World Markets Simplified

A new iPhone app is able to reveal the identity of your friends in any photos that you take. The app is called KLiK and it performs real-time facial recognition, which means it can instantly identify and tag your friends in your photos. Gil Hirsch, the CEO of the facial recognition technology platform, Face.com, which is the company behind KLiK said, "It's our most recent evolution of both the platform and the consumer product that we're offering." The way the app works is that it connects to Facebook and then scans your friends' photos to create facial profiles of everyone in the user's network. The app then identifies people in the pictures you take by comparing them to the facial profiles created from Facebook.

Of course, the app doesn't work like Google Goggles. Hirsch says, "It's not like you can point this at someone on the street and make it work." Since the app uses your Facebook profile to scan people, it will only be able to identify people you have as friends on Facebook. For those who still have friends who are not on Facebook, the app comes with a learn mode with which it can learn the faces of those friends that you do not have on Facebook. Finally, as any good photo app should do, KLiK also contains Instagram like filters and photos can be shared via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.

The big issue that comes up with the way the app works is privacy. Hirsch, however says, "This system has been engineered from the get-go to preserve privacy and also deliver a social fun value and nothing creepy," in response to the privacy concerns that come up. Another service that Face.com has previously released is Photo Finder, which scans your friends' Facebook photos and finds pictures of you that you were never tagged in. The company also has technology for facial recognition, which does not come with privacy concerns, because while it can reveal gender, age and mood, it cannot reveal identity. KLiK is currently available from the iOS App Store for free. It can run on iPhones, iPod Touch and iPads running iOS 4.3 and later.

A New Jersey woman said on Monday that she was dismissed from a temporary job at a New York lingerie warehouse because her male employers felt she was too busty and dressed too provocatively for the workplace.

Wearing a form-fitting sequined black dress and black leather, sequin-studded boots, Lauren Odes, 29, said her Orthodox Jewish employers at Native Intimates told her that outfit and others like it were "too hot" for the warehouse.

"We should not be judged by the size of our breasts or the shape of our body," Odes said.

Odes's attorney, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, said she filed a gender and religious discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in New York.

Odes said she felt her wardrobe was appropriate for a business that sells "thongs with hearts placed in the female genital area and boy shorts for women that say 'hot' in the buttocks area."

Media photographers climbed on chairs and crashed into each other as Odes held a pose and Allred held up a series of purple, black and brown outfits she said also led to the woman's dismissal.

Odes said that on successive days during her week-long employment in late April she was warned that her attire was too alluring, that her breasts should be taped down to make them look smaller, and that she was asked to wear a red bathrobe to cover one outfit.

"This whole experience has been horrifying to me," she told reporters. "I love fashion and I always will, but I don't believe any woman should be treated as I was."

Odes, whose said her duties included data entry and coordinating the shipping of samples to customers, said she eventually agreed to purchase a sweater to wear over her dress, but was dismissed anyway.

"I understand that there are Orthodox Jewish men who may have their views about how a woman should dress ... but I do not feel that any employer has the right to impose their religious beliefs on me," she said.

An employee at the company had no immediate comment on Odes' claims.

Everyme attracted nearly half a million users in their first month of operation. Here's why they jumped to the web and Android so quickly--and why Facebook's success is good news for other social networking services.

Everyme, a heavily funded social networking service, made it big last week when they unveiled web and Android versions of their previously iPhone-only app. The social networking service restricts itself to users' friends and families, and has a series of sophisticated algorithms that automatically determine how contacts know Everyme users. Everyme isn't just high-tech: It's also an early peak at the post-Facebook future of specialized social networks.

The California-based social networking service's secret source is a series of algorithms that go through a user's phonebook/contact list and automatically sort contacts into coworkers, family members, friends, neighbors, work contacts and other sublists--with a surprisingly high success rate. In a phone conversation with Fast Company, CEO Oliver Cameron explained that the algorithms were designed to understand the relationships between end users and their contacts. More importantly, Everyme was only able to provide their service with the advent of cloud computing--by using Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company was able to get the computer brainpower their sophisticated algorithms require.

Everyme, of course, is well funded and has prominent backers. The Y Combinator graduate recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding from a team of Silicon Valley A-listers including Andreessen-Horowitz, Crunchfund, and Greylock Partners. Since launching in April 2012, Everyme has attracted over 400,000 users--a staggering growth rate. Everyme's backers hope that the company will continue to attract similar numbers of new users over the next few months.

Social networking in 2012 is an odd game. The old Facebook-MySpace-Friendster (remember those?) wars are over and Mark Zuckerberg's creation is the Internet's de facto user directory in much of the world. Facebook attempts to be all things to all people. But while Facebook is ubiquitous, it also fails at niches. Spotify unites music lovers. Path caters to close circles of friends. Foodspotting caters to foodies. Goodreads is for readers. Instagram's for photo geeks. The list goes on and on--with the notable exception of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr, the only three truly successful non-Facebook social networking sites that exist in private ecosystems.

Like Spotify, Foodspotting, Goodreads, and Instagram, Everyme is also integrated with Facebook. Users can share Facebook status updates with circles of contacts via Everyme. Interestingly, Everyme has no option at all for public sharing: All content posted through the service goes directly to restricted circles of contacts.

Everyme's default social circles include Family, Friends, Co-workers, and “Sweethearts.” Users can easily customize social circles and all content is self-contained; stories, photos, and files posted to Everyme cannot be republished on sites like Facebook. However, Everyme does allow users to share content from Facebook, Instagram, and others on their site.

Ironically, Facebook's popularity makes it possible for other social networking sites to flourish. Facebook's Achilles heel is their awful mobile product, which makes it possible for smartphone-centric services like Everyme, Path, and Instagram to thrive (and, ironically, competitor Google+). More importantly, Facebook offers a massive list of services it provides to users. Most of these services work well, but none of them work great. This leaves space for more specialized social networking services to operate and, of course, make a profit. And if Everyme doesn't work, hey, at least users will still have one heck of an address book organizer.