(Updated to reflect comment from Yahoo)
Once again, Yahoo has made a startup acquisition. I'm seriously starting to think it might be time for an intervention here. Like, someone really needs to sit down with Yahoo and tell them that they have a problem.
Literally less than a day after buying iOS photo app maker GhostBird Software, Yahoo has gone and bought up free conference call service Rondee, it was revealed on the company's homepage Thursday.
"When we set out to build Rondee, we sought to help as many small businesses as possible become more productive," Rondee wrote.
"We’re excited to join Yahoo!’s Small Business team and continue with Yahoo!’s goal of helping small businesses succeed online."
No financial terms of the deal have been disclosed, but it looks like Rondee will be shutting down, as users will be able to sign in and create new conference calls only until July 12th. The service is already no longer signing up any new users. Users will be sign in and access their past data until August 12th.
"Andre and Mike will join the Yahoo! Small Business Team. Their entrepreneurialism and experience working with small businesses throughout their careers will be hugely beneficial as we continue to invest in and build our small business platform," a Yahoo spokesperson told VatorNews.
Founded in 2006, Palo Alto-based Rondee was a free conference call service that offered features that included free conference call recording, email reminders, call archiving, recurring conference call appointments, and the ability to personalize PIN codes.
Now that the service is going to be discontinued, Rondee is recommending that to its users that they switch to Instant Conference instead.
Yahoo acquisitions
Yahoo has been buying so many startups lately, its kind of hard to see what their strategy is, though I guess it has something to do with mobile.
By my count, with the purchases of GhostBird Software and Rondee, this now makes 11 startup acquisitions for Yahoo since October. (It's 12 if you count the massive Tumblr acquisition in there too).
The first one was Stamped, the Justin Bieber-backed mobile app that lets users “stamp” and share their favorite restaurants, movies, books, and music, which was purchased in October; and OnTheAir, a video chat service that can be used for casual hangouts or to organize largish webinars
In February, Yahoo purchased location discovery app Alike, and then, earlier this month, Yahoo acqu-hired the team at personalized recommendation service Jybe, giving the company both a location service, and now a team with knowledge in personalized recommendations.
In March, the company bought news summarizer Summly and then it scooped up Astrid, a productivity app which helps people manage lists.
The company then bought real-time polling tool GoPollGo and frequent flier search startup MileWise on the same day, before also purchasing PlayerScale, which makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming.
Before we know it, the entire startup community is going to be working for Yahoo!
Shares of Yahoo are up .68% Thursday, or 18 cents to $26.07 a share.
Rondee could not be reached for comment.
(Image source:
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