Travel Traction: Yahoo Buys Social Startup Wander
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, February 11, 2014
Conceived as a sort of travel diary in 2012, Wander more recently gained traction with Days -- a mobile app that lets users share a “Day” full of experiences, hopes and dreams in digital form. The concept contrasts with most social platforms, which encourage users to share images and thoughts on a moment-to-moment basis.
“We started our company with the vision of transforming daily habits, and we’re proud to be joining a new one that shares that mission,” founder Jeremy Fisher and the rest of Wander’s management team explained in a blog post on Tuesday.
Wander's leadership said it expects the entire team to join Yahoo’s New York-based Mobile and Emerging Products group.
“We’ll continue on as a startup team within a larger organization,” they said. “The Days app will live on as a stand-alone entity, and we’ll also be working on some exciting new projects that we can’t talk about just yet.”
Yahoo did not return requests for comment by press time.
Since Marissa Mayer took the reins at Yahoo in 2012, rarely a week has gone by without an acquisition or partnership of some kind. Last month alone, Yahoo acquired a number startups, including Incredible Labs, the startup behind personal assistant app Donna, and Tomfoolery, a startup launched by AOL and Yahoo veterans that makes the Anchor communications app for the workplace.
In 2013, Yahoo racked up some 28 acquisitions.
In Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call last month, Mayer said the company would “continue to opportunistically look for talent acquisitions as we continue to grow, particularly our technical workforce and our mobile workforce.”
Mayer also noted that Yahoo now has 400 million monthly active users, or about half its total active user base, up from 150 million 14 months ago.
Yahoo also just announced a partnership with consumer reviews site Yelp, which was widely seen as an effort to increase market share of local queries on its search engine.
