Apple Buys Polar Rose Facial Recognition Company? [Update]

POST

MAIL

Posted September 20, 2010 at 10:09am by iClarified

Apple may have acquired all the shares of facial recognition company Polar Rose, according to a report by Mac1.

The company offers three different products. Two of them (Face Cloud and FaceLib) seem to be very interesting for Apple.

Face Cloud is a scalable server-side solution to add facial recognition to nearly all types of Web services. One can, for example, easily imagine Face Cloud can be used to introduce face recognition in images that are uploaded to Mobile Me - a service that does not exist today.

FaceLib is the same face recognition just moved to a mobile phone. FaceLib can either work together with Face Cloud or can make facial recognition directly on your mobile phone - such as an iPhone. FaceLib Polar Rose has developed for both the iPhone and Android today.

A note on the company's website reads, "Our free face tagging service is now closed. We are now focusing solely on licensing our technology. Hopefully you'll see our tech in one of our licensees' products in the future!"

Check out the Polar Rose demo video below...

Update:
TechCrunch says "we have rock-solid sources that say the company went for $22 million. Polar Rose has had about $6 million in VC funding since 2006."

Read More [via 9to5Mac]

Follow iClarified

JDavila - September 20, 2010 at 11:45am

Maybe on MobileMe there is no face recognition this far, but FB has been implementing it this far. Still buggy, my iPhoto still keeps mixing my 10 years younger brother (with hear and no beard) with me. Hope it gets better to the point of actually being a useful feature.

Reply · Like