Skip to footer

What does Facebook want with Face.com?

Facebook has acquired Face.com for a reported $100 million. 

|
Reuters
Facebook has acquired Face.com for an undisclosed sum. Here, the Facebook app appears on a row of Apple iPhones during an Apple event last week.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Back in April, a pre-IPO Facebook confirmed it would buy Instagram for a reported $1 billion in cash and stock options. This week comes news that the newly public Facebook Inc. will purchase Face.com, an Israeli company that develops facial-recognition software. The terms of the deal have not been made public, but many analysts have put the price tag somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million.

"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," the Face.com team wrote in a blog post today. "By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers – that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do."

A quick primer: Face.com – official motto: "Is that you?" – makes applications that recognize the contours of a human face. According to the company's website, Face.com technology can identify subjects "despite difficult circumstances like poor lighting, poor focus, subjects wearing eyeglasses, facial hair, and even Halloween costumes." That technology, in turn, is used in apps such as Photo Tagger, which identifies and groups faces in online photo albums.

Photo Tagger is already a popular Facebook app. So what else does Facebook want out of the Face.com acquisition? Mobile facial recognition, speculates TechCrunch: "As Face.com’s speciality is mobile facial recogition, it could potentially allow you to upload a photo to Facebook while on the go, instantly receive suggestions of whom to tag, and confirm the tags with one click." 

That is a little frightening! But also more or less in line with Facebook's efforts to become a photo-sharing/storage hub for its users. (See also: Instagram.) 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to What does Facebook want with Face.com?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0618/What-does-Facebook-want-with-Face.com
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe