Yahoo on Tuesday continued its quest for relevance in mobile internet with the acquisition of Qwiki, an iPhone app that automatically makes story-telling videos out of pictures and videos shot with Apple's smartphone. The investment is just the latest in Yahoo's business moves to come to the foreground of internet services, especially for mobile.
On Tuesday the company announced on its blog that they had acquired Qwiki - a deal that had been rumored about two weeks ago by AllThingsD, which puts the price tag for the upstart multimedia company at about $40 million to $50 million, according to their sources.
"We're excited to announce that Yahoo! acquired Qwiki - a company that uses awesome technology to bring together pictures, music and video to capture the art of storytelling," said Yahoo's blog. "Have you ever listened to an old song and all of a sudden a favorite vacation, concert, or summer memory pops into your mind? The Qwiki app automatically turns pictures and videos that you already have on your iPhone into quick, beautiful movies to share, including transitions and a soundtrack."
Qwiki, co-founded by AltaVista's Louis Monier and backed by an investment by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, launched in early 2011 as a web-based multimedia presentation system for search terms. "We've all seen science fiction films (or read novels) where computers are able to collect data on behalf of humans, and present the most important details. This is our goal at Qwiki- to advance information technology to the point it acts human," said the company's About section at the time, according to PCMag. Qwiki would bring up slideshows, relevant facts, audio clips, and create video montages related to topics users searched.
Since then, Qwiki moved offices from New York City to San Francisco and started focusing on a mobile video creation and sharing app, but one that's different than Vine and the most recently unveiled mobile video service, Instagram Video. The Qwiki iPhone app, launched in February 2013, creates mini-documentaries based on photos and videos that iPhone users take, adding in a soundtrack and captions to tell a story.
Now Qwiki is moving back to New York City, where Yahoo's headquarters are, to "reimagine Yahoo!'s storytelling experience," according to Yahoo's blog post. Qwiki created this Qwiki video to express its feelings about their acquisition.
This is the latest in a series of moves by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to reimagine the company and revitalize its services. In March of this year, Yahoo bought the news-summarizing web app called "Summly" for $30 million, making its 17 year old founder rich overnight. Later the service was integrated into the Yahoo mobile app in May, the same month Yahoo paid $1.1 billion to acquire Tumblr.
More recently, on Friday, June 28, Yahoo's executive vice president for platforms, Jay Rossiter, announced the discontinuation of several vestigial Yahoo services in a blog post called "Keeping our Focus on What's Next." Among the axed products was Yahoo Axis, a browser plug-in, Citizen Sports, which has been replaced by Yahoo Sports, the Yahoo WebPlayer, FoxyTunes, and, most prominently, AltaVista. AltaVista was an early colossus in the field of search engines. In the late 90s, it was one of the top destinations on the web, and provided one of the first web-based language translation services, called Babel Fish. The company eventually lost favor and was passed around as a web property by several technology companies, ending up at Yahoo after AltaVista's popular search engine was superseded by a fledgling new company called "Google."