Facebook has closed a deal to buy Face.com,
an Israeli facial recognition software startup, the companies
announced Monday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed in an official announcement
on Face.com's website, but influential tech site TechCrunch said the
price was between $55 million and $60 million.
Facebook has been using Face.com's technology for about two years
to help users automatically tag photos of their friends. The company
is now working on a new product that would automatically tag pictures
taken with a mobile phone.
Facebook sees mobile photos as an increasingly important service
to its 900 million users who currently upload more than 300 million
photos per day. Earlier this year it paid a reported $1 billion
for the photo-sharing service Instagram.
