Yahoo! picks up image recognition company IQ Engines

The acquisitions keep coming in at a frantic pace for Yahoo! The Internet giant has purchased image recognition service IQ Engines in hopes that the technology it will acquire will help bolster its Flickr services.

According to the deal signed by both parties, IQ Engines has already stopped taking in new sign-ups and will be shutting down its API within the next 30 days. In a blog post announcing that it had been brought over by Yahoo!, IQ Engines wrote, “At IQ Engines, our dream has been to transform the way people search and browse their photos by helping to process them intelligently. We are excited to take things to a global level with one of the most widely used photo services [Flickr] in the world.”

More acquisitions (Image credit: Reuters)

The API provided by IQ Engines was something of a big deal in 2010 when it helped the company get $1 million in funding. It allowed users to provide a visual search engine. App developers and online retailers could use the API to build a search system that would allow the website to categorise images instantly, reports TechCrunch. The company mainly worked off two APIs – SmartCamera and SmartAlbum.

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SmartCamera allowed retailers to help build a system their customers could use to interact with images of products and logos using their smartphone camera. SmartAlbum, on the other hand allowed for photo analysis and facial recognition for online photo albums and mobile apps. This could well be what Yahoo! needs to build a fitting reply to Facebook’s facial recognition system.

It seems now that IQ Engines team will be joining Yahoo! and its Flickr team right away to build a better product. The emphasis seems to be on improving Flickr’s application and its usage for now.