I was beginning to wonder about Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) of late, it seems like its been forever since Marissa Mayer opened up Yahoo’s coffers to purchase another company it views necessary to its turnaround. I mean the addition of Rockmelt follows only six acquisitions in July. With the exception of Tumblr, nearly every acquisition made since has focused on Yahoo’s laser like focus on competing in the mobile arena, and Rockmelt is no different.
Rockmelt’s history
Rockmelt started as a company in 2010 and first released a browser that was built on the same backbone as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s Chrome, though it added heaps of social aspects that made what you found browsing easier to share on Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately for Rockmelt, they soon learned that people like to share Twitter and Facebook content, on Twitter and Facebook and found little need for a third-party platform to do so.
In April of 2011, Rockmelt recognized the folly that was this browser and pulled the plug to focus on a social news aggregater in the same vein as Flipboard or Digg while still having a lightweight browser built in to the platform. And it is just that, a strange hybrid of the two with browsing support. That is, it was. When Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced the acquisition today it did so at the same time as it said that Rockmelt would shut down its app on August 31. The world won’t miss it, of the million or so people who downloaded the app for iOS, less than half returned to the app the day after first downloading it.
No terms of deals of acquisition made public
No terms for the deal were made public today, but Kara Swisher of AllThingsD suggest that her sources close to the deal believe it to be in the range of $60 million to $70 million.
“The parallels between Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Rockmelt are obvious: we share a common goal to help people discover the best personalized content from around the web,” said Yahoo product heads Mike Kerns and Adam Cahan in a company blog post.
Given the fact that the app will be shut down nearly immediately, it’s easy to call this a talent acquisition. Given that the blog post announcing the deal was c0-signed by Adam Cahan, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)’s senior vice president of mobile, it’s also a pretty easy guess as to where this talent will go.
