Face.com is an Israeli startup and its facial recognition technology has already been used by Facebook.
The company was founded in 2007 but according to Israeli news publication Calcalist, it has only received $5.3m in funding.
The rumour comes just over a week after Facebook’s lacklustre IPO performance. The company has made several acquisitions from the start of the year in efforts to strengthen its weak mobile platform.
Acquiring facial recognition technology could enhance its mobile platform offering. The site has recently made large investments in the mobile app area with its recent acquisition of photo app, Instagram and the company’s new photo application ‘Camera.’
Facebook could benefit from applying Face.com to its photo technology which could make identifying faces in photos on the site accurate and easy.
The social networking company has also been recruiting engineers to build a smartphone rumoured to be released by next year.
This would be the company’s third attempt to develop a smartphone.
The social networking site tried to develop a phone in 2010 but stopped plans when the company feared it would develop into a hardware maker instead of a software developer. The firm’s second attempt was working with Taiwanese smartphone company, HTC under the codename "Buffy."
Facebook’s smartphone project with HTC is still under development but the company is propelling plans forward on its own and has hired "more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone and one who worked on the iPad."
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