos.” This technology could have several applications.

The first possibility relates directly to the somewhat social nature of the site-after posting pictures of themselves, friends, and family, users could search for other images of the same people. “We want to help you recover every moment, every place you’ve been and all of the people you’ve met along the way,” reads one Riya page.

Malindi Davies, an equity analyst for the Susquehanna Financial Group, foresees marketing and advertising potential for the technology, as well. “If you have a more efficient way to tag or recognize objects in photographs that’s less human-capital intensive, that’s a great technology for stock-image companies like Getty Images, Jupiterimages, or Corbis Photos.”

Riya isn’t yet aspiring to that, or at least not publicly. But the company does have an ambitious goal in mind, saying, “We will be successful when we can find every digital photo in the world.”

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Does Net Neutrality Have The Proper Support?

Why? Fear. Narcissism. Ignorance. Politics. Apathy. I am not sure which one, although I do think it is each one. I think that Web 2.0 is afraid to take a stand on Net Neutrality – or join the voice in SaveTheInternet or Pulver’s Save the Net – because it might offend a potential purchaser/corporate overlord. I think they are narcissistic because they just do not care because they think it does not affect them. I call ignorance (or, stupidity) because they do not understand the issue. I cal it politics, because they are playing politics in the flip game. I call it apathy, because I just do not think they care about the issue.

The point is that I searched through Technorati, and could not find the usual Web 2.0 suspects writing, but just pointing people to fun videos that are cutesy; they are not really taking the banner of Net Neutrality.

I have discussed this with a couple of other bloggers – and wonder if Web 2.0 has not rushed to this because they are so caught up with themselves. Do they think that the banners of open source, community Web, and whatever the buzz words du jour are going to save their companies? If you look at the Web 2.0 sites -Facebook, Riya, YouTube, Second Life, Songbird, BitTorrent and others – they are total bandwidth hogs. Look at how much Second Life is growing, to the point that it is holding virtual conferences, virtual concerts. But at least is it suited to find ways around the potential costs of the loss of Net Neutrality, as it already charges for membership.

And, well, since Friday it is even a bigger issue since the House rejected Net Neutrality.

Now, while the big Net companies – MSFT, Google, Yahoo – have been to the hill to fight for Net Neutrality, the other side of the debate has just been as active. But is smarter and better at lobbying. Just imagine if the Web 2.0 companies rallied their users to send a letter or email to their Senators and Congressman. Would not those voices be heard, or am I a little too Mr. Smith Goes To Washington?

While I am neither for nor against Net Neutrality – I think it is inevitable – look at cable and pay TV and how that evolved from regular TV. Think about the history of television. It hit good mass adoption in the 50′s, and then had a nice run through the 70′s and 80′s, when cable came out and offered more premium channels at a price, and then a premiere price of more channels, like HBO and Showtime. People accepted the new tiered television, and have embraced it with a little bit of complaints once in a while.

But, with the Internet, we have not yet hit mass adoption of broadband access. While people are still using dial-up of NetZero and AOL for $10-24/month, are they ready to jump to $40+ a month for DSL or Cable, and then find out that that is just the first level, not the premium Internet that will get them the cool bells and whistles? It is too early, but it is inevitable. The fact is we all want our high, high-broadband access and we will likely pay for it.

As an aside, read these posts from GigaOm/Om Malik, which helped me understand the issue better.

But, the Web 2.0 (relative) silence is both deafening and sad. It’s a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil issue right now.

Follow-up: I just spoke with Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv, who has been speaking on the issue of Net Neutrality – as part of the panel, and as part of the changes in media, and how without Net Neutrality, his company would not have been able to launch. There are some Web 2.0 companies that are speaking out there – watch the PBS Now episode – but overall, there is too much silence. Mary Hodder also speaks a lot on the issue as well.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.