It seems that more and more tech companies are jumping into the acqui-hire bandwagon to further improve their products and services. The latest tech heavy weight to announce another acqui-hire is no other than Google with its acquisition of Wavii for a reported $30 million.


Apple also had an interest with Wavii and was Google’s main competitor for the Seattle-based startup. Both companies took interest in Wavii’s algorithm that parses a personalized news feed and summarizes them in similar fashion as Yahoo’s recent acquisition – Summly.

Wavii’s 25-person team, including its founder Adrian Aoun, will soon move from Seattle to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division in Mountain View, California. At the time of acquisition, Wavii had raised over $2 million in seed funding from several investors including Max Levchin, Crunchfund, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Mitch Kapor and Dave Morin to name a few.


As to what Google plans to do with Wavii technology, it’s possible that the Search giant will go the same way as Yahoo did with the latest version of its app on iOS. However, Google has a more diverse portfolio than Yahoo so it may employ Wavii’s expertise in places other than search, say its upcoming Glass HUD.

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Yahoo has been very busy these past couple of months, actually making headlines just a few days ago when it announced that it will be shutting down several of its long time projects to focus its efforts on the development of apps.


And based on the looks of its new weather and mail apps, it seems that the company’s decision to streamline its portfolio was a good one. Both the weather and mail apps sport a new interface characterized minimalist yet highly visual user interface. Today, Yahoo announced its flagship app for iOS which integrates features developed by its recent acquisition – Summly.

Summly, which was acquired by Yahoo last month for a reported $30 million is a mobile app for iOS that summarizes news feeds into short and condensed version for easy consumption. After the acquisition, Yahoo absorbed the Summly team including its founder 17-year old Nick D’ Aloisio into its app development wing to start working on Yahoo’s mobile apps.
And today, the result of this acquisition is reflected on the company’s new app. The app provides Summly summaries of new stories in a “virtually endless” newsfeed that is shown on semi-transparent panels on top of images stretched across the entire width of the display. The app also let users to drill down on specific categories and allows users to like or flag topics which they deem interesting or not.

Searches done on the app as well as preferences set inside the app are also reflected on Yahoo’s site both for the desktop and on mobile as long as the user is signed in using his Yahoo ID. The app is currently available to US customers only but an international roll out is sure to follow.

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