Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off
rumors that
it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when asked.
But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile
apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s
user base shifts away from desktops.
In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app
KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.
For the record, Face.com people are keeping their cards close to
their chest. Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch flatly tells: “We have
nothing new to announce or share at this time.”
But even while Facebook has been pushing a lot of fancy new enhancements to its mobile offerings (its Camera mobile app being the most recent) there are still a surprising number of features that have yet to be covered by the company.
So, perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, we’re now getting a full
whack of reports of what the company might buy or launch to make up for
that, including
today’s Face.com news that Facebook is looking to buy mobile/PC browser company
Opera and hiring
ex-Apple hardware engineers to
work on its own phone.
We may just, quite possibly, be in the middle of a Facebook news
bubble and that half of what we are reading about Facebook and mobile
may never come to pass — or could take ages to come to fruition: Buffy
the Android slayer is reportedly still six to 12 months away going by
the timing in the
AllThingsD post from November. And this is not the first time we’ve heard that Face.com is in the Facebook acquisition line.
But, if you swallow that large grain of salt, there is a huge amount
of sense in the social network looking at beefing up its mobile arsenal
with companies like these, which offer features that Facebook currently
does not, and therefore offer the promise of getting mobile users to
spend more time on the social network — something that is a concern for the company.
