That's crap.
"Most of the images are on people's PCs"? Where do you get that?
A corporation that has to be compliant with document retention policies has terabytes upon terabytes upon terabytes of scanned OCR'd documents. A physics lab maintains petabytes of image data from experiments in bubble chambers. Astronomical research? petabytes as well.
This is not even to mention the M&E market segments which maintain petabytes of images, with tons of redundancy too (each picture frame in an animated HD movie has a lot going on with the surrounding picture frames).
Who the hell even wants to get near the consumer market with a 10 foot barge pole when there are so many untapped resources that can actually PAY the premium that such software requires? not to mention that CPU bound means exactly that - it means that you need a dedicated CPU (which is why AFAIK why Ocarina sells an appliance, not software) just for dedup if you want to get anything else done.
No no. Ocarina's business strategy is sound - deduping images on a phone is perhaps a good idea in 5,10,20 years when you have 50 terabytes of capacity on your phone and you're snapping pictures like a motherfucker, and the phone's CPU can support. For now, leave the damn thing where it fucking is.