KLIK v1.0 is here and ready for prime time.  As many of you know, we’ve been testing a preliminary version of our real-time face recognition camera app KLIK.  Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us improve our product and, today, we’re announcing KLIK 1.0, which we have just released into the iOS App Store. You can download it here.

KLIK 1.0 has improved face recognition, “Face Filters” specifically designed to make faces beautiful, a new commenting and “like” system, push notifications, and, most importantly, a brand new mode for training KLIK on friends’ faces – called “Learn Mode.”

Learn Mode

Learn Mode

Our new “Learn” mode is a quick way to improve face recognition and gives you and your friends a cool sneak peek behind the scenes of KLIK. “Learn” mode allows users to quickly tag faces and acts as a training mechanism helping KLIK to better recognize those faces for future recognition and tagging. It also serves as a means for manually adding someone to your universe of recognizable faces.

KLIK works based on real-time matching of your friends with their tagged photos on Facebook. Unfortunately, some friends just don’t have a lot of pictures tagged on Facebook (or they’re keeping them private to friends or apps), meaning KLIK has a harder time recognizing them – that’s where “Learn” mode comes in.

You can enter the “Learn” mode anytime by clicking the button on the type right. Once you’re in Learn mode, point your camera at your friend and KLIK will show you a list of potential matches (with confidence percentages). If they’re on the list, just pick their name or you can manually tell KLIK who they are.

Face Filters

While most photo filters apply their effects on the entire photo, ours were designed with faces in mind and are dynamic based on the location, size and number of faces in a photo. For example, some of our filters use a blur effect on everything but people’s faces. This simulates a shallow depth of field camera setting and creates a composition that focuses on the people in the photo.

Other filters might make faces shine through by specific treatment of the face area that balances out other filter effects. A great example is the “Epik” filter, which takes the subtle treatment one step further and actually creates a zoom blur effect that originates on the face in the photo, making sure it looks…well, epic.

Exploring and Interacting with Photos

We’ve completely revamped our “Nearby” feed to provide you with a beautiful and serendipitous browsing experience. Fire up the Nearby feed wherever you are and see friends’ and public photos taken near you. You can also scroll down to get farther and farther from your current location and experience photos from your entire city and beyond. Don’t forget you can also branch out from any photo you’re viewing to the feeds of all the people tagged in it, as well as the location it was shot at.

Hearing how cool your photos look is always fun. With KLIK 1.0, you and your friends can now like and comment on KLIK photos When you like a photo on KLIK or add a comment, your friends will be instantly notified about it. Of course, it works the other way around – push notifications will always alert you (if you choose) when your friends have liked and commented on your photos. You’ll also be notified when someone tags a photo of you and it’ll instantly be added to your personal feed.

We’ve been building KLIK for sometime and will continue to value your feedback so comments and suggestions are always welcome. A truckload of “Thank You’s” and “Atta boys” to everyone involved for making KLIK a reality. You can now take a 15-minute nap.

The Face.com Team

Our Chief Explanatory Officer, Gil Hirsch, sat down with Abby Johnson of WebProNews and talked about all things Face.com.  Check out the interview! If you’d like to explore our shiny brand new Age Detection API, you can get started here.

We’re never satisfied here at Face.com and always looking for ways to improve the core capabilities of our API while adding new features to let developers create innovative applications. This week, we made a major upgrade on both fronts – deployed new algorithm that improve recognition by 30%, added age detection and even upgrade our datacenter.

First, and most exciting, we’ve added a completely new attribute to our API: age detection. For the first time, developers will be able to create applications that detect and estimate the age of faces found in photos. When using the API, our new age detection technology will return 3 relevant integer values per tag: minimum age, maximum age, and an estimated age, as well as their respective confidence level (expressed as a percent).  Developers can even set parameters to identify subjects within a group by age. For example, the age API can look at an image and identify those faces that likely belong to individuals aged 18-25.

The uses of this capability are nearly limitless, from parental control applications (restricting or enabling age-limited functionality based on the visitor’s age) to potential real-world targeted advertising based on detected age range of a consumer. Of course, as is always the case with Face.com technology, user privacy is key and controls have been engineered into the code. No identifiable information is accessible to developers via age recognition or any other part of our API – developers will only be able to estimate an age and build applications around that estimation.

