Facebook has gone on a little bit of a spending spree this year, with mobile ad firm Rel8tion and group messaging service Beluga both joining being acquired starting in January. Now there’s another new corporate logo being added to the social network’s growing number of business assets, the developer of the mobile app platform Snaptu.
The Israel-based company confirmed the coming business deal in a new post on its company blog. Snaptu has already had dealings with its new owner-to-be, having developed one of the more popular methods for feature phone — less powerful than a smartphone, but Internet-connected and able to do more than just place calls — users to access Facebook on their devices. The mobile platform offers a series of mini-interfaces for popular social networking portals, everything from Twitter to LinkedIn to Picasa, laid out in a style that mirrors the Apple iPhone‘s home screen.
Snaptu was founded in 2007, with the goal of providing “useful and innovative services to the 95 percent of mobile users that don’t have access to advanced smart phones,” the blog post reads. The company’s recent partnership with Facebook on its “Facebook for Feature Phones” app was a success, and ultimately a big deciding factor in allowing the acquisition to move forward.
“We soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development,” the Snaptu blog post reads. “And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.”
Obviously the number of smartphone users has risen dramatically since Snaptu launched in 2007, thanks largely to the immense popularity of the iPhone and the wave of smartphone offerings that followed (and continue to follow) its release. It is expected that the deal will close within a few weeks, and users can “expect Snaptu to continue operating as it does today” during the transition period.
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