Facial recognition startup Polar Rose pitched at the the Under the Radar conference being held today at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus today. Panelists consisted of Canaan Partners' John Balen, Lockergnome.com's Chris Pirillo and Forum Nokia Americas' Doug McMillan.

Polar Rose is a Sweden-based facial image search engine that raised $5.1 million from Nordic Venture Partners in December and recently brought on Scott Rafer, former Feedster CEO and MyBlogLog CEO, as its US representative. For now, their beta service allows users to identify people in public photos. After privacy options are worked out, the company will enable collaboration that will allow users to find photos of people from around the web. It's pursuing a distributed strategy with plugins, APIs and Javascript for other publishers.

I've summed up the question and answer period between Polar Rose's Scott Rafer and the judges. Some are quotes and others are my best attempt at paraphrasing.

Canaan: What’s your business model?
Not talking about that yet but if we’re lucky we get to be the White Pages. In terms of others that have tried it, they haven’t tried it on the open web. Haven’t let you drop Javascript in another site… We can and we are.

Nokia: It's a cool technology but what problem are you trying to solve? What’s the value to me?
When you search for someone like jay leno. Sometimes I get a picture of jay leno and others are pictures of a skit from the show.

Nokia: Can you do other things aside from facial recognition?
Nope. That’s been the other problems with the startups. If you can do faces, you can’t do images and vice versa.

Chris: What would keep Google, Yahoo or MSN from doing this. What would happen to Polar Rose?
They have to buy it. This has been a problem for companies with thousands of engineers for so long. Google is the only one that’s close.

For more on Dealmaker Media's Under the Radar conference, see:
Polar Rose blog
Under The Radar

Tags: polarrose, undertheradar, undertheradar2007, polar_rose, vc, goog, msft, yhoo, venture+capital