Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) acquired Alike, a mobile start-up company, which develops location-based mobile applications for Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhones. The company also creates web applications.
Alike created the app that provides nearby places or locations based on the possible preferences or taste of a user. It recommends nearby locations similar to the favorite places of a user.
According to Alike, it will no longer support its “Nearby” iPhone and web apps. The company also expressed gratitude to all the customers, investors, partners, and advisers that provided support since its establishment.
In addition, Alike stated that over the past couple of year, the company has been working hard to develop “amazing” mobile experience to make customers happy.
“We’ve always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences. We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives,” the company said in a statement
Furthermore, mobile start-up company believed the Yahoo! Inc.’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) team is equally excited in achieving their goal.
Alike said, “In Yahoo! we’ve found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real. We’re super excited to join Yahoo!’s mobile team, where we can march toward that vision faster than ever.”
On the other hand, Yahoo! Inc.’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) spokesperson confirmed that the company acquired Alike. “The Alike team created an app that focuses on personalization — using the restaurants and places you like to find the ones you’ll love. We were very impressed by the team and their approach to building personalized experiences. The entire Alike team will join Yahoo!’s mobile organization in San Francisco and Sunnyvale,” said a spokesperson in a statement.
In the past, the tech giant acquired Koprol, a check-in service company in Indonesia. Last year, Yahoo! decided to return the ownership to the founders of the company. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) recently purchased Stamped, a mobile recommendation application.
Yahoo! CEO, Marissa Mayer pointed out during the company’s 4Q earnings call that mobile is one of its “big four” product categories. The company’s move to expand and strengthen its mobile offering is not surprising given the fact that the company has 200 million active users per month.
In a previous interview with Bloomberg, Mayer explained that the mobile and search usage go together in terms of personalization. According to her, “I think the right way to think of it is not that it replaces search, but that it becomes a critical part of search.”
“One provocative way of thinking about it is, in terms of a lot of people say when you type into this search box, that’s your query. In the future, you become the query. It’s what you type, your background, it’s where you are, your preferences, what you looked at yesterday. The search box can take all of that as the input and come up with a set of results that are customized for you,” added Mayer.
