Today, mobile app company Alike has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo and will be joining the Yahoo Mobile team.
Alike allows you to recommend nearby venues that are your “favorites.” This is similar to Facebook’s approach in tagging the things around you that you’re interested in. This could be a great move for Yahoo in pulling together like-graph type information to build out more content on its site.
Here’s what Alike had to say about it:
Alike is joining Yahoo! Mobile
At Alike, we’ve spent the last couple of years working hard to build amazing mobile experiences to delight our customers, which is why we’re thrilled to announce some big news: we’re joining Yahoo! Mobile.
We’ve always been passionate about the growing power of intelligent mobile experiences. We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives.
In Yahoo! we’ve found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real. We’re super excited to join Yahoo!’s mobile team, where we can march toward that vision faster than ever.
As of today, we will no longer support the Alike Nearby iPhone and Web apps. Thank you to all our customers, partners, investors, and advisors who’ve supported us from day one! We’ve taken a big step on our journey, and we could not have done it without your support.
Looking forward to starting our new chapter at Yahoo!
Sincerely,
The Alike Team
When our own Ryan Lawler covered Alike last year, this is how he described the experience:
The app ranks recommendations based on how “alike” they are to your search queries, allows users to see how far away a place is, and lets them provide feedback about whether they think one place is like another. Venue pages provide more detail, including address, phone number, hours, etc., and lets users bookmark them for later.
Many have thought that Foursquare was a perfect acquisition target for Yahoo, and that might still be the case, or the company decided that it liked the Alike app and team much better. At the very least, Yahoo now has a battle-tested, social-experienced mobile team on its staff.
Through a spokesperson, Yahoo has confirmed the acquisition but is not sharing the purchase price at this time.
The Alike team created an app that focuses on personalization — using the restaurants and places you like to find the ones you’ll love. We were very impressed by the team and their approach to building personalized experiences. The entire Alike team will join Yahoo!’s mobile organization in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.
We’re told that the app and site will be shut down, so it will be interesting to see if Yahoo ever unleashes what the team built in a local discovery and recommendation service of its own.
Alike’s CEO Maria Zhang sent us the following comment about the news:
I am super excited to start my first day here at Yahoo! Mobile team. It is an amazing team with a grand vision. The entire Alike team is very happy to be here.
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...
The Alike iPhone app is designed to let you know about nearby restaurants, bars, and cafes that are like those you’re already a fan of. It’s pretty simple to use: You just open it up, type in the name of one of your favorite spots, and it’ll suggest others like it in your proximity. The app ranks recommendations based on how “alike” they are to your search queries, allows users to see how far away a place is, and lets...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
