Yahoo's Shopping Spree Continues With Smart Contacts Company Xobni
July 4, 2013
Already this week, Yahoo has announced a couple of its new acquisitions, the fantasy sports app startup Bignoggins and the automatic video creation app startup Qwiki. But wait, there's more! Apparently, Yahoo has also just acquired the address book software company Xobni.
According to AllThingsD, Yahoo paid $30 million to $40 million for Xobni.
The San Francisco-based smart contacts app and plugin developer, whose name is "inbox" spelled backward, announced its move to Yahoo, specifically to its Sunnyvale HQ, in a blog post:
Did you ever meet someone who truly “gets" you? That’s how we feel about Yahoo!. The power within every Xobni product is that it responds to how you communicate. Every day you demonstrate who and what is important to you. 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. This is just the type of gig we’ve been preparing for throughout our history. We look forward to letting the results speak for themselves. Stay tuned…Said blog post was subsequently reblogged by Yahoo by way of an announcement on its official blog on Tumblr, which it acquired for $1.1 billion. Following the acquisition, Xobni will no longer accept new purchases of its premium products, including Xobni Pro, Xobni Enterprise, Xobni for Teams, the Xobni Salesforce Gadget, and the Xobni JIRA Gadget. Also, Xobni's namesake app for Blackberry and its Smartr Contacts app for Android will no longer be available for download. On the other hand, Smartr Contacts for iPhone (see our review here) and Smartr Inbox for Gmail will remain available for download. If you're an existing user of any Xobni product, you'll be able to use it as is through July 2, 2014.
