New mobile service gives users face time with celebrities (kind of)

[Anchorman]

Millions of Japanese mobile phone users are getting hooked on a service that allows them to not only literally save face, but also see how they look compared to some of the country's biggest celebrities, according to AREA (7/16).

Catching the heart of mobile phone users is GaoChieki -- which, in the little more than two months since it began operating on April 26, has already attracted 30 million page views.

Taking part is easy, with people using their mobile phones to take a snapshot of their face and sending it into the GaoChieki site. An automated reply will come back asking the user to write the names of three celebrities they think they most resemble. Their portrait is then analyzed and facial features compared with the celebrity and the degree of resemblance then mailed back to their mobile. The service is free and doesn't require registration, a factor attributed to its success.

Operators J-Magic are delighted by the success of GaoChieki.

"We select hundreds of facial features, like the nose, mouth and eyes, analyze the frequency around these areas and mine data on features from it. We've analyzed the facial features of about 1,000 celebrities and stored them in a database, which we dig into so that we can compare the features with those of our users," J-Magic President Takuya Miyata tells AERA.

Miyata adds that GaoChieki uses the same technology as face recognition software under consideration for use in places like airports.

Being free, courtesy of advertising-funded operations, GaoChieki attracts few complaints from users about its accuracy. There are limitations, however, because data on users' faces can only be collected from a single angle, instead of the multi-sided views afforded to conventional face recognition software.

Another surprise for the operators -- and one that is making many in the mobile phone business sit up and take notice -- is that it's getting many inquiries from 40-somethings, a demographic widely regarded as being well outside the core group of cell phone users.

Miyata has dreams of developing GaoChieki into something even bigger.

"Existing search engines next text to be input through a keyboard, even to look up stuff that's really right before your eyes. I figured it'd be much better if you could search for what you see, and by that I mean an image search. That's what led me to GaoChieki," Miyata tells AERA. "I want to expand it to become a service that not only recognizes people's faces, but a total image search that can instantly provide information about products just by seeing a picture of them." (By Ryann Connell)