Yahoo acquired Blink, the maker of a mobile messaging application with ephemeral photo-sharing, in a move that seems to indicate Yahoo is attempting to compete with self-destructing photo giant Snapchat.
Blink's seven-person team will also become Yahoo employees as part of the deal, according to TechCrunch. Yahoo had quite a few companies with ephemeral photo-sharing to look at such as Confide and Wickr, but decided on the product of former Googlers.
The terms of the deal weren't discussed, but apparently Yahoo will also own Kismet, an ambient social app that never seemed to gain "traction." That seems to be TechCrunch's view of Blink in general. It seems as if Meh Labs, the makers of Blink with $1 million of seed funding, appeared to jump on the bandwagon of whatever new app fad was going and crossed their fingers that their app would "gain traction." They didn't and now they're owned by Yahoo.
Blink was gaining some users in the Middle East, but so far only had 100,000 downloads.
Both Blink and Kismet have now been shut down, likely to be integrated into Yahoo's own apps.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
