Facebook rumoured to buy Face.com for upto $100 million

The latest rumour circling Facebook and its wallet is a potential acquisition of facial recognition service, Face.com. Israeli publication, Calcalist reports that the social networking giant is looking to buy the service and Newsgeek reports that the deal could could be between $80 million and $100 million. It’s still in speculation stage and The Next Web reports that when they reached out to Face.com CEO, Gil Hirsch, he said, “There is nothing new to share”. While this statement does not confirm an acquisition, it doesn’t deny it either. The two companies have allegedly had meetings over the past few years to discuss an acquisition, but Face.com always turned down offers because of the low price that Facebook was paying.

Face.com on Facebook turf soon?

Face.com was launched in 2007 and already has two services up on Facebook. One is called Photo Tagger, which allows users to scan their photos or their friends’ photos for known faces. The app scans photos and batches people for suggested tags that you then approve. The company also has a service called Photo Finder, which works similarly to Photo Tagger, where the application scans Facebook photos in your networks and finds pictures of you that you never knew were there. Face.com also recently launched an iPhone application, called KLiK, which also connects to your Facebook network and identifies the faces in your photos. 

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With the amount of work Facebook has been putting into photos, particularly mobile photos, it makes sense that they would want to make this acquisition. The company recently bought Instagram for $1 billion and then launched their own rival to Instagram, called Facebook Camera. The application functioned as a Newsfeed for photos uploaded to the social network as well as a photo editor and uploader. It features filters, similar to those on Instagram albiet with different names, and an interesting function of the application is that you can upload multiple photos in one go. It would make sense for Facebook to include not only a facial recognition feature, but also a facial identification feature in the app, so friends can be tagged much more quickly on the go. Furthermore, this would be Facebook’s first big acquisition post IPO, that is, if it happens. Facebook is also rumoured to buy Opera Software and build their own browser. Between Face.com and Opera, it will be a race to see what Facebook’s first big post-IPO acquisition is.