[matt_ny]

May 20 the AlchemyVision and Watson Visual Recognition Beta services merged into Watson Visual Recognition - http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

We're continually improving them (as everyone in computer vision is!) but for now one key feature of Watson Vision is the ability to train a custom classifier for your own data by just giving a bunch of example images. The service also provides general image tagging, text extraction(beta), face detection and a fixed list people for celebrity facial recognition.

We see this as a green-field area where rapid progress is being made across the board... I wouldn't count anyone out yet!