In equally exciting news, we’ve deployed new recognition algorithms on our engines, improving recognition by 30%. Detection has been boosted too, increasing accuracy of pose and points of interest. This means face detection and recognition is more powerful and accurate than ever, even under sub-optimal conditions.

Finally, the entire API has been redeployed on a larger, stronger and elastic data center, improving robustness and availability to developers.

We’re excited to see what our developer community builds using the new, more accurate Face.com API along with age recognition. As always, we’ll keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest Face.com applications via our developer newsletter, which you can sign up for here

Hey Hey from PhotoHackDay2.  Just wanted to give everyone out there in the Series of Tubes a quick update:

• Turnout is even more ridiculous-er than last year.  Double perhaps? We can’t count that high.
• It’s 10:00pm EST and everyone is still going strong fueled by BBQ, booze and 50 Cent’s energy drink, SK. (Not even making that up.)
• We’re short on shirts & stickers so better come find us now before they’re gone.
• Everyone we’ve met rocks and we’re pretty excited to be here.

Face.com is in NYC this weekend for PhotoHackDay 2.  We’re jetting in, sponsoring (aka making it rain), presenting, holding an API workshop

on Saturday (12:00 – 12:30)  and giving a prize for best use of our API. Plus…prize for the best application will get $5,000.  Check out the full prize page here - there are a ton!

In other ridiculous face-related news, we’re going to make a brand new alpha api available exclusively to PHD2 hackers to tinker with. We’ll be happy to tell you all about it during opening and workshop.

We’ve asked our staff to be on call for the occasion so they will be providing real-time support. Here’s how you can get our attention:

• Ask a question in our developer forum: http://developers.face.com/forums/
• Email us at support@face.com
• We’ll be there,  just holler for Gil

We’ve been secretly working on “Project Badass” (not really its name) for months now and last week was the culmination of many sleepless nights, a massive quantity of spousal understanding and at least 3 crying fits (but really manly crying fits, like those of a conquering hero).  Introducing KLIK – a real-time mobile face recognition application.

KLIK is Face.com’s new real-time mobile face recognition camera application.  Just download the app here, connect it to Facebook, Twitter or both and voila!  You’ll be recognizing friends with your mobile phone in no time (and in real time too).  It’s magic – and we don’t use that word lightly.  Share photos on KLIK, Facebook, Twittter, and with friends.  If you don’t like it, we’ll give you double your money back.  Did I mention it’s free? Common responses we received at the party were “woah!”, “Holy crap!”, and “I love it, but it still needs some work.” We’re still in the initial stages of development but wanted to share it with friends, get your feedback and continue to improve.  If KLIK doesn’t recognize a face – snap a photo, tap “Tag Me” over unrecognized faces to pick a name, and then save the photo (no need to share). The more photos you save, the better KLIK gets.

To celebrate our hard work, the entire Face.com team flew to San Francisco to live it up. About 120 people gathered at the amazing Clift Hotel Spanish Suite to party with the beautiful people (hey, we had to make up for our ugly mugs), an amazing live band, food, copious amounts of liquor, a KLIK themed drink called a ‘KLIKtail’, demo stations and all kinds of cool schwag to toast the birth of KLIK.  If you didn’t attend, we totally invited you and you should check your spam folder.

Some party pics and pictures from the KLIK app are below including CEO Gil Hirsch getting jiggy with feedbomb – the best Silicon Valley cover band there ever was.  Much fun was had by all.  Thank you to our team for working so tirelessly, our friends for attending and showing us the love, and finally all our users and developers who have given us valuable feedback and support.  We look forward to continuing the work to make KLIK even better and welcome your honest feedback.

Our good friends at Apigee have a pretty stellar API collection designed to be a great place for developers to find and explore new APIs.  On December 27, Apigee launched a holiday “gift” to their users by assembling a collection of some of their favorite cutting-edge geeky API Consoles. Much to our delight, they included Face.com. Check it out here: https://apigee.com/console/facecom

Apigee makes it easy to learn, test and explore APIs by letting you request/response pairs, get past authentication quickly and share screen shots.   We love it.  Thanks to all the hard working people at Apigee for burning the midnight oil over the holidays.  We know our developers love easy – thanks for making it even easier.

