Recent reports indicate Facebook may extend its spending spree beyond the rumored acquisition of Opera Software, the company behind the Opera Web browser. Rumors of a new acquisition first surfaced on Monday, May 28, when Israel's Calcalist reported that Facebook has a new target: Tel Aviv-based startup Face.com, "the world's largest and most accurate face recognition platform," as the company described itself.
Face.com offers apps that scan photos on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular sites, offering to tag the images with detected faces. In addition, the startup also offers an API that allows developers to use Face.com's face detection technology in their own applications.
Further reports from Israeli-based blog Newsgeek and The Next Web indicated that Facebook is willing to pay between US$80 million and US$100 million for Face.com. Meanwhile, Gigaom said the social networking giant "could rely on an unexpected partner - the Russian search engine Yandex," citing Russian newspaper Vedomosti as the source of this report.
Detour Deal
According to Russia's Vedomosti, Gigaom reports, the deal may take a detour, meaning that Yandex would sell its stake in the Israeli startup to Facebook instead. "One of the shareholders of Face.com is Russia's Yandex which, in autumn 2010 together with Israeli investment firm Rhodium, invested $4.3 million in return for 18.4 percent of the company and the move for its CEO, Arkady Volozh, to join Face.com's board of directors," reported Vedomosti, as cited by Gigaom. "Yandex is in talks to sell its stake in Face.com, says a source close to the company. The source told Vedomosti about the negotiations for the sale, which Yandex wants to do in exchange for money and Facebook stock."
Facebook has had an auto-tagging feature of its own for a while now, but Face.com could take the technology to the next level. Other theories indicated that Facebook might in fact be interested only in the domain name, not the technology itself, as face.com would be a convenient short name for Facebook.
Face.com's Facebook app, Photo Tagger, has only 3,000 Monthly Active Users, according to AppData, meaning it is not very popular. This lack of popularity might be seen as another indicator that Facebook is interested just in the domain name, but Face.com's underlying technology should not be underestimated. Face.com's technology is highly appreciated by developers, and its API is used in numerous third-party mobile apps. As of February 2001, Face.com's technology has been used to detect over 18 billion faces.
Gigaom asked Yandex for a comment on the report, but a spokesman for the company declined to comment. When contacted by The Next Web to comment on the rumors, Face.com said there is "nothing new to share."
