Facebook has acquired the image recognition company, Face.com for a hefty $16M. The Face.com is a company that provides third party APIs to help developers create apps that recognize faces across the Facebook platform.
The rumors were true, and this was a pretty long acquisition by Facebook. The largest social networking company has acquired the Face.com, a company that excels in image recognition, which provides an API to third-party developers to make use of their algorithm. It is also told that the acquisition costed Facebook a hefty $16 million and what would Facebook do with this new acquisition is still unclear.
About Face.com
Face.com is a company that helps developers write branded Facebook applications like Photo Tagger, which allows users to recognize faces from an image. Photo Tagger was the first app the company developed, and deployed it on Facebook. The app works brilliantly to detect the photos in which a user is not tagged on.
Face.com has also helped a lot of developers in building their own applications on Facebook Platform by providing an API, that makes use of their algorithm to detect faces in the photos. Moreover, the company has helped develop an app named, CelebrityFindr, which searches for the photos of celebrities across Twitter using the Face Recognition technology that they’d developed.
The Acquisition
So, now that Facebook has acquired Face.com, many have been wondering if it would die, or if the technology would exists just like how Instagram exists even after its acquisition. Well, but looks like everything is going to be the same. The third-party developers, who make use of the Face.com API will get the support from the company as they were getting earlier, and there’s not going to be any change in it. Here’s the confirmation from the Face.com team about the support:
“Now, lots of developers use Face.com technology to power various apps and make wonderful products…[T]he plan is to continue to support our developer community,”
What would Facebook do with Face.com’s algorithm is still unclear. But a not on the blogpost hints that Facebook is looking into deploying them into the mobile apps pretty soon! Which looks interesting. May be, Facebook Mobile apps would help people tag, by just pointing the camera? Here are the lines that hint at its use in Facebook:
“We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people’s lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph. By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers,”
Moreover, Downey also reveals how Facebook would learn to recognize your Face everytime it sees you:
“Every time you’re tagged, Facebook learns more about your face and how it looks with or without glasses, in various lighting, with facial hair, etc. It’s one of the few data sources that Facebook has yet to monetize, and the acquisition of Face.com suggests that making money off your face is on their to-do list.”
Looks like Facebook is going to be making some purchases here and there. If you’d missed previous purchases that Facebook has made, You can catch-up with them here.