Facebook buy Face.com for $60 million

Facebook have bought Face.com – the Israeli facial recognition system. Techcrunch initially reported that the cost was around $100 million, but they revised the cost to $55-60 million.

Facebook will be adopting the facial recognition technology for their own projects. Face.com have been developing mobile facial recognition and the theory is that a user could potentially “upload a photo to Facebook while on the move and instantly receive suggestions of whom to tag, and confirm the tags with one click.”

The Facebook system currently doesn't support mobile photo tagging. Users could be alerted they are in a picture and get automatically informed to visit.

Face.com made a blog post about the takeover, focusing on third party developers. They said “We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.”

They added “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 contentwith their social graph. 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.  :)”

Facebook previously bought Instagram for $1 billion and Techcrunch speculate that the company could port Face.com's facial recognition to Instagram, interlinking the products.

Kitguru says: Big plans afoot at Facebook.

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