Lambda Labs, an early-stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, which is still very much in the prototype phase.

The startup’s facial recognition API, launched into beta last year, is already used by 1,000 developers, including several major international firms. It now sees over 5 million API calls per month, and is growing at 15 percent month-over-month. Balaban also says that the company has been cash-flow positive since November.

Now that same API has been tailored specifically for Google Glass apps to enable both facial and object recognition.

Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,” “networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains. (You can see what apps developers are tweeting about here.)

As potentially amazing/horrifying as that technology sounds, any apps using the technology couldn’t do so in real time – that is, you couldn’t just walk around automatically recognizing people you see through Glass. The way Google’s Mirror API works right now is that you first have to snap a photo, send it to the developer’s servers, then get the notification back. The lag time on that would be several seconds at least, and would depend on how fast you could take a photo and share it. A forthcoming Glass software development kit (SDK), though, may change that.

“There is nothing in the Glass Terms of Service that explicitly prevents us from doing this. However, there is a risk that Google may change the ToS in an attempt to stop us from providing this functionality,” Balaban says. ”This is the first face recognition toolkit for Glass, so we’re just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react.”

The privacy caucus he’s referring to has to do with the Congressional inquiry from earlier this month where eight members of Congress reached out to Google CEO Larry Page with over half a dozen questions about Glass’ capabilities and the potential impacts to user privacy. The Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, a group led by Texas Republican Joe Barton, wanted to know if Glass would collect data from users without their consent, whether or not Google would consider privacy before approving third-party apps, and a host of other things.

One of those questions was whether or not Glass would have support for facial recognition. That’s something Steve Lee, Glass director of product management, has already answered. In a statement offered to The New York Times, he replied, “We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place.”

That’s not a solid “no,” of course. It’s more of a “no, for now.” Glass is simply too new of a technology to begin limiting what it will or will not do, at least in such definitive terms.

Facial recognition, however, doesn’t appear to be specifically prohibited in Google’s API policies, which inform Glass developers what they can and can’t do in their applications. That means, for now at least, Lambda’s facial recognition API for Glass developers would be permitted.

The only cause that would impact its use, according to Google’s policies, is one that says Glass is “not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations.”

Obviously, lawmakers could still enact such a policy, if they chose to do so.

“Assuming Google and Joe Barton’s Privacy Caucus don’t attempt to stop us, [the API] will be available to everybody within the week,” Balaban says.

Google, it should be noted, has long since had the technology to build apps capable of facial recognition itself, but has always tread very carefully to not incite a privacy backlash.

In 2011, there were reports that Google was developing a mobile app that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces to access their personal information. That app never arrived, but facial recognition has since made an appearance within Google’s photo-sharing service Google+ Photos (previously Picasa), where users can now opt in to have their face recognized. This makes finding “pictures and videos of you easy,” explains the company’s documentation on the technology.

Perhaps one day, users will be able to “opt in” to having Glass apps identify their faces, too?

Time – and Congress’s reaction – will tell.

Between pricey flights, hotels and foreign shopping sprees, travel may be one of the best indicators of consumer confidence. And with unemployment going down, and even real estate seeing a modest comeback, that confidence seems to be rising.

Last summer, one in five Americans said they planned on taking a vacation, according to a survey by the market research firm Harris Interactive. And almost half of them, 42%, said they planned on taking two or more trips. This year, the numbers are even higher. Now nearly one in four say they're planning on packing their bags, according to a survey conducted by TD Ameritrade. 'Tis the season.

Before you book your flight or room, or even decide where you're going, check out these five free iOS apps made by the Appcelerator mobile platform. If you're the type that can't leave the office back home, using these tools might even improve your productivity.

ReallyLateBooking

If you live spontaneously, ReallyLateBooking lets you make last-minute reservations at hotels in a slew of international cities, offering detailed room info and options should you find yourself out of town, and without a room.

Sure beats sleeping in the airport should you miss your flight, get rerouted or decide the hotel you booked just isn't up to par.

AirportChatter

No one wants to admit it, but with jetlag and even culture shock, getting lost in an airport is embarrassingly easy. Especially when all the signs are in a foreign language. Stall that with AirportChatter, which gives you detailed info on airport amenities, nearby restaurants and real-time reviews, and a geo-location radar from people around you. It's almost like a Facebook-Yelp hybrid for your terminal.

TripLingo

Comment allez-vous? Come vai? ¿Cómo estás? What, you say?

You don't need a Star Trek universal translator to figure out what everyone around you is saying.TripLingo gives you everything from basic phrases, a live translator, and a country-by-country guide to customs and cultural taboos. There's even audio files to help with your pronunciation.

TapHunter

You made it. You're in your destination city. But you don't know where to go for drinks. Craft beer, to be exact. And you don't want to spend time trolling through Yelp or bother your friends on Facebook with incessant postings.

There's an answer for your night-life woes, and it's called TapHunter. The app shows you were to find your favorite brews as well as nearby, hip bar spots based on your drink preferences. Now there's no excuse not to drink.

TripBridge

If you're staying behind the wheel on your journey, TripBridge is the app to use to push your travel plans from your smartphone or tablet to an in-vehicle navigation system. You need a car that supports NaviBridge, an app that allows you to remotely browse maps or set a destination on your car. TripBridge offers navigable itinerary, complete with points of interest highlighted by Foursquare. So now you can make your trip both collaborative and social, without having to look down at your mobile device.

China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), the world’s biggest mobile telco by user-base, has perhaps been inspired by the worldwide success of WeChat and Skype in launching its own app messaging app for a global audience. Called Jego, it has apps for iPhone and Android but no desktop application.

While you can sign up with your phone number apparently anywhere in the world, the new Jego service is actually more like Skype than newer social messaging apps because it has global calling plans. For example, a Jego user could sign up for unlimited calls to Hong Kong for $12 per month after buying credit. There are mobile and landline calling rates (see here) for 20 countries so far, such as $0.02 per minute for landline or mobile calls in Singapore. That makes Jego a lot cheaper than the gouging you’d get from most telcos on global calls – including on China Mobile itself – and makes Jego app comparable in affordability to Skype’s paid features.

For those who don’t need calling, China Mobile’s new Jego app supports online messaging for free, and will scan your contacts to find friends who also use the service.

Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has over half a billion users (when it last revealed numbers under its previous ownership), though it’s not clear how many of those are paying for premium calling.

Mobile telcos around the world have been threatened by social messaging apps like Whatsapp, WeChat, Line, Viber, and Nimbuzz for many years, with the threat mounting as new features like video calls get added to some of those apps. WeChat has 195 million active users (and close to 400 million in total) while Line has 160 million registered users this week. While China Mobile’s stealthy launch of Jego won’t really solve any of that, it at least puts the company in contention to wrest back some of those global chatters and perhaps turn them into paying customers.