Yahoo buys app start-ups to boost email, video, sports offerings
Yahoo users could soon have a better way to keep track of their online friends and to share photos and videos with them.
Continuing its recent buying spree, Yahoo scooped up three more start-ups this week for a total of less than $100 million. The acquisitions of Xobni, Qwiki and Bignoggins appear to be aimed at improving social connections on mobile devices, a key goal of Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer.
Xobni -- inbox spelled backward -- connects with Gmail, Outlook and smartphones to figure out which people a user contacts the most. The app creates a contacts list that’s based on relevance rather than alaphetical order. It syncs with Facebook and Twitter to match up additional contact information.
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Xobni’s apps will live for at least one year. But it has ceased selling its premium products, which added functionality such as automatic backups and the ability to search emails.
“Every day you demonstrate who and what is important to you,” Xobni said on its blog Wednesday. “That can benefit not just your inbox or smartphone, but the many services you use. Yahoo! gets that, and they want us to use our platform to make many Yahoo! services better for you.”
Yahoo’s email service is in tight competition with Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.
Qwiki is an iPhone app that enables users to combine photos and videos to produce an interactive movie. They can be shared on social networks and embedded on websites.
“We will continue to support the Qwiki app, and the team will join Yahoo! in our New York City office to reimagine Yahoo!’s storytelling experience,” Yahoo said in a blog post.
On Monday, Yahoo bought Bignoggins, an app that brings all of a user’s fantasy sports accounts into one view.
Yahoo has bought at least 15 companies since Mayer took over, according to Bloomberg.
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