Digital Week in Review: Google grabs facial-recognition ‘ware firm’ Amsive Digital Published: July 25, 2011 2 min read Categories: News Google grabs facial-recognition ‘ware firm’; The Register Google has bought a facial recognition company called pittpatt. The Takeaway: The acquisition looks a little curious in light of comments by Eric Schmidt at Google’s ‘Big Tent’ privacy conference in May to the effect that facial recognition technology creeped him out, and in which the company co-founder seemed to state that Google would not make use of such technology. Four Things Google Plus Could Do To Fix Google Plus; ZDNet Saturday’s Google+ user account deletion purge plunged the new social network into a crisis of user trust. The community wants it fixed. The Takeaway: It seems impossible that the issue around name and identity – and how to implement policy, let alone understand the needs of modern social network users – could have been overlooked in the year and a half that Google+ was being created. Twitter Is Said to Buy Employee Stock With Half of $800 Million in Funding; Bloomberg Twitter Inc. is close to raising $800 million in funding and will use half the money to buy back shares from its employees and backers, according to two people with knowledge of the plan. The Takeaway: Investors are enticed by the popularity of Twitter’s service, which lets users share 140-character messages. Its members include celebrities, executives and President Barack Obama, who together send more than 200 million messages a day. The company is working to make money from those users by selling advertising. Bing Becomes a Distraction for Microsoft; The New York Times Microsoft needs to concentrate on a different kind of search: finding a buyer for Bing, its online search business. Bing is the industry’s distant No. 2 after Google. The Takeaway: The company thinks search makes its offerings in everything from mobile phones to business software more compelling. Perhaps, but there is little evidence to date. And Bing and sites it powers like Yahoo still control only about 27 percent of the United States market; Google has more than twice as much.