Improved technology played a big role in the identification of the two primary suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Law enforcement officials were deluged with digital images and video after asking anyone who was in the area during the event to submit them. Traditionally it would take hundreds of officers countless hours to examine all of that media, but new versions of facial recognition technology have made that task much more manageable.

CNet explains how this tech works: "The software, which can help pick a person out of crowd, looks for differentiating features -- from the shape of a mouth to the ridge on a nose to the distance between a pair of eyes.

3VR in San Francisco has developed software that extracts information from video and then makes it searchable for its clients, which include retailers, banks, security firms and law enforcement."