Guy Grimland of Israeli business newspaper TheMarker published two articles (both are in Hebrew) this morning about a rumored relationship between Facebook and Face.com.
The first article claims that Face.com rebuffed an acquisition offer worth ‘tens of millions of dollars’. The second article claims that Face.com is powering Facebook Photos’ facial recognition functionality, which was clearly upgraded in the past few months, albeit, with no indication there was a third party involved.
While the acquisition claim has been swirling around in the local startup community for a couple of months, no numbers have been mentioned. Worthy to note the fact that the company recently raised a $4.3M round of financing, led by Yandex. If the acquisition offer claim is true, both Face.com and its investors clearly believe the future holds a bigger liquidation event than an aqui-hire scenario.
The second rumor, about Face.com powering Facebook’s facial recognition functionality, is more interesting in my opinion and makes more sense for a couple of reasons.
For one, Face.com’s facial recognition algorithms are really quite effective. We wrote about their remarkable quality when the company first launched nearly two years ago. Secondly, from a technology standpoint Face.com’s ability to provide facial recognition economically on a massive scale, has been touted as one of the company’s major IP attributes.
In the case of Facebook, being able to provide such functionality in an economic manner from a computing resource perspective must be seen as a major upside, if not a vital one.
I reached out to Gil Hirsch, Face.com CEO, who declined to comment on both claims.
Face.com is helping people find photos, using our home grown best-in-breed facial recognition technologies. The first deployment of our tech is our Photo Finder application for Facebook, today’s largest photo sharing site, which scans public photos in your social network and suggests tags for untagged faces. face.com has offices in Tel Aviv and New York.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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