Awesome News - Facebook Acquires Face.com
Facebook has acquired Face.com! Our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways to make face recognition a fun, engaging part of people's lives, and incorporate remarkable technology into everyday consumer products.
Context & Ripple Effects
The deal closes a loop that opened three weeks ago, when sources told TechCrunch that Facebook was definitely acquiring Face.com; today the company itself confirmed it, with AllThingsD pegging the price at nearly $60 million. It is Facebook's second major purchase this spring, following the Instagram agreement in April 2012.
The timing matters: the acquisition lands a month after Facebook's IPO, which left legions of small-time retail buyers underwater even as the stock has climbed 20% over two weeks. Buying proven mobile-era technology outright — rather than building it — is part of how management answers questions about whether the company can keep shipping products after going public.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains both Face.com's talent and its facial recognition technology, per the completed deal terms, putting automated photo identification directly under its control rather than licensed from a third party.
- Face.com exits the market as an independent vendor; its mission statement frames the move as folding its recognition work into everyday consumer products inside Facebook rather than serving outside developers.
Second-order effects
- Every social and photo competitor now has to match Facebook's tagging capability in-house or through its own acquisitions, since the leading independent consumer face-recognition shop is no longer available to license.
- The near-$60M price sets a fresh benchmark for computer-vision talent deals, raising the ask for any startup in the space negotiating with larger platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Instagram in April, Face.com in June — Facebook's post-IPO strategy leans on tuck-in acquisitions of mobile-native technology teams, consolidating capability that used to sit with independent developers into the platform itself.
- As face recognition moves from a niche API business into core social-graph infrastructure, the privacy questions around biometric data shift from developer communities to regulators and the general user base, though the shape of that scrutiny is genuinely uncertain from here.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing independent computer-vision and mobile-technology companies wholesale, converting a startup ecosystem into in-house platform capability.