Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Google acquires image-based city guides company Jetpac to improve visual search

Jason Hahn
By

Jetpac Google
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Google is continuing its acquisition binge in 2014 with the purchase of Jetpac, an iOS app that uses public information from Instagram photos to create image-driven city maps and guides. The move appears to be a step toward improving the search giant’s visual-search capabilities.

Jetpac-HipsterJetpac’s City Guides app offers users visual guides to local recommendations for bars, views and other hangout spots in more than 6,000 cities around the world. It serves up guides that are tailored to the user’s personal affinities or filtered by categories of places to go. It also has a “Snappyness” rating to show what visitors snap the most photos of at a specific venue.

Recommended Videos

Related: Google acquires drone company Titan Aerospace

Related

The app also identifies notable elements in Instagram photos, such as blue skies and mustaches, in order to categorize hangout spots. So, for instance, a spot with a noticeably high number of mustaches in photos is tagged as a “Hipster Hangout.”

Jetpac’s Spotter app, on the other hand, allows users to use their iPhone’s video camera to identify objects in real time. This “deep learning” feature in particular may be a boon for Google’s image search capabilities – for its Google Goggles app, for instance. Meanwhile, the City Guides functionalities may be a nifty implementation for Google+ or Google Maps.

Jetpac has announced the acquisition on its website, noting that its iOS apps will soon be removed from the App Store and that support for its apps will end on Sept. 15.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and Google has yet to confirm the acquisition.

Jetpac City Guides – The Discovery from JetpacApp on Vimeo.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jason Hahn
Jason Hahn
Contributor
Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…
Google Images’ latest feature makes it easy to find that perfect shareable GIF
google job widget update chrome android app os

Google has been consistently making Search more and more helpful over the past few months, with features like the ability to share results straight from Search. Now, it's Google Images' turn to get a new feature -- Google has announced that it's making it easier to share the perfect GIF with a new "Share GIFs" section, in which you can quickly and easily share GIFs into apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, and Messenger.

Google Images has supported GIFs for some time now, and the new feature itself is powered by Google's already-established GIF search engine.

Read more
You can now share Google Search results straight from the app
Google Search

Google is making it a little easier to share search results. How? Well, with a share button, of course. The new share button is available in the Google app beta for Android, so its reach is a little limited right now. That said, the feature will likely make its way to the standard app on both Android and iOS in the near future.

This isn't the first way to share a Google Search result, but it may be the easiest. In the past, you could simply copy and paste the URL, or use LMGTFY (Let me Google that for you), which was usually a little more of a sarcastic way to share a Google search result. Now, however, you don't necessarily have to use either of those methods.

Read more
New Google Search feature will let you see life-size animals up close with AR
Google search

Google Search rolled out a new feature that allows owners of augmented reality-enabled smartphones to go on a safari in the comfort of their own living room.

At Google's I/O conference in May,  Google’s vice president for camera and augmented reality products Aparna Chennapragada demonstrated how Google Search may use AR to layer 3D models on top of the real world. This will allow people to look at the 3D object from every angle, and place it in the location of their choice.

Read more