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August 15, 2006

Google acquires biometric company Neven Vision

Marshall Kirkpatrick

29 comments »

Google announced today that they have brought biometric and photo recognition company Neven Vision into the Google fold. Neven Vision has patents on technology ranging from photo analysis to face recognition in video files to several patents for facial capture for avatar animation. Sounds like a fascinating partnership. The company is heavily focused on mobile phones and also offers a product to deliver coupons to mobile devices, something I was hoping would be included with today’s Google Maps coupon announcement.

Google was previously interested in aquiring photo recognition company Riya, but in the end did not. Riya has since expanded its focus beyond facial recognition.

Google says that it will use the newly acquired technology to extract information from photos, though it says that facial recognition in particular may be available “some day.” Gigaom’s Lizz Gannes points out that the LAPD already uses Neven Vision’s technology to recognize gang members. Investors in the company include Anthem Venture Partners and Zone Ventures. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Interesting update: as of midnight PST almost all the links on the Neven Vision site are now bringing up Google 404s.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Jordan

    August 15th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    The Neven Vision website states that the company was founded in 2003, so it is 3+ years old, not “ten” as you say in your post. See http://www.nevenvision.com/about.html

  2. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 15th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Thanks for pointing that out. Conflicting information, I’ll take it out and make a phone call.

  3. LostInBrittany

    August 15th, 2006 at 12:44 pm

    Three posts about Google and all of them seem neutral, fair and well documented. Congratulations, TechCrunch !

  4. zmarties

    August 15th, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    The Japanese website for Neven Vision

    http://www.n-vision.jp/e/company/company.html

    gives a capitalization of 140 million yen - about US $1.2 million, but since the news page there was last updated about 2 years ago, the valuation is probably of a similar vintage. It may also just refer to the Japanese operation.

  5. Adam

    August 15th, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    “The price of the acquisition was not disclosed” … yet. But it will be on Google’s upcoming SEC filings.

  6. Drew Olanoff

    August 15th, 2006 at 1:28 pm

    The boys at Google are busy, and acquiring pieces that make sense. Unlike AOL and Yahoo. Great stuff.

  7. Bryan

    August 15th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

    I think this is a great move by Google. It will take a while for Google to integrate Neven’s technology, but once they do… look out!
    Neven’s technology isn’t just limited to facial recognition either, they do objects as well. Could this take Google Earth to another level?

  8. Peter

    August 15th, 2006 at 4:59 pm

    How bout that? The LAPD is using facial recognition software to spy on Americans. Brilliant. Oh, my bad - they’re brown and black Americans, so they don’t count. Doh!

    You forgot to mention that other little outfit that’s using Google’s new spying technology - it starts with ‘Uncle’.

  9. HZ

    August 15th, 2006 at 5:21 pm

    Marshall, wrt time of development before the acquisition… both are correct. The company was founded in 2003, but the technology has been there since more than 10 years ago. It’s in the category of Elastic Bunch Graph Matching, developed at USC in middle 90’s.

  10. jumper

    August 15th, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    LostInBrittany,

    because it’s marshall who’s writing them? :)

  11. B.O

    August 15th, 2006 at 8:03 pm

    R.I.P Riya

  12. LostInBrittany

    August 16th, 2006 at 3:21 am

    Jumper,

    I didn’t see that. I guess that I was right about Michael’s Googlephobie then…

  13. Deep

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:45 am

    Even though I cant see anything in Neven Vision’s site… but i can say that riya.com has to get ready for a tough competition now.

  14. Danny Yang

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:41 am

    competition is good. =)

  15. paco_fery

    August 18th, 2006 at 7:52 am

    Good move;
    it´s may be possible for the next future that this technology could be apply to analyze the web pages graphics relevance

  16. Biometric Guy

    February 22nd, 2007 at 11:59 am

    Before 2003 they were Neven Engineering. That company went under and they started Neven Vision in 2003

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