Polar Rose

» see polarrose.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The service went dark on 6 September 2010. Apple bought the company that had been running it about two weeks later, for a price reported around $29 million and never confirmed by anybody who would know.

Polar Rose launched in November 2004 in Malmö. Jan Erik Solem, who had a PhD in applied mathematics and did the computer vision work, was CTO; Nikolaj Nyholm, a Danish entrepreneur, ran it as CEO. Nordic Venture Partners put up money. From 2007 it shipped plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer that looked at photos on whatever page you were on, found the faces, and let you attach names to them, then go and find the same person in other pictures elsewhere. By May 2009 the plugin was retired in favor of doing it on the web, with auto-tagging for photos on Flickr and 23hq and your Facebook contacts as the source of names.

Face recognition on arbitrary consumer photos in 2007 meant no deep learning worth the name and no pretrained model to download, on whatever CPU the visitor happened to have. The problem a phone now solves in the background while you scroll was, in Malmö that year, a whole company's reason to exist. I came into this field later and from the hardware side, which mostly means I underrate how much of it had to be built by hand before 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fourteen days ~

The shutdown had a stated reason. Polar Rose said it was moving away from running a consumer service and toward licensing its technology to other companies, which is what a startup says when the product is good and the business around it is not. The plugin and the tagging went away on 6 September and users were told the engine would live on inside somebody else's software.

Then Apple bought the company. MacRumors had it on 20 September 2010 and The Register wrote it up the next day, with the number floating between $22 million and $29 million depending on who was leaking. Apple's statement was the usual one about buying smaller technology companies and not discussing its plans. Two weeks earlier the thing anybody could actually use had been switched off, so the acquisition bought a team and a patent portfolio rather than a product.

~ where the faces went ~

Apple shipped face detection and face tagging into iPhoto and then into Photos on the phone, running locally, with no plugin and no account. Whether any specific line of Polar Rose code is in there is not something Apple has ever said, but it stopped being a question anyone needed to ask once every iPhone could group a decade of photos by who was in them.

Solem did not stay. In 2013 he started Mapillary, back in Malmö, street-level imagery stitched together from whatever cameras people had, and sold that to Facebook in June 2020. He also wrote the O'Reilly book on computer vision in Python in 2012, which has sat on more engineers' desks than Polar Rose ever had users.

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