Facebook is agressively acquiring mobile talent with the war chest it built post IPO. It's is blazing through the mobile landscape and acquiring companies that either have products that are a good fit for its ecosystem and/or has talent that are making strides on the mobile platform.If you can't beat them, buy them seems to be FB's current mantra. Will these acquisitions be as accretive as YouTube acquisition by Google, etc.. We will know in the upcoming 10Ks.. Here are some of the recent acquisitions Facebook closed:
Facebook acquired Karma, a beautiful mobile app for giving gifts. Founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis proved that they understand mobile with their previous company TapJoy, which was acquired by Offerpal in 2010. It's the type of talent Facebook needs right now.Karma is the fifth mobile startup Facebook has acquired this year alone. So far, it's bought Karma, TagTile (a mobile loyalty platform), Lightbox (an Android photo app), Glancee (a social discovery app), and of course, Instagram. And don't forget that Facebook nearly acquired Kevin Rose's mobile dev lab Milk, but lost a bidding war with Google.
I predict there will be many more mobile acquisitions in Facebook's future. It wasn't built as a mobile-first company, and it's becoming increasingly clear that it needs top-notch mobile talent if it's to fend off upstarts like Path and Instagram. Facebook seems to have decided that if it can't recruit mobile talent, it will simply have to acquire it. It's an expensive and aggressive way for Facebook to address its mobile problem.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-33617_3-57437555-276/facebooks-aggressive-approach-to-solving-its-mobile-problem/
2 comments:
This is a really important development in the web 2.0 world. Both Facebook and Zynga have been pursuing a policy colloquially called "acq-hiring." Basically, they want to get the talent to come aboard, but the talent refuses to come aboard unless the suitor buys the company. So they buy the company, shut the product down, and just keep the engineering talent they were after in the first place.
I think this is an interesting idea - Facebook realizes that it has a steep climb ahead of it, as it seeks to become a large player in the mobile arena, and is hiring the people necessary to do it - either by hiring them directly or just acquiring the full company.
That definitely is a way to keep a hold on your competition!
Another way is to just hire former IPhone engineers and utilize their knowledge of the actual mobile device to craft and design the most useful mobile applications possible.
It will be fun to see where Facebook goes with their mobile strategy in the upcoming periods.
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