Monday, June 18, 2012

Facebook to buy facial recognition startup FACE.COM

Facebook continues its expansion. After buying Insatagram a couple months ago for $1 billoin the company announced today a $100 million deal to buy Face.com. Face.com provides facial recognition technology and will enabling tagging on shared photos . The technology scans newly uploaded photos, compares faces in those snapshots, compares faces in those snapshots with previous pictures and, then tries to match faces and suggest name tags. So will Facebook be able to overcome all the criticism that it has received by various wall street analyst for being an over hyped company that will struggle to generate long term growth. The stock has advanced ~15% in the last few days.

http://www.haaretz.com/business/facebook-to-buy-israeli-startup-face-com-for-an-estimated-100-million-1.437185

1 comment:

Unknown said...

One thing Facebook has done well is to try and keep their website simple and user friendly. With Face.com it sounds like it will not add complexity but could bring fear of customers privacy being violated. Since it is a small feature it should not add too much to their bottom line but sounds like a great addition and is about 900 million less than Instagram. As Zvi pointed out the stock has made some nice gains since its 25.87 bottom but like many others I do not see the price going around 40 for a long time. This is because I believe the best way to grow Facebook would be to keep growing global but with with so many different social media sights out there now its going to be difficult.