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Apple has bought out Polar Rose

by Dave Caolo Sep 20th 2010 at 2:00PM

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.



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Apple has spent a little bit of that huge cash surplus to buy Polar Rose, a Sweden-based technology company that focuses on face...
 

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K4K3

Just a wild guess here, but I'm pretty sure they'd want to use such a technology with a little social music network that someone (not naming any names here) just launched. just a guess... perhaps to add incentive of ease of use when it comes to tagging pictures. Pretty sure they'll integrate MobileMe with Ping in the near future anyway.

September 20 2010 at 11:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Doc Rock

I didn't Mike Rose had a sister :p

September 20 2010 at 3:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tali

That's a pretty cool feature I would like to use to unlock my phone as opposed to entering a pass code. What wouldn't be cool is if someone could use a picture of me to unlock my phone.

September 20 2010 at 2:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Tali's comment
Rego

Yes, using facial recognition to control who is authorizes to use the device is way more important than the social networking stuff.

I would hope that it could distinguish between a user's photo and a live user.
Possibly by retina scan or finger print etc.

September 20 2010 at 4:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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