Google has just acquired facial recognition software company PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition), according to an announcement on the startup’s site. PittPatt, a project spawned from Carnegie Mellon University, develops a facial recognition technology that can match people across photos, videos, and more. The company has created a number of algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition.

Google and Facebook are at war. We’ve known this for a while

When Facebook shows users news feed stories about events their friends have RSVP’d to, it now also shows photos uploaded to the event’s wall. These photos should make event stories more eye-catching and increase earned RSVPs. Event admins should therefore add wall photos to their events to gain news feed visibility

You may recall the SmartBird , a robot we saw back in March that mimics the flight of birds, flapping its wings like the real thing. The video we saw then was a bit too edited to get a feel for the bot, but luckily one of the inventors was invited to do a TED talk, and of course they had to set the thing free in the auditorium. Check out the video: Markus Fischer, the speaker, describes a few finer points and demonstrates the simplicity of their motor and wing system on a skeletal model

Today, we are trying a special edition of Founder Stories ; that we are calling Founder Office Hours .

New technologies usually allow for more . In the move from print media to the Web the “more” was comments, slideshows and of course rapid-fire content. In the move from VHS to DVDs the “more” was all sorts of behind the scenes footage and director commentaries

Facebook Deals, the company’s Groupon-style pre-paid coupon service, has now been live in beta for almost three months. While it so far hasn’t achieved the instant success some expected, Facebook has been cautious with promotion of the product rather than spam its news feed with Deals announcement.

The only thing better than a leak is six leaks, which is exactly what we have for you today. Bundled nicely in the form of a 2011 LG Roadmap (discovered by PocketNow ), five Android smartphones and one Mango-powered handset have found their way to the web. Along with the recently announced Optimus Pro and Optimus Net , LG has quite a bit more in store for the rest of the year.

We’ve already seen bikes from both Audi and McLaren in the last year, so I suppose it’s no surprise to see competition from Porsche . The German sport car giant has actually had a bike for quite a while now, but I believe the new Sport and Rennsport are their first attempts at road-going bikes rather than the mountain variety.

It’s been just 11 days since Apple released Beta 3 of iOS 5 to developers, but a new Beta is already up in the air — literally. iOS 5 Beta 4 has just gone live, and it appears to be the first update to support installation via iOS 5′s new over-the-air update system. We can’t actually get the update to work over the air right now, but the patch notes specifically define it as an option.