Having noticed that the mobile market brings in significant profits to other companies, Yahoo decided to strengthen its position there by acquiring Sparq a platform that enables people to jump from one app to another on their mobile devices.
Sparq wasn’t exactly one of the most popular mobile marketing companies in the world. This Seattle-based startup was only founded in 2010 and had raised only $1.7m to develop their products. Still, it’s one of Sparq’s technologies that caught the eye of Yahoo and eventually determined the Internet corporation to make a bid.
The deep link technology developed by Sparq connects a certain place within a mobile app to external links located in e-mail messages or on Web pages, for example. While the service itself will be shut down when the deal is struck, the technology developed by Sparq will continue to exist in Yahoo’s mobile products. Ultimately, the deep link technology could make Yahoo’s offer of mobile apps more cohesive, even though the company didn’t say how it would use Sparq’s platform.
Jesse Chor, Sparq founder and CEO, stated: “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo. Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”
Last year, in an interview with GeekWire, Chor explained how the deep link technology works: “The Sparq platform removes common friction and barriers to purchase by detecting if an app is already installed on a mobile device. If the app is there,the SPARQ platform eliminates the need to login to a mobile site and delivers the customer quickly to the place in the app where they want to go. This leads to more purchases, more games being played and more activity on the apps.”
Naturally, Chor (who is a former Expedia developer) and his team are happy about this acquisition also because they have now become Yahoo employees. Now, don’t imagine that this startup had hundreds of employees, as the LinkedIn page only features about a dozen. I believe this to be an essential part of any merger or acquisition, so I salute the Internet corporation for taking this decision.
From a financial point of view, Yahoo hasn’t been all that great lately. This is exactly why the company bought Sparq, as it hopes that this platform will help it broaden and monetize its mobile audience. Yet, the financial details of this acquisition haven’t been disclosed. All in all, the sum paid for this mobile marketing company couldn’t have been that great.
If you liked this post, please check the Nest acquisition by Google and the Boston Dynamics acquisition by the same Internet giant.
