In case you haven’t heard, Yahoo! announced its new CEO today, Scott Thompson. Talk about walking into a storm of acquisition rumors and drama on your first day. Luckily, Thompson was formerly the President at PayPal, so he’s used to sticky situations.

The company says that Thompson will be tasked at focusing on its “core business”, but nobody knows exactly what that is, including Yahoo! What should their core business be? Mobile communities could be potentially lucrative and forward-looking to start.

If I were the new CEO at Yahoo!, I’d give the folks at Instagram a call and make them an offer on the spot.

Here’s why:

1. It could strengthen Flickr

Flickr isn’t “dead”, but it has become extremely stale. In an interesting post today, well-respected blogger and photographer Thomas Hawk wrote an open letter to Scott Thompson, asking him to save Flickr.

One of his best points was:

Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late.

I’m not so sure it’s too late if Yahoo! were to purchase Instagram and bundle it together as the web version of the popular photo sharing community. Not only are you getting a killer service that was Apple’s #1 app last year, you’re grabbing a team that is expanding impressively. With this team of giants, Flickr could be saved and put back on track. See, the Instagram team completely understands social, community, and comprehends how ripe the world of photography is for innovation.

What has happened at Flickr is sad, there are no voices guiding its community and the innovation on the site has come to a complete standstill. The community will eventually move elsewhere if it doesn’t start getting some TLC.

2. Mobile user acquisition

If one bought Instragram, 15 million users come with it. However, it’s not the quantity that makes sense for Yahoo!, it’s the quality of users it could acquire.
Instagram users are share-hungry, and by looking through the popular photos section of the app, it appears to have a strong hold on younger demographics. For example, Kylie Jenner (the youngest of the Kardashian bunch) has such a huge following on the app that it no longer displays her total number of followers:

Fans of people like Jenner and her Kardashian family would be a perfect fit for Yahoo! properties like omg!, which serves as its celebrity news and gossip hub:

While this is only one example of demographic and content matching that Yahoo! could take advantage of by buying Instagram, it’s quite a powerful thought. By working really hard on building out a mobile community, Yahoo! can sprinkle its supporting services in to create more of a well-rounded ecosystem of content-sharing social people. Plus, Flickr saw 78,895 photos from iPhone 4 cameras uploaded to the service yesterday alone, so there’s a strong opportunity to go bigger with mobile.

3. Cut the crap and do one thing really well

Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s very difficult to do a ton of things at once. Just ask Google about how long it has taken to glue all of its services together with Google+. It’s not impossible to stitch services like email and search together, but you must have a core competency that you can fall back on. I would say that having a strong mobile community would be a smart bet for that “one thing”.

While I have no idea if either side has any interest in working together, it would make a whole lot of sense for Yahoo! to double down on social and mobile, and those goals can be gained by acquiring Instagram. The fact that the company already owns Flickr, a once-successful photo sharing network that could benefit from such a deal, is just a cherry on top.

We reported last week that social check-in and travel journal company Gowalla was acquired by social networking titan Facebook.

Today, the company confirmed the acquisition in a blog post. One major thing to note is that all of the data the company has collected on your whereabouts are not a part of the deal with Facebook. That means that deleting your Gowalla account won’t be necessary after all.

Apparently the discussions started around Facebook’s f8 event, and here’s what Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams had to say about the process:

About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!

Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.

The Gowalla team will be working specifically on the Facebook Timeline product, clearly coming in with a keen eye on mobile design.

According to a MarketWatch report, Adobe has acquired Typekit.

Typekit, formerly known as Small Batch, is an easy use service that facilitates linking to high-quality Open Type fonts to make sure real fonts stay intact as they are placed on multiple platforms, such as the web and mobile browsers. The service is subscription based and contends that their reliability is second to none.

Typekit will stay a standalone service and become a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. The Company announced the new initiative this morning.

Lea Hickman, VP of Product Management at Adobe had the following to say on the acquisition:

Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites – especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices

Working closely with type foundries, the Typekit team has delivered an outstanding service, empowering designers to present the power of the printed word in new ways – online and on devices.

Typekit’s Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Veen adds:

By joining Adobe, we are now an integral part of the worldwide leader in creative software, and as Adobe moves aggressively into cloud-based services, this will accelerate our vision of reinventing the look and feel of Web through creative and beautiful fonts

This is an exciting time to be designing for the Web. As millions of new users come online via tablets and smartphones, capturing their attention via high-impact typography has never been more relevant.

With Adobe’s announcement this morning, this acquisition could be a sign of things to come. They are clearly creating some type of Mobile apps killer.

The purchase price is not known at this point.

You can read the blog post from Typekit here.

Amazon.com has announced that it is set to acquire The Book Depository, a UK-based online bookstore that offers more than six million titles and ships to more than 100 countries.

The Book Depository was founded in 2004 by Andrew Crawford, and in the last financial year its turnover was thought to be in the region of £120m, according to industry specialists TheBookSeller.com. Crawford said of the takeover:

“With the support of Amazon, we look forward to continuing our growth and providing an ever-improving service for readers globally.”

Greg Greeley, VP of European Retails at Amazon, said:

“Customers in more than 100 countries enjoy The Book Depository’s vast selection, convenient delivery and free shipping. The Book Depository is very focused on serving its customers around the world, and we look forward to welcoming them to the Amazon family.”

The acquisition is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and the exact figure for the deal hasn’t been disclosed as of yet. The announcement was rather scant on details, and it’s not exactly clear what Amazon plans to do with its acquisition.

Amazon has been pushing towards e-books in recent times, and it recently announced that its Kindle books were outselling both its hardback and paperback books combined. The Book Depository has very much been about selling lesser known titles, and dispatching for free across the world within 48 hours. Whether Amazon plans to maintain this brand identity or integrate its acquisition more tightly within the Amazon brand remains to be seen.