Yahoo, Inc. on Tuesday announced the acquisition of social mobile service Alike.
Yahoo purchased Alike to acquire the teams talented staff of developers. Alike is a recommendation tool that suggests local businesses to users who have visited those locations in the past. The tool also recommends locations based on a users prior interactions with other types of similar locations.
After the acquisition Yahoo released the following situation:
“The Alike team created an app that focuses on personalization — using the restaurants and places you like to find the ones you’ll love. We were very impressed by the team and their approach to building personalized experiences.”
Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer is no stranger to location based service acquisitions. Before leaving Google the Yahoo CEO helped purchase and combine Zagat and Frommer’s.
Alike also has a talented founder in former Microsoft and Zillow employee Maria Zhang.
In October Zhang told GeekWire:
“We’ve painstakingly collected hundreds of terabytes of data and crafted complex algorithms to really understand the essence of a place. We compare these essences to discover similar places. The great thing about this big data approach is that there is no waiting for a critical mass of 500 of your friends or 10 million other people for the service to be useful.”
Yahoo is making a huge push in the mobile sector of social. In 2012 the company purchased Stamped, a mobile application that allows users to “stamp” restaurants and other businesses for their friends to see. In December Yahoo purchased OnTheAir.
All three Yahoo acquisitions will be combined to create a competent mobile development team for new social initiatives.
The Alike app will no longer be supported by its former team.
Yahoo has not disclosed terms of the sale.
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