To celebrate the occasion of the second annual International Day of Happiness, Jetpac has revealed the happiest countries and continents in the world, according to new “geo-parsing” technology that can analyze people’s smiles in Instagram photos.
After analyzing over 150 million Instagram photos to produce city guides for over 6,000 cities in its iPhone app, Jetpac City Guides.
Image processing technology shows that South Africa is one of the happiest countries in the world with one of the highest “smile scores,” a value based on the average size of smiles in photos. You can see the list of happiest countries in the world, according to Jetpac’s smile score analysis, here.
These findings are in connection with the release of Jetpac City Guides, a new iPhone app that curates Instagram’s big data to help users find everything from the top bars with women wearing lipstick to coffee shops full of mustached men. The app, which recently launched, gives a new take on today’s digital city guides, utilizing big data imaging rather than user reviews.