Face Recognition on Facebook Mobile?

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.

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Black SMS iPhone App Encrypts Your Texts, Lets Playas Play

Maybe you’re just a secretive person. Or perhaps you are in the middle of leaving your job, and are talking to a boss from a competing company. Maybe you have a girlfriend… andanother girlfriend.

Whatever the case may be, you don’t want people reading your texts. In fact, when Greg wrote about a guest mode on the iPhone, you basically realized the biggest problem with your phone in that very instant. But there’s a solution, and it’s called Black SMS.

There’s one tiny issue I have with the app but none that should hinder anyone from downloading the app if they want to keep their text chats private. Seriously, you don’t even need to read any more. Just download. Here.

OK, fine. You want to know more.

It’s really simple. Black SMS is an app that works with iMessage. You simply install and set a password, and then type out your big secret. Once you give the other person the password for your convo (which I recommend that you do over some other form of communication, not text), you simply copy and paste the message from Black SMS into iMessage and hit send.

When the text shows up on the other person’s phone, it’ll just look like a black text bubble. The recipient then needs to copy the bubble, switch over to the Black SMS app, and paste the message. The recipient will also need to input the same password you used to encrypt the message.

After that, the secret text will appear clear as a bright blue day within the Black SMS app, but anyone who goes snooping in your iMessages app or tries to fake a password will come up with nothing.

If you’re curious about the tiny issue, I just wish that there was a more direct way to get back into Black SMS from iMessage rather than multitasking. I use a lot of apps all the time and it’s really easy for an app I used just five minutes ago to get pushed out the multi-tasking bar of four.

Still, for $.99 this app is totally worth it. Especially if you creep.