Face.com Purchased by Facebook for Unknown Amount
Posted by aonenetworks On June 19, 2012
Rumors about the companies Facebook and Face.com being in negotiations have finally been confirmed as of yesterday when Facebook officially purchased the facial-recognition software. Face.com announced on their blog today that they had been purchased by Facebook, who promised to offer “more opportunities” to build groundbreaking products.
The Israel-based company offers API (application programming interfaces) for third party developers. The developers can then incorporate the Face.com software into applications. For example, Photo Finder and Photo Tagger are both applications using Face.com software that have been released on Facebook in the past few weeks. Photo Finder lets a user find untagged pictures of themselves on Facebook and Photo Tagger bulk tags a user in photos once they’re found. Face.com has been around since 2010, but has only recently taken off.
“People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com’s technology has helped to provide the best photo experience,” a Facebook spokesperson e-mailed to a news company. “This transaction simply brings a world-class team and a long-time technology vendor in house.”
The price is unconfirmed, and Facebook is refusing to say how much they paid for Face.com’s software. However, it is estimated that the social network giant will pay between $80-100 million once all has been said and done. This is not Facebook’s first big purchase of the year; in April, Facebook bought Glancee, a social-gifting company, for undisclosed amounts. In May, the social network bought Instagram, a photo manipulation company, for around a billion dollars. All three of these purchases indicate large changes in the works for Facebook.
