Face.com ( he, פייס.קום) was an Israeli technology company that developed a platform for efficient and accurate facial recognition in photos uploaded via web and mobile applications. Face.com apps and

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

services scanned billions of photos monthly and

tagged Tagged may refer to: * Tagged (website), a social discovery website * Tagged (web series), an American teen psychological thriller web series {{disambiguation ...

faces in those photos, tying them to social networking information. As of February 2011, the company had “discovered” 18 billion faces across its API and Facebook applications. The company was established in 2009 in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the ...

, and maintained an office with 10 employees. Face.com developed and released two Facebook applications: Photo Finder and Photo Tagger. Photo Finder allowed users to find untagged pictures of themselves as well as friends on Facebook and then tag those photos. Photo Tagger enabled bulk-tagging of faces that appear in multiple photos uploaded to the Facebook website. On June 18, 2012, the company announced that it has been acquired by

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

. It was also announced that they were winding up their API's to focus on new Facebook products.

REST API Program

In March 2010, Face.com opened an Alpha of their free

REST Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

API, allowing third party developers to integrate the Face.com facial recognition technology, algorithms, and database of tagged faces with their own apps and services. The REST API gave developers free access to all of the platform's technology, with some applicable rate limits while also offering white listing and premium licensing options. With the API, developers could tag and recognize users from Facebook and Twitter, attach Face.com technology to their own index of images, or even mix and match facial recognition across photo sources, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and more. In February 2011, Face.com's API program moved from Alpha to Beta, increasing the rate limit from 200 scanned photos per hour to 5,000 photos per hour. As of February 10, more than 10,000 developers were using the Face API.

Funding

Face.com raised a total of $5.3 million in funding for their face recognition technology. A

Series A A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exc ...

round, totaling $1 million was raised in February 2009. On September 27, 2010, the company announced that it had closed a Series B round of $4.3 million, led by previous investor Rhodium and Russia-based investor

Yandex Yandex LLC (russian: link=no, Яндекс, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine, information services, e-commerce, transportation, map ...

. On June 18, 2012, the company was acquired by

for an undisclosed sum estimated to be between $55 and $60 million.

University of Massachusetts study

In 2011, a study conducted at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, ...

compared a portion of the Face.com

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

, and found it to have a recognition rate of 0.91{{cite web, title=Labeled Faces in the Wild, url=http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html, publisher=University of Massachusetts

Update

As of June 2012 Face.com was sold to Facebook. The Technology is continued under the project

DeepFace DeepFace is a deep learning facial recognition system created by a research group at Facebook. It identifies human faces in digital images. The program employs a nine-layer neural network with over 120 million connection weights and was trained o ...

. As of December 2015 the domain Face.com was sold to an e-commerce company.

References

Israeli companies established in 2009 Facial recognition software Meta Platforms acquisitions Online companies of Israel Mergers and acquisitions of Israeli companies 2012 mergers and acquisitions Israeli inventions