With TinEye you can upload a photo and have it find other copies that might exist on the internet. Not just exact copies, but even cropped, edited, or watermarked versions of your photo. That's the idea and it certainly will be a powerful tool for those who wish to keep track of their presence online. A company could upload a photo of their product and see which stores are selling it. A celebrity could upload their headshot and see which websites are writing about them. Professional photographers could see who is using their work without permission. In time the same techniques could probably be applied to video I'm sure. It's a powerful idea with great potential, but it's not quite ready yet. This week TinEye moved towards open beta, which means that for the first time anyone can give it a try, but because its still in beta and the company has only indexed 700 million pages, you may find the results returned to be sparse. I experimented with a few images I "borrowed" from the Internet Movie Database and received no results, but a few gadget photos I have brought back many hits. The good news is that the basic technology used for finding matches works really well, it's just a case of waiting for the search engine to expand its index of the web. In the meantime, Idée Inc. which is based here in Toronto, has also developed a set of browser plug-ins to make it easy for users simply right-click an image and search directly through their service.