Yahoo! acquires IQ Engines
28 Aug 2013
1
Yahoo! has announced acquisition of face and image recognition technologies company IQ Engines. The technology is likely to be used by Yahoo's photo-sharing platform Flickr, in the near future, to help users to organise and search their online albums.
IQ Engines owns two proprietary technologies, SmartCamera and SmartAlbum that allow retrieval of the maximum amount of information from an image taken on a smart phone for accurate recognition of images and faces.
The technologies developed by the company involve processing of several elements in the background, GPS data, the type of object photographed or any text present in the photo. According to a message on IQ Engines' website, the company hopes to improve the way Flickr users searched and browsed their photos "by helping to process them intelligently."
Flickr offers users 1TB of free photo storage, the equivalent of 537,731 photos with 6.5MP resolution, or 1.1 million photos at 3MP and also allows users to upload videos of up to 3 minutes in HD format (1080p).
The acquisition comes after Yahoo bought Qwiki, with its technology for producing and sharing short videos, Xobni, with its personal address book technology, and of course the microblogging platform Tumblr, for the record sum of $1.1 billion in the past year.
''IQ Engines is joining the Flickr team at Yahoo,'' IQ Engines said in a message on its website.
''As longtime Flickr fans and fellow photography enthusiasts, we look forward to working on improving photo organisation and search for the community.''
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has been snapping up companies after Marissa Mayer took over as chief last year with a mission to revive the declining fortunes of the internet pioneer.
Mayer's plan for Yahoo includes focusing on mobile devices, video, personalised digital content, and boosting the popularity of the company outside the US.
Yahoo shares picked up sharply last week after the struggling internet giant topped a survey for US web visitors for the first time after 2011.
In late afternoon trading on Monday, Yahoo was trading slightly down at $27.97.
According to the comScore survey, Yahoo had overtaken Google with 195.6 million unique US web visitors.
It was the first time Yahoo made it to the top after May 2011. Figures for Yahoo's newly acquired Tumblr blog sites are not considered in the survey.
IQ Engines owns two proprietary technologies, SmartCamera and SmartAlbum that allow retrieval of the maximum amount of information from an image taken on a smart phone for accurate recognition of images and faces.
The technologies developed by the company involve processing of several elements in the background, GPS data, the type of object photographed or any text present in the photo. According to a message on IQ Engines' website, the company hopes to improve the way Flickr users searched and browsed their photos "by helping to process them intelligently."
Flickr offers users 1TB of free photo storage, the equivalent of 537,731 photos with 6.5MP resolution, or 1.1 million photos at 3MP and also allows users to upload videos of up to 3 minutes in HD format (1080p).
The acquisition comes after Yahoo bought Qwiki, with its technology for producing and sharing short videos, Xobni, with its personal address book technology, and of course the microblogging platform Tumblr, for the record sum of $1.1 billion in the past year.
''IQ Engines is joining the Flickr team at Yahoo,'' IQ Engines said in a message on its website.
''As longtime Flickr fans and fellow photography enthusiasts, we look forward to working on improving photo organisation and search for the community.''
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has been snapping up companies after Marissa Mayer took over as chief last year with a mission to revive the declining fortunes of the internet pioneer.
Mayer's plan for Yahoo includes focusing on mobile devices, video, personalised digital content, and boosting the popularity of the company outside the US.
Yahoo shares picked up sharply last week after the struggling internet giant topped a survey for US web visitors for the first time after 2011.
In late afternoon trading on Monday, Yahoo was trading slightly down at $27.97.
According to the comScore survey, Yahoo had overtaken Google with 195.6 million unique US web visitors.
It was the first time Yahoo made it to the top after May 2011. Figures for Yahoo's newly acquired Tumblr blog sites are not considered in the survey.
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