Amazon is expanding in Atlanta.
This week’s Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the Seattle-based Internet services giant quietly opened an Atlanta office for its A9.com subsidiary, following its secretive acquisition of local visual search startup Partpic late last year.
The A9 Atlanta office is located in a 20,000 square foot office at Terminus 200 in Buckhead, which it shares with Amazon’s cloud computing services business, or AWS.
In Atlanta, the A9 employees are developing visual search software for hardware. The technology uses visual recognition algorithms to identify a picture of a product and provide information about it.
Visual search is a natural progression from keyboard and voice search. Unlike keyboard and voice-based search, the user does not have to know details about the product they are searching for. Instead, the user takes a picture of the object and the visual recognition technology returns product details, even suggests similar products.