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Read more...Yahoo has been on an incredible start up tear over the past 12 months, buying up companies left and right. It has made so many purchases that, incredibly, it has just acquired its 25th start up of 2013.
The company has picked up photo and video sharing app Ptch as its latest acquisition, it was revealed in a blog post on Tuesday. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but a Yahoo spokesperson told VatorNews that three Ptch members have now joined Yahoo’s media organization.
"We launched Ptch just over a year ago. Our passion and our mission was to give you the best way to make and share beautiful movies made from the photos and videos on your phone. Well, someone noticed!" Hans Ku, co-founder of Ptch, wrote.
"As part of the Yahoo team, we’ll be able to focus our efforts and leverage our technology to make Yahoo’s photo and video platforms the best in the world."
Founded in 2012 by a team within DreamWorks Animation, Ptch allowed users to take video clips and photos and then turn them into "beautiful, shareable movies."
Yahoo will now be using the team to enhance its video products.
"The team will join our media organization in Santa Monica, where they will draw upon their product expertise to help us build out our video assets and content," the Yahoo spokesperson said.
As such, the Ptch service will be shutting down on January 2nd of next year. Until that date, though, Ptch users will have the ability to download them via desktop or save their Ptchs to their camera roll on their phone.
To download them, users have to go to ptch.com, go to their profile page, click on the title of the ptch and then click on the download button. To save them to the camera roll, a user has to go to the app, go to their prorile, tap the share icon under the ptch and then tap “Save to Camera Roll.”
Yahoo's 25 start ups of 2013
It may sound incredible, but Yahoo really has now purchased 25 start ups this year. Here's the entire list:
In January, Yahoo bought social news start-up Snip.it In February, Yahoo purchased location discovery app Alike, and then Yahoo acqu-hired the team at personalized recommendation service Jybe, giving the company both a location service, and 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.
In May, it picked up game developer Loki Studios and purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The company then scooped up free conference call service Rondee in June
July was a particularly busy month for Yahoo: it picked up commerce app platform Lexity, and it also acquired fantasy sports app Bignoggin; rich media service Qwiki; email and address book management app Xobni; advanced mobile ad technology startup Admovate; and social data analytics platform Ztelic.
Yahoo then bought social media web browser startup Rockmelt and Image recognition service IQ Engines in August, and sports app developer Hitpost in a purchase earlier this month.
In October, the company purchased URL-shortening service Bread and enhanced image recognition company LookFlow.
Just yesterday the company bought natural language provider Skyphrase.
There are still 28 more days left to this year, so it wouldn't surprise me if Yahoo snuck a couple of more acquisitions in before 2014 hits.
(Image source: https://blog.ptch.com)
There's over $2T in counterfeit goods in the market, and over 70% of consumers have bought them
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Snip.it collects the best of the Web. It enables consumers to easily “snip” content - videos, images, and articles - and share their opinions with the world.
Startup/Business
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Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Our users tell us that Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does.Startup/Business
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alike enables you to use the places you like to find new places you’ll love.
Keywords suck. First, they are too simplistic. When you search for a coffee shop a keyword based engine won’t know if you wanted the best java in town or a nearby place to crank out some emails. Second, they are too vague. Google returns 12,938 results for coffee shops in San Francisco. And finally, they are generic – with rankings based on popularity/SEO rather than relevance. None of the current options let you organize results to find what you really want.
The alike engine takes search beyond the keyword to solve this problem. Using alike anyone can simply enter the name of something they enjoy, alike will identify this ‘entity’, and then alike will provide the user with similar ‘entities’ that they will love.
The alike search engine has developed a semantic understanding of many different entities (places, products, people) and their attributes (locations, cost, reviews, preferences).