August 25, 2014

Search engine giant Google has acquired social travel app maker ‘Jetpac’, as was disclosed on the latter’s website, on 18th August, 2014. The announcement read, “We’re joining Google! We look forward to working on exciting projects with our colleagues at Google.” Jetpac also added that they will remove their applications from Apple’s App Store by September 15, 2014.

Jetpac was established back in the year 2011 and during its initial stages it allowed people to explore the travel pictures taken by their Facebook friends to decide whether they want to visit that place or not. For instance if you wanted to search for an Irish pub in the area you would just have to search with the most specific terms and Jetpac would sort through millions of pictures posted on social networking sites to deliver you the most relevant results. Of late however, the company has created a unique tool that is able to spot smiles (face expressions) in the pictures. This helps you to determine people’s happiness rate at a particular location. Jetpac has also developed immediate recognition of a local object as seen through a phone camera which is quite similar to the Google Goggles technology.

It is not yet clear what’s in Google’s mind with the acquisition and whether or not will it integrate the artificial intelligence technology of the app with its own map and image search services, however there are some services of Jetpac that go well with Google’s primacies. Firstly, it works on an automatic technology to extract information from different publicly accessible photos on Instagram. Jetpac also worked on a technology called ‘neural network’, to analyze the photos, which is a system of programs that can be automated to examine the photographs for different elements like facial hair, makeup or accessories to outline the atmosphere of a bar or restaurant. Jetpac also sneaks through Facebook photos and uses an algorithm to find out the place where your friends enjoyed the most during their vacations. Secondly, as many as 6000 city guide results of Jetpac are intended to provide personalized geographic details and this kind of technology blends well with the services like Google+, Google Maps and Google Now.

The skilled team at Jetpac has years of experience in deep learning, an area in which Google has spent a lot of time. The procurement would surely provide the tech giant with a lot of talented employees and creative ideas to improve expertise in image-recognition. Also, now you can expect a better merger of the real world into web search results.