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iPad App Sources Travel Photos From Facebook A crowdsourced code allows a travel-photo app to take off.

By Katherine Duncan

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The Jetpac iPad app scours Facebook to gather travel photos shared by users' friends, then compiles them to create travel guides. Led by Silicon Valley veteran Julian Green and big-data expert Pete Warden, Jetpac developed technology to detect where photos were taken--even if they aren't tagged--by analyzing related text, such as a caption or album name. But that wasn't enough for the audacious startup--the team wanted only the best photos to surface.

"What Jetpac is intended to do is be inspirational … in terms of beautiful photos [and] beautiful places that give you ideas of where you want to go," Green says. To achieve that, they needed an algorithm capable of distinguishing good photos from bad, but their three-person company lacked the time and money to develop it.