Facebook recruits Israel’s face.com
July 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Over the past few months the competition between Google and Facebook has become fierce. On one side of the arena is the Internet giant that feels as if the younger competitor is destroying the ground it built and the business environment it nurtured.
The move of talented young individuals from Google to Facebook, alongside the rising popularity of the world’s most popular social-networking website, led Google to launch Google+, a social network to compete with Facebook, which has attracted 20 million users within a few weeks. A new front was opened in the struggle between the sides when Google this past weekend acquired PittPatt, which specializes in developing face-recognition technology. Google already acquired Neve Vision in 2006, which also operates in this field, and integrated this identification technology for tagging pictures and faces in Picasa. However, the acquisition of PittPatt is an additional source of strength and technology that will facilitate the integration of face recognition into profiles and photo albums on Google+. This was Google’s 100th acquisition. Facebook did not sit by idly. Instead, it has integrated the face-recognition technology developed by Israeli start-up face.com into its photo-sharing capabilities. This will allow the 750 million users of this social network to tag and identify friends’ photos. Founded in 2007, face.com has so far raised $6 million from Daniel Recanati, Rhodium and Yandex, Russia’s largest search-engine company. The company’s founders are CEO Gil Hirsch, CTO Yaniv Taigman, chairman Moti Shniberg and Genesis Partners partner Eden Shochat. In the past, it was believed that the close cooperation between face.com and Facebook would lead to a buyout or an investment. But this has not yet taken place. The acquisition of PittPatt took place a year after Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced that the company was wary about entering the facial-recognition field out of a concern for users’ privacy. What bothered Google then was not just the privacy issue, but the concern that while they were taking protective steps, their competition would capture most of the market share. And this is exactly what the competition did. In the meantime, Facebook and Apple pounced on the sizzling field of face recognition, and Apple acquired Sweden-based Polar Rose for $30m. last fall. Facebook, as well as Yahoo!’s photo-management and -sharing application Flickr, use Polar Rose’s face-recognition application. “There is not one mobile manufacturer that would not be interested in this type of technology,” Polar Rose CEO Carl Silbersky told the Financial Times. “There are hundreds of millions of mobile phones with cameras. The mobile companies are looking for ways to encourage phone owners to use them, and this is one way.” And so, as the race to become technologically equipped is at its height, the question arises: Were Schmidt’s concerns over users’ privacy real? We can also ask this about developments in Israel. And if we judge by a joint venture between face.com, Coca-Cola Israel and the advertising agency Idealogic, the answer is that young social-network users are not bothered. As part of Coca-Cola’s summer events, the three companies launched a “Like” machine based on a camera that recognizes users’ faces. After the initial photo, the machine recognizes the person, so that a quick glance at the camera is enough to “check in” and post the photo on Facebook users’ personal wall. If these young people are standing in line at the Like machine of their own free will and sharing their facial features with a commercial company such as Coca-Cola, it appears that the time is ripe for the struggle between technology companies over control of the facial-recognition technologies to continue.
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Daum: The siren song of Google+
July 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Google+, which launched a month ago to great fanfare, is so far feeling more like Google nonplussed. Reported to have crossed the 20-million-user mark last weekend, the new social networking site is designed to correct one of Facebook’s major drawbacks: the problem of too much information being shared with too many people.
Instead of all social contacts being lumped into one huge group (meaning that your boss and your mother and your best friend from clown college all see the same posts), Google+ lets you compartmentalize people into circles: friends, family, acquaintances and a category called “following,” which appears to be for people whose updates you’re interested in but who you don’t care to have any real life interaction with. You can also create customized circles that narrow your contacts even more: knitting group, people from dog park, people from high school you vaguely remember, people from high school you have no recollection of whatsoever. The possibilities are apparently endless.
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There’s a video-conferencing feature called “hang out,” a group-texting service called Huddle and plenty of other stuff guaranteed to suck even more time out of your day than you thought you had, but so far no one seems to be using much of it. My feed, or “content stream,” (yes, I joined up) shows a lot of people saying, in effect, “Is this thing on?”
Sure, there’s a sense of excitement in being an early adopter and, in this case, an air of exclusivity that comes from the fact that membership, at this point, is “by invitation only” (though invites aren’t too hard to come by). But with so many people’s Web browsers bookmarked with so many different online versions of the high school dance (if Facebook is like homecoming, Twitter is like the prom and MySpace is a freshmen ice cream social that somehow turned into a rave), it’s no surprise that the question that comes after “Is this thing on?” is often “What am I doing here?”
My first instinct is to say that what we’re doing primarily is wasting our time and worse. As my husband wisely points out, there is nothing anyone can post on Facebook that makes you like or respect them more than you did before. Your reputation can only lose luster or remain the same. (Indeed, that is why I have blocked my husband from viewing my Facebook page.)
When it comes to Twitter (which I also initially mocked but ended up joining), I’ve noticed that the more tweets I see from folks in a short period of time, the more I begin to wonder whether they’re receiving the proper psychiatric care. When I see that someone’s on MySpace, LinkedIn or Foursquare, I assume he or she is in a band, have some really boring job or are incapable of going anywhere alone, respectively.
I know these are unfair assumptions, and I know I’m doing some big-time generalizing here (though I have yet to hear a compelling argument for the GPS-driven, friend-locating service that is Foursquare, which seems useful primarily if you want to avoid running into someone). In simpler times we judged people according to the crowds they ran with; we now must form opinions based not only on people’s “friends” but the platforms on which they choose to collect them.
Google+, on the other hand, is so far largely impervious to such judgments. It’s so new that it has no identity and therefore no stigma. I haven’t yet posted something to lower my husband’s estimation of me because, like 99% of people I know, he’s not on it. That will change, of course; users are believed to be increasing at a rate of 1 million a day.
For now, though, I have to admit I kind of like it. There’s mystery and potential here, a little like the allure and do-over possibilities of moving to a new town in ninth grade.
Not that I don’t still think all of these social networking sites are hijacking our lives. Surely even the most ardent Facebookers won’t lie on their deathbeds one day saying, “I should have ‘liked’ more posts.” But given the choice between the homecoming dance and this awkward new dance that is Google+, I’ll choose awkwardness.
Besides, right now all anyone’s doing is getting drunk in the parking lot. And that can be the best part.
mdaum@latimescolumnists.com