VKontakte (VK), Russia’s leading social network and a property of Mail.Ru Group, is developing a technology for object recognition in photos and video recordings, with a special button to purchase the corresponding products in just one click. The project was unveiled at a recent meeting with investors and analysts, the TASS news agency reported last week.
Social commerce is to become VK’s new focus, leveraging the network’s existing VK Pay payment service, an unnamed participant in the meeting told TASS.
The company’s press service told TASS they are constantly working on developing neural network technologies, which are already used in various ways on VK. “Our algorithms already allow us to identify talented authors, find non-original content, automatically recognize friends in photos and much more. These algorithms may be used for product recognition [in the future], but we’re not ready to share specific details about this.”
Last month Mail.Ru Group and Alibaba announced a “strategic partnership” which will encompass e-commerce, social media, online entertainment and online communications. As part of this strategy, VK will partner with AliExpress, an Alibaba subsidiary which has become a leading B2C marketplace in Russia.