Thanks,

The Face Team

People all over the world are using Face.com’s API for new, different and amazing things.  So amazing in fact that we’d like to share some of them with you.  Let me just take off my jacket, put on my comfy blue sweater and change into sneakers.  OK, ready to share…but this isn’t make-believe:

The News360 App - There are now so many news outlets, news aggregators and blogs that it’s tough to know what to prioritize and read first (besides the face.com blog of course).  News360 is the solution.  As TechCrunch recently said, “News360 is a news reading application with semantic underpinnings that uses smart algorithms to personalize your news reading experience. Upon installation, you connect your Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Google Reader and now, Google+, accounts to the service, which helps it determine what sort of things you would find interesting.”  News360 collects images from more than 1,500 online news sources, and then intelligently crops the photos to fit the different devices displaying the app – otherwise faces in the photos would be cut off.  This solves a huge problem because cropping portraits to a specific size is necessary but tedious work. Face.com allowed them to very easily solve this issue.

 FareClock - During High School, this app would have been my nightmare, but my boss’ dream come true.  No more having your buddy do a solid for you.  Your boy can’t punch you in so that you’re on the clock. Those glorious days are over!  FareClock uses Face.com’s face recognition software to verify that is in fact you and you’re present, ready to work.  I’m sure Fred Flintstone would have appreciated it.  The alternative left him sticking his timecard into a dinosaur’s mouth.  Congrats FareClock.  Employers everywhere are saluting you.

MA7 Mashup Awards – No, it’s not cherry blossom season…it’s Fall so that means it’s…hackathon season!  MA7 is Japan’s #1 Hackathon with a grand prize of
1,000,000 Yen.  That’s like…a whole lotta Yen. The contest started in September and winners will be announced on December 11th.  Currently using the Face.com API, is a very cool little app called HairReco.  It’s a web service that proposes various hairstyles for you.  Simple. Why this doesn’t already exist, we have no idea.  It could have saved millions of women from severe, post haircut trauma.  Lives could have been saved. We love the app and will be sending you some very chic Face.com t-shirts very soon. Good luck in the competition!

That’s it for now.  Thanks to all the developers who spent countless nights awake in their office and many sunny days shut in and closed off to the world.  The sacrifice was well worth it.  Keep ‘em coming.  We can’t wait to see what else you have in store.  OK, now to put on that jacket and loafers…back to work.

The Face Team

Ever wonder how you’d look as a funhouse mirror freak of nature?  Well, now you can give your paranoid schizophrenic delusions a test run with GooTube.  Try on a face or two without having to raid your girlfriend’s makeup…or undergo plastic surgery for the sheer fun of it .

Choose from many disturbing, truly vile and crazy funhouse mirror faces.  Be the freak show you know you are.  Share the results on Facebook and make your friends sorry they ever friended you in the first place.

We love the app and can’t stop futzing around with the many crazy, maniacal, disfigured and generally zombie-like faces. Kudos to Tomek (aka Og2t) for developing such a fun Halloween app.  You definitely earned your Face.com t-shirt.  Try not to get blood on it.

Our API is free to all up to 5,000 photos per hour.  Let us know how we can help you in your quest to build new, innovative and sometimes wickedly scary apps.

Happy Halloween!!!

We’re  back from WIRED UK 2011 – cheerio, pip pip, tea, crumpets, and all that rot.

The two-day conference in London was billed as a celebration of ideas, innovations and the people reshaping our world and there’s no question it fit that bill.  The speakers in attendance provided brain food for personal development on a range of topics, from science and business to pop culture and politics. Of course, the highlight of the whole conference (from totally unbiased sources – like us) was Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch presenting on the power of face recognition, complete with a demonstration of something really cool that you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future – real time mobile face recognition.

Face.com was invited to speak on the general topic of the ‘Social Future’,  but our focus was to convey the power of face recognition in our lives and the possibilites and opportunities that exist in a more transparent world.  We were honored to attend and thank the organizers at WIRED for all their support.  As has been so often quoted in recent days and again at WIRED, “Here’s to the crazy ones.” We couldn’t agree more.

Many thanks to everyone working behind the scenes who made WIRED 2011 and our real time mobile face recognition demonstration possible.  Pictures of our visit to foggy London town below.