Pinterest has acquires a two-person startup that specializes in visual search, per Douglas MacMillan. It stems from a demand for engineers with expertise in visual technology like facial recognition or computer vision, which he describes as a technology that helps computers learn to recognize people and objects inside photos and video.

Google engineers have developed technology that allows the company to use images to read house numbers and match them to geographic positions. MIT Technology Review explains the significance. It is useful in places like Japan, where streets are rarely numbered in chronological order, but rather in the order they were constructed. The technology relies on publicly available number images such as the street address, along with a database of 200,000 numbers taken by Google's Street View cameras.

Microsoft said it is acquiring Parature, a cloud-based software that companies can use to create self-service Web portals for consumers. The technology will fit into Dynamics, Microsoft's enterprise suite of Web-based products. As more brands move to integrate data silos from multiple types of media. Chris Kanaracus tells us that "customers include Ask.com, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and IBM." Parature's software serves about 70 million users.

Microsoft reached out to industry experts to get their opinion on the hot topics in paid search in 2014. The topics range from mobile to reporting to display advertising. The most common tread is picking a strategy and staying focused.

Apple has filed a patent that would allow Siri on an iOS device to sort through photos with voice search and tagging, along with time and location. The filing -- "Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching" -- describes linking a natural language text string with photographs saved on a device. The patent also allow users to tag photos with their voice. Apple's example describes a user telling their device where the photo was taken.

Google has reportedly acquired Bitspin, along with the company's small team of developers who studied computer science at ETH Zurich. The company creates mobile apps and services such as the Timely alarm app for Android. It supports an alarm, stopwatch and timer. After the acquisition, Google made the 99-cent app free on Google Play.

Innovega will introduce a high-tech contact lens that can shoot video or photos with a wink of an eye. It also creates a virtual image or overlay in the lens that sits on top of images seen in the real world. The technology, iOptik, will debut this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Consumers can wear the contact lenses with or without Innovega eyewear. The image is created by allowing light from the display to pass through the center of the pupil, and light from the surrounding environment to pass through the outer portion of the pupil. The technology will compete …

Adding to its talent pool, Yahoo News has hired Daniel Klaidman as deputy editor. The Daily Beast correspondent and former Newsweek managing editor is just the latest quality hire by Yahoo News, the masthead of which now includes Katie Couric, former New York Times tech writes David Pogue, and former New York Times Magazine political correspondent Matt Bai. As Politico reports, Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic Web site, is also joining Yahoo News. 

Storytelling is one aspect of Google Glass. Richard Gray points to a clever animation using about 1,000 images taken with Google Glass. The stop-motion style video was made in four days by a group of friends, animator and filmmaker, in New York. They belong to the Glass Creative Collective, a Google partnership with film schools.

Retail spend 23.3%; financial services, 12.4%; and automotive, 12.1% when it comes to generating lead from digital advertising, per eMarketer. The analysis firm published a report analyzing each industry sector, what it spends in online advertising, and contributions invested to generate sales and leads. Retail spends the most when it comes to branding its products and services, whereas health care and pharma invest the least.