Facial recognition technology startup Face.com publicly launched at last year’s Techonomy event in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The company is today publicly launching a developer community and open API, providing third-party developers access to their facial recognition technology, including the algorithm that powers their Facebook applications Photo Finder and Photo Tagger.

The former app saw one hell of a kick-off, tagging up to 400 million photos in its first month. A year later, Face.com’s Facebook apps have scanned over 7 billion photos in total and identified no less than 52 million faces.

Developers who are interested in building their own facial recognition apps can now get full access to the open Face.com API, free of charge. That basically means developers can tap into Face.com’s face detection and recognition technology and create brand new ways for friends to engage through photos at zero cost. Hard to beat that offer.

Face.com is letting any developer tap into their tech through simple REST API calls, and via Facebook’s and Twitter’s APIs also enable developers to apply their tried face recognition tech to their users’ social graphs.

Here are some examples of ways the Face Open API and database have already been integrated: Celeb-Finder/Twitterazzi, Tagger Widget and PosterYourself.

Soure: TechCrunch

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

Source: Help Save MySQL!