This recent news development will bring the latter company’s platform to a close on March 30.
In a recent news posting on the Distill website, it has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo, in a move that many in the industry are assuming that has a great deal more to do with obtaining the mobile marketing talent from that company anything much else.
The platform for the company will remain fully operational through March 30.
The Distill service had been in a private beta phase and had been working with companies such as Box and Disney. Now, Yahoo has purchased this startup, which has come up with a collaborative system based on video, which is targeted at hiring technical talent. However, instead of putting that approach to use for drawing their own engineers, Yahoo plans to shut down the company altogether and simply hire the leading engineers who worked there in order to work on mobile marketing development.
The terms of this acquisition (which is also seen as a mobile marketing deal) have not yet been released.
About five months ago, Distill had just finished securing investments worth $1.3 million and had developed and created a system that made it possible for a potential new hire, such as an engineer, to be interviewed through a video conversation comparable to Skype. What made it stand out from a standard video conversation is that it could provide programming challenges to the candidate during the interview, itself.
Therefore if the interviewee was, for example, a graphic designer, then the video interview would be able to include a collaborative walk through of a portfolio so that its contents could then be discussed.
As the interview can be scheduled online and the prospect is sent a direct link in order to “meet” with the prospective employer, there is no need for exchanging user names or other contact details.
The engineers from Distill, who will now be working for the purpose of mobile marketing at Yahoo, have also worked on other major projects such as Tapjoy, which is a smartphone ad platform that is performance based.
