By John Townley
November 24, 1999

If you're like me, you've spent far too many eye-blurring, mind-numbing hours searching for just the right image or sound to put on some Web page or in a presentation. But those days of thankless toil are almost at an end.

The military calls it "target acquisition." And they should know, they invented it. Now that it's made the leap from Cold War to Hot Marketing, cyber-warriors are calling it everything from "finding the golden needle in the haystack" to "the last remaining land-grab on the Internet." I call it SMaRT.

What's SMaRT? It's Streaming Media Recognition Technology. Imagine software that can pick out a face in a crowd, a phrase in a speech, or a specific trumpet lick in your favorite music track. In short, imagine being able to find any image or sound no matter how small and elusive - or vast and pervasive, from among the stacks of media data that (currently) pile up on your desk. Plus, SMaRT will help you find similar data, organize it, tag it, package it, and sell it!

But that's not all SMaRT is expected to do. Its proponents claim it will turn the media content, distribution, advertising, and sales markets on their heads and open access to hidden information that will impact everything from finance, to politics, to personal freedom (no more getting lost in a crowd.)

One such proponent is Carlos Montalvo, VP Marketing for Virage, who claims that streaming recognition technology may truly be "the last remaining land-grab on the Internet." Virage was founded in 1994 out of core technology from MIT's MediaLab and University of Michigan research and is at the forefront of SMaRT. Montalvo was VP/General Manager of the QuickTime Group at Apple for 8 years and joined Virage in May.