Singaporean telecommunications giant SingTel has acquired intelligent, social photo aggregator Pixable for $26.5 million. The company develops sleek social photo creation, aggregation, and categorization tools.
Pixable’s Photofeed Facebook app and companion mobile apps intelligently sort and categorize your friends’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr photos, as well as Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube videos.
The company, which was founded by three MIT graduate students in 2009, uses predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze users’ interactions and consumption habits to sort and categorize photos from close friends and family. The company’s “WonderRank” technology crawls users’ networks to find out what has interested them in the past and what relationships are valued most using commonalities in background information (like school, work history, etc.) to serve the best content.
Its machine-learning and algorithmic mix takes more than 70 signals into account, getting smarter the more you use the app, organizing photos and videos into a number of fields (like most popular of the day, week, month), showing which users changed profile pics, what photos and videos are most recent, etc. Users are presented with the most interesting photos through feeds such as “Top of the Day” and “New Profile Pics.”
To date, more than 4 million users have installed Pixable’s “mobile photo inbox” service via the web, iOS devices, and Android devices.
Pixable’s early service allowed people to use all of their Facebook and image-sharing site photo content such as captions, tagging information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slideshows, calendars, and artwork. Another one of Pixable’s early applications was a nifty tool that allows you to make mosaics of your Facebook photos.
SingTel plans to offer additional intelligent photo services to its 462 million mobile customers in Asia and Africa. In Singapore and Australia, customers can already store and share photos safely using SingTel’s cloud services. According to a release, “With Pixable and other rich technology platforms acquired through recent investments, SingTel will be able to further enrich the content and connections for customers in today’s digital world.”
Pixable has raised $6.6 million from Menlo Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and others.