Following last month’s rumors, LinkedIn has confirmed its acquisition of Pulse, a popular news reader app similar to Flipboard and Circa. The cost of the deal was $90 million, which sits high within the previously reported range of “between $50 and 100 million.” It consists of 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash, according to LinkedIn’s official release.
LinkedIn’s SVP of “Products & User Experience,” Deep Nishar, states that “Pulse is a perfect complement” to its vision of turning LinkedIn into “the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content.”
Clearly LinkedIn has plans to expand on this front, but what does that mean for the future of Pulse as an independent product, and what about the service’s 30 million users?
Nishar details that LinkedIn and the Pulse team will be “working side by side…to create new and better ways to help professionals contribute to and leverage this collective body of business knowledge. In the meantime, Pulse will continue to deliver the news you care about and will remain the great experience you count on everyday.”
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The phrasing “in the meantime” doesn’t instill confidence in Pulse’s future as a separate service. We’ve reached out to LinkedIn in regards to Pulse’s future, and will update this post with more details when we hear back.
Update: The press release confirms our suspicions:
Following closing, members of the Pulse team, including those from Engineering, Product and Design, will join LinkedIn at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The existing Pulse apps will continue to be supported as the integrated Pulse and LinkedIn teams work to build future generations of professional content consumption products.
It’s clear that Pulse’s technology will not be discarded, but it appears that Pulse will not remain in its current form forever.
Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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