Denny |
February 20, 2014
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.
As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.
Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.
This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.
This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.
Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.
According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”
The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.
In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.
