Apple (AAPL) Purchased Facial Recognition Firm Polar Rose [Confirmed]

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has apparently paid close to $26 Million for Polar Rose, and when one considers their current direction with Facetime, mobile Financial Transactions and more complex mobile devices it is easy to come up with any number of ways that this technology is attractive to Apple.

Polar Rose are the company behind the facial recognition technology that was built into Facebook and Flickr, and used for photo tagging.

After that success Polar Rose continued to refine its tools, culminating in an Android app called “Recognizr”, which uses Augmented Reality and Facial Recognition to create a very unique user account feature for Android devices.

Basically it used facial recognition to have different home pages for different people’s profiles on a device. User accounts, something which is common place in desktop operating systems is something that people have been clamouring for on the Apple iPad for some time now.

A more mundane use might simply be face tagging in iPhoto. More likely is facial recognition on mobile devices and if this will factor into the Near Field Communications technology Apple are rumoured to be working on for financial transactions is another matter for consideration.

Apple has bought quite a few technologies in the last year or two. Many of which that have not actually shown up in products yet.

When one thinks back to Apple’s purchase of LaLa (a music streaming service), Siri (a new kind of search technology in the form of a kind of digital PA) and hirings like Near Fields Communications expert, Benjamin Vigier, there is almost a tangible feel of lots of jigsaw puzzle pieces coming together…

Most certainly all these pieces have a relationship to one another.

What do you think Apple is up to? Have your say in the comments…

[TechEYE]

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3 Comments on “Apple (AAPL) Purchased Facial Recognition Firm Polar Rose [Confirmed]”

  1. David

    I think Apple’s just buying up the competition, and I doubt they have anything exceptional up their sleeves. Things like Facetime and all these other “world changing” technologies are unproven and will not necessarily be adopted by consumers. I say Apple should focus on refining the products they already have – namely making the new iPhone 4 have better phone call quality

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