Yahoo buys image recognition start-up company IQ Engine

Beijing Time August 24 Noon News, a Yahoo spokesman confirmed in Friday, Yahoo has acquired image recognition start-up company Iqengine.

Yahoo declined to disclose the terms of the acquisition, but Iqengine's team confirmed in a bulletin that they would join the Flickr team in "Improving photo management and search".

Iqengine was concerned in 2010 when the company gained 1 million dollars in investment and developed an API (application interface) to help network retailers and application developers provide visual search engines. The company then attended a 2010-year demo conference, and was considered by the industry as one of the most noteworthy start-up companies.

Iqengine currently maintains two APIs. One of its smartcamera. This API is intended for online retailers to help users interact with products and brand logos. Another API, named Smartalbum, supports photo analysis and facial recognition in Web albums and mobile applications. The latter API may be exactly what Yahoo needs.

The API developed by Iqengine has been used by many well-known companies, including Best Buy, Oldnavy and Tesco. However, the company will close these APIs over the next 30 days. Iqengine a 3.8 million dollar investment in the latest round of funding, including the Thirdpointventures and Motorola system's VC sector.

Although Iqengine's main business is to provide an image-recognition API, the company has been developing mobile album apps glow to help users manage photos on smartphones based on automatically generated labels. This application can not only manage photos based on location, but also manage them based on content. In the future, this technology is likely to be integrated into Flickr applications.