14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo's Marissa Mayer is out shopping. While she's a regular fashionista and well known for it, she's shopping for talent this time. True to her word, the first company Yahoo bought under her leadership, right after the Q3 financial report, is a mobile tech company.
Yahoo acquired the company behind the iOS app Stamped, a personal recommendations app. The app is getting shut down by the end of the year.
Stamped's gimmick to stand out from every other app or service with recommendations, pretty much any app or site out there, was that the recommendations came from the people you knew.
There were also "tastemakers" like Justin Bieber or Ellen Degeneres, both of which "invested" in the company.
Given that it's just been bought by Yahoo and that the product is shutting down, it's safe to say Stamped didn't get all that popular even with the help of its celebrity investors.
The good thing about having a struggling startup is that you can't fail, you just get acquired. If the product isn't panning out, you've got a nice salary and a big pay day to look forward to.
"Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented team based in New York City to help us create a new center of mobile product development for Yahoo," Yahoo said.
"Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with Yahoo!’s vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. They will be a great asset as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and build a world-class mobile development organization," it added.
The Stamped team will form the core of a new mobile development team at Yahoo New York. All Stamped employees along with the cofounders are joining. Apparently, they're already working on a Yahoo branded app coming out soon.
One of the problems at Yahoo Mayer underlined was its lack of coherence in the mobile space, there are 76 different and largely independent mobile apps and sites at Yahoo.