Yahoo on Wednesday announced it has acquired personalized recommendation company Jybe, which aimed to help people find new interests based on what’s trending in their social circles. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The Jybe service is being closed, but the team is building a tool so users can download and keep all their data. Meanwhile, Yahoo says it plans to use the startup’s data-driven experience to “supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day.”
Jybe’s five employees, all of whom happen to have previously worked for Yahoo, will be joining the company’s platform organization. The engineers and data scientists include Arnab Bhattacharjee, previously the VP of Yahoo Search Technology (YST), as well as former key members of the YST and Hadoop teams: Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye, and Karthik Krishnamurthy.
Unsurprisingly, Yahoo is quite happy with the return of its former staff:
Five former Yahoos returned today as part of the Jybe acquisition! Welcome @chrkunz@karthikkrish @timconverse @sparanjpye@arnabnil
— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) March 20, 2013
The news was also confirmed on Jybe’s website. For reference, here’s the full announcement (typos and all):
We are super excited to announce that Jybe has been acquired by Yahoo!.
The Jybe team first set off two years ago to bring mobile users smart, personalized recomendations on food and entertainment. This has been a fun and furious journey for our tiny startup, as we applied our various technology backgrounds to recommendation and mobile app design. It’s now time to move ahead to join a larger company, and Yahoo! is the perfect match.
For the five of us who will be joining Yahoo! this is a coming home – we are all former Yahoos. Three of us left Yahoo! to pursue our passion at Jybe, and two of us took a longer path via other startups and search-engine companies. We can’t wait to apply what we’ve learned about recommendation, personalization and the mobile experience to the hundreds of millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day. We look forward to (re)joining the world-class talent already working at Yahoo! and are excited to hit the ground running.
To our awesome users, thank you so much for trying out the Jybe platform. We hope it made your life a little more entertaining. We will be closing down the Jybe service, but we are putting together a tool so you can download and keep all your data. We’re eager to start applying everything we’ve learned and built to the Yahoo! platform, so stay tuned. Exciting developments are ahead!
If you have any questions, you can contact us at info@jybe-inc.com.
Sincerely,
The Jybe Team
Details on how exactly Yahoo plans to integrate Jybe into its firm are unknown. Giving the importance of social, we’re sure the Jybe team will play an important role, but given Yahoo’s recent integration of Facebook into its homepage, we doubt we’ll be seeing Jybe-specific features anytime soon. Eventually though, we’ll probably see something Jybe-like across all of Yahoo’s sites.
See also – Yahoo reportedly in talks to buy stake in Dailymotion to help expand its Web video presence globally and Yahoo acquisition Stamped to shut its doors on December 14th, offers user data download
Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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