Riya was introduced as a visual search engine, a way to identify faces or shapes and then search the internet for similar faces or shapes. Like.com's use of the technology for fashion is brilliant - it offers a real service to people who see a purse or shoes worn by a celebrity that they love, and returns links from which they (most probably) get advertising revenue from. Brilliant.
There are so many potential uses for this technology. See a flag you don't recognize in a news photograph? A search could return a list of references about that flag. Studying an ancient Greek frieze? The user could search on the faces depicted in the frieze to identify each god/goddess/hero.
