Yahoo took its first major steps towards its new, more mobile strategy as the search engine announced it bought mobile start-up Stamped Thursday.
The New York-based company created an iPhone app that let users share and recommend things such as restaurants, movies, books and more. The deal is reported to cost somewhere in the double-digit millions.
"Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've acquired a very talented team based in New York City to help us create a new center of mobile product development for Yahoo!," Adam Cahan, senior vice president of Emerging Products and Technology, wrote on Yahoo's corporate blog.
"[The] entire Stamped team are a natural fit for us," Cahan continued. "Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with Yahoo!'s vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users.
"They will be a great asset as we expand Yahoo!'s mobile efforts and build a world-class mobile development organization."
Yahoo's new mobile direction
Earlier this week, CEO Marissa Mayer told Yahoo investors she wanted to focus the companies scattered mobile strategy.
She said Yahoo's mobile experience is too "splintered," with 76 different apps across iOS and Android platforms.
Mayer went on to say that Yahoo needs to become a predominately mobile service, and that goal should be attained sooner rather than later.
Yahoo didn't have quite the mobile talent it needs, and she told investors they would be bring that talent over through hiring new people.
Stamped marked the first wave of those new hires. Its co-founders will not only share a huge paycheck but they will be charged with creating a new engineering office for Yahoo in New York City's Bryant Park.
"After everything we learned from building Stamped, we're excited to start work again on something big, mobile, and new - but we can't discuss the details just yet," the Stamped team wrote on the company blog.
The new office also means the team will be hiring more engineers, presumably with a background in mobile.
See ya later, Stamped
As for Stamped, the service will skip into the sunset by the end of the year. Though it will be closed down, its founders said they will roll out a new tool that lets users export stamps and other data.
How ex-Stamped followers will be able to use that data is unclear at the moment, but it will probably have something to do with Yahoo.
Via TechCrunch
