Story by
Martin SFP Bryant
FounderMartin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-qualit Martin Bryant is founder of Big Revolution, where he helps tech companies refine their proposition and positioning, and develops high-quality, compelling content for them. He previously served in several roles at TNW, including Editor-in-Chief. He left the company in April 2016 for pastures new.
Well that was short-lived. Just seven months after it acquired Boxcar, French startup Kwaga (maker of Writethat.name) has announced that it is selling the push notifications service to fellow Paris-based company ProcessOne.
Under the deal, the financial terms of which haven’t been disclosed, the technology and IP behind Boxcar will be passed to ProcessOne, which develops instant messaging services.
Kwaga’s acquisition of Boxcar was announced on 26 July last year, at which time the company said that the purchase would result in Boxcar being integrated with Writethat.name.
However, in the joint press release announcing the new deal today, ProcessOne and Kwaga say that while work will continue on the Writethat.name integration, Boxcar’s new owner has broader plans. Namely that it plans for Boxcar to become “a key push notification service for developers and service providers for iOS devices and other smartphones.” The company will work to improve the reliability and scalability of the Boxcar service, while “streamlining” it. ProcessOne intends to keep the Boxar app in Apple’s App Store and it will be optimized for the iPhone 5 and iOS6.
In a blog post on its website today, ProcessOne says that Boxcar will be integrated with its existing offering; “ProcessOne represents our excellence on real-time robust fault tolerant services. Boxcar is about mobile. Both brand will strengthen each other. Now if you think mobile and real-time mobile messaging and notification platform, we want to be your first name.”
It seems that ProcessOne is simply better placed than Kwaga to develop Boxcar further. In today’s press release, Philippe Laval, CEO of Kwaga says, “We’ve been working with Process One for the last 3 months on rebuilding Boxcar notification infrastructure for the benefits of our user base. In the process, it became clear to me that ProcessOne was uniquely positioned to bring Boxcar to the next level and that it would be better if they were to keep operating Boxcar.”
Image credit: Ryan McVay / Thinkstock
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