by LEENA RAO
September 19th, 2012
Singaporean telecommunications giant SingTel has acquired
intelligent, social photo aggregator Pixable for $26.5 million. The company
develops sleek social photo creation, aggregation, and categorization tools.
Pixable’s Photofeed Facebook app and companion mobile apps
intelligently sort and categorize your friends’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
and Flickr photos, as well as Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube videos.
The company, which was founded by three MIT graduate
students in 2009, uses predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to
analyze users’ interactions and consumption habits to sort and categorize
photos from close friends and family. The company’s “WonderRank” technology
crawls users’ networks to find out what has interested them in the past and
what relationships are valued most using commonalities in background information
(like school, work history, etc.) to serve the best content.
Its machine-learning and algorithmic mix takes more than 70
signals into account, getting smarter the more you use the app, organizing
photos and videos into a number of fields (like most popular of the day, week,
month), showing which users changed profile pics, what photos and videos are
most recent, etc. Users are presented with the most interesting photos through
feeds such as “Top of the Day” and “New Profile Pics.”
To date, more than 4 million users have installed Pixable’s
“mobile photo inbox” service via the web, iOS devices, and Android devices.
Pixable’s early service allowed people to use all of their
Facebook and image-sharing site photo content such as captions, tagging
information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slideshows, calendars, and
artwork. Another one of Pixable’s early applications was a nifty tool that
allows you to make mosaics of your Facebook photos.
SingTel plans to offer additional intelligent photo services
to its 462 million mobile customers in Asia and Africa. In Singapore and
Australia, customers can already store and share photos safely using SingTel’s
cloud services. According to a release, “With Pixable and other rich technology
platforms acquired through recent investments, SingTel will be able to further
enrich the content and connections for customers in today’s digital world.”
Pixable has raised $6.6 million from Menlo
Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and others.
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