Apple has spent a little bit of that huge cash surplus to buy Polar Rose, a Sweden-based technology company that focuses on face recognition. In a blog post dated September 2nd, Thijs Stalenhoef notes that their face-tagging service is closing down, and, “You may yet see our technology in one of our licensees’ products in the future.”
Polar Rose produced a cool product called FaceCloud, which brought face recognition to web services. Think photo tagging on Facebook to get an idea. iPodNN guesses that Apple may want to bring the service to MobileMe, thereby providing the Faces feature to those without iPhoto.
In addition, their very cool FaceLib technology allows mobile devices to recognize users’ faces and pull up their associated social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter, Fickr and more. We can easily see such a thing working on the iPhone. Watch a video of FaceLib for Android after the break.
TUAWApple has bought out Polar Rose originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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