Yahoo Acquires Recommendation Startup Jybe

Yahoo has acquired recommendation startup Jybe, founded in 2011 by three former Yahoo employees. The company’s stated mission was to help people find things they like to do, based on what’s trending in their social circles.

To that end, it released an iPhone app last year providing personalized recommendations for things to do, books to read and movies to watch, among other things.

Yahoo’s latest “acqui-hire” brings back a total of five former Yahoos, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, previously vice president of Yahoo Search Technology. The others were also part of the company’s search and Hadoop teams: Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye and Karthik Krishnamurthy.

“While the Jybe app has closed, we're confident that their data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day,” stated Jay Rossiter, senior vice president, Cloud Platform Group, at Yahoo, in a blog post today.

The stand-alone Jybe app will be closed down as part of the acquisition, according to a TechCrunch report. But he told the tech blog the personalized delivery of various types of media will be “very important” to Yahoo in the future, which helped bring him back to the Web portal.

 
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