The Dropbox computer vision acquisition that slipped under the radar
Summary
Admittedly, the Anchovi acquisition slipped under my radar too, until I heard a couple recent references from people in the know about the computer vision team Dropbox is putting together. Anchovi’s underlying techniques weren’t based on deep learning (this 2008 paper co-authored by three of the four founders seems to explain its classification model in more detail), but they still appear rather effective. Should Dropbox want to enter the fray and start doing something intelligent with the petabytes of untagged photos that its users might some day want to search through, the Anchovi team’s skillset would certainly come in handy. It would also seem to make a nice complement for the talents of the team that built SnapJoy — a photo-aggregation service that Dropbox acquired in December 2012 before closing it in June. I have reached out to Dropbox for a comment on the Anchovi acquisition and any plans to launch a photo service, and will update this post when I receive a response.
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