The Heat Is On: Eye-Tracking Startup GazeHawk Founders Join Facebook; Product/Tech Looks For A Home

Yet another talent acquisition by Facebook: the social network is taking on the team behind GazeHawk, a two-year-old Y Combinator startup that uses a computer?s webcam to track eye movements and then plot them on a heatmap.
But unlike past occasions when Facebook has bought companies for the people behind them and subsequently shut down the services they built up (a notable recent case being Gowalla), in this case the product and technology are being left behind.
?GazeHawk has developed a best-of-class technology that does not exist anywhere else, and is committed to seeing it continue to provide benefits to others. The team welcomes suggestions and thoughts on potential options at team@gazehawk.com,? the two founders, Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, write in a post announcing the Facebook deal.
The news raises questions of what, exactly, Facebook might do with that know-how. It might not be exactly the eye-tracking techniques pioneered at GazeHawk, but given that Facebook is effectively rethinking what is being done on the web with advertising and marketing ? how it is measured, delivered and consumed ? the idea of putting in a team working at the the cutting edge of how to track the third of these makes perfect sense.
The two note in their post that Facebook had been ?impressed with our ability to build out a powerful technology and platform.?
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.