Google, on Friday, announced it has acquired JetPac, a startup that is popular for developing an app that recommends destinations based on users’ photos shared on social networking websites.
Although the financial details of the deal remained undisclosed, the San Francisco-based JetPac announced the acquisition on its website saying that the company would withdraw its Jetpac City Guides app from the App Store within a few days as it has been acquired by Google.
“We’ll be removing Jetpac’s apps from the App Store in the coming days, and ending support for them on 9/15,” read the company’s message on its website.
“We look forward to working on exciting projects with our colleagues at Google.”
Founded in 2011, Jetpac has its headquarters in San Francisco. What the app maker does is that it compiles information from users photos posted on social networks like Instagram and Facebook and creates guides using the information contained in the photographs through an artificial intelligence system.
The guides shows “top 10” lists of things to do in particular locations mostly focused on the most popular places to go. The app also allows users to see which places in the city are most frequented by their friends, various personalities, business travelers, students, foodies among others.
Jetpac also offers two other image-recognition apps- Spotter and Deep Belief.
It is expected that Google might utilize JetPac’s technology either to bolster Google+ features or use it in search results for Google Now and Google Maps to pull in more images.
Some of Google’s other recent acquisitions includes smartphone video creation platform Directr by YouTube and digital assistant messaging application, Emu.