Today, Facebook told the public that it has bought Ozlo, a company that created a virtual assistant for iOS and Android devices. Ozlo provides recipes, shows restaurants near you, movie times, etc. Ozlo is still very small with only 500-1000 downloads on the Androids. The 29 Ozlo employees will be moving to Facebook's messenger group. Terms of the deal are not released. Source
- What is Facebook's mentality when doing this? Don't they have enough brain power to create a better virtual assistant
If a company had a good enough idea to get funding and hire 29 people, it's likely that they did have a good idea that took time to develop. Why spend time to develop a good idea if you're rich and can buy one, along with the employees who created it and who best know how to handle it?
How much did they pay?
Often times huge companies have planned (for a long time) to incorporate certain features into their products, but instead of going through the hurdle of extensive planning, hiring, etc. they just buy a small company that has the desired tech. And with it, they get the human resources too, on top of new IP. So they also save a ton on hiring costs, and all that.
They will probably just part out the tech, and incorporate it. Change name, or probably just drop the name. Sometimes they do it for the developers alone. Yahoo has run a very similar tactic for ages, where they simply acquired companies with relevant tech and developers, and canned the projects, while keeping some parts. If it's possible to buy it as a whole, it can be cheaper than buying each part. Since this startup was quite small, I can only image that they got it relatively cheap (and probably paid them in a huge chunk of stock - the owners, that is). Time AND money saved.
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