Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) on Wednesday announced it acquired the personalized recommendation company Jybe, that aims to help people find things thay aspire to do with regards to what’s trending in their social circle.
Founded in 2011, Jybe’s mission was to help connect people to the world around them based on personalized recommendations pushed about things to do, stuff to eat, books to read and movies to watch.
“Basically we’ve learned a lot about how to use search scale techniques, both on the data science side but also large-scale engineering, and apply it to signals to really do personalization well,” said Jyber co-founder Arnab Bhattacharjee. “We really want to take those technologies and apply that across most of the Yahoo! properties.”
As the deal closes, Jybe’s service will be closed down while user can still download their data by means of a tool that Jybe’s team is currently working on. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) believes that Jybe’s data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day.
Bhattarcharjee said that personalized recommendations of various sorts of media will be “very important” to Yahoo! in the future, which is in one of the reasons Jybe team decided to shake hands with the company.
The engineers and data scientists who previously worked for Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) 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.
