Yahoo Gets Into Location Services with Koprol Acquisition

Yahoo hasn’t been very active on the acquisition front lately, with a few notable exceptions. In fact, it’s been much more likely to shut down or outsource a service than buy a new one. Yet, one opportunity seemed of particular interest to Yahoo, location-based services. It reportedly tried to buy the hottest location service in town, Foursquare, to no avail, but it’s clear that the company believes in the emerging market, as it has now acquired an Indonesian business, Koprol, that pretty much does the same thing as Foursquare.

“Headquartered in Jakarta, Koprol is a provider of online consumer experiences that combines social, mobile and location based services,” a post on Yahoo’s corporate blog read. “Koprol allows people to connect and share photos, reviews and additional information about locations in real-time using just their mobile phone browser, making the service accessible to a larger percentage of mobile users. The addition of Koprol to the Yahoo! family will extend Yahoo!’s social and mobile offering in this emerging market,” the post added.

While there are plenty of similarities with Foursquare, including the ‘check in’ feature, Koprol is much more suited for the market it’s in. Being a web app, it works on any mobile phone, not just smartphones, and it also has a more developed social aspect.

It’s unclear why Yahoo is suddenly interested in the market. It’s also unclear how it will integrate the services into its own. There’s certainly been a lot of hype over location-based services, but that hype hasn’t yet translated into much mainstream success, not to mention revenue.

Yahoo is a very mainstream web company, but maybe it’s trying to show that it can still innovate and still lead in emerging markets. However, buying a business just to prove a point doesn’t seem like the best business move. And Yahoo has a history of buying companies only to run them into the ground. Yahoo has also recently signed a deal with Nokia, a move that many are labeling as ‘too little, too late’ for both of them.