Jetpac is a San Francisco based company which created a mobile application that is designed to come up with interesting city guides. It uses pictures that are publicly posted in social networking sites. These pictures provide the system a sort of a visual cue.
One example is analyzing the number of pictures that have mustaches in them in order to find out the fashion style or the number of hipsters there are in a determined location. By using this system, the company can get contextual information on an area where the photo was taken. It can even confirm on the goodness of a place and see if it is exactly how it was described in the reviews. It can also find places that are popular among a certain group of people such as women who are in their 30's. By comparison, Jetpac is one step ahead of Yelp or Google Maps since it provides visual information on what is really happening in a given place.
Jetpac started back in 2011. During the early months, the Jetpac app allowed people to explore those travel pictures that are taken from their friends' Facebook account and let them decide where they wanted to visit the next time they travel. Recently, the company developed a unique mechanism that can spot smiles in pictures. This helps them discern the happiness rate of the people in a city. It has also developed real-time local object recognition as seen on the video from a phone's camera. This type of technology may just be an enhanced version of Google Goggles.
Jetpac is removing the app from the App Store in the next couple of days. The company will be ending its support on Sept. 15. This was mentioned by the company in a tweet where it announced the acquisition.
"We look forward to working on exciting projects with our colleagues at Google. We'll be removing Jetpac's apps from the App Store in the coming days, and ending support for them on 9/15," said Pete Warden, cofounder and chief technology officer of Jetpac.
The team behind Jetpac was skilled in deep learning, an area that Google has also spent a lot of time to work on. The acquisition would definitely provide the tech company with more talent and ideas on ways to push technologies that focus on image-recognition. After all, there seems to be a growing interest among several companies to have their own deep-learning operations. These would include Microsoft, Baidu, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
Terms of the deal and more concrete details are not available at the moment. Google was not available to give a comment beyond the normal business hours.
