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Reuters Labs will use Viewdle's facial recognition search features to help index video content delivered over certain Reuters satellite streams. Lots of interesting announcements have emerged from the TechCrunch 40 conference. One company disclosed a significant endorsement of its technology during the event.

Viewdle announced its Reuters deal, where the company's technology will allow viewers to leap to precise moments of a person's appearance in a Reuters video.

A demo of how Viewdle handles search for a handful of celebrities and politicians at Reuters said they have over 600 hours of video indexed. It isn't a comprehensive repository of video yet, but the results for those who have been indexed works well.

Viewdle said its engine employs "a video indexing and reference system that fuses pioneering, facial-recognition visual analysis technology along with other leading search techniques to automatically look inside video streams, frame-by-frame, to recognize and index appearances of people on-screen."

We think there's more work to be done on Viewdle, just by looking at a couple of searches through the Reuters Viewdle site. A query for Tom Cruise brings up one video for the superstar, posing for photographers with Katie Holmes. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher appeared on screen after that, but doing a separate search for Moore returned no results.