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Facebook Acquires Feature Phone App Maker Snaptu
Krystalo writes "Facebook has agreed to acquire Snaptu, an Israeli startup that makes Java-based feature phone apps, for an estimated $70 million. The acquisition, for which neither company would reveal financial details, is expected to close within a few weeks. Earlier this year, Facebook worked with the mobile development firm to build a feature phone app that is accessible free of data charges in various overseas markets. The company says the Facebook for Feature Phones app currently works on more than 2,500 devices."
Why is the titlebar of this article red?
is a feature phone
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Remember all the rumors of a "Facebook phone"? Whatever happened to that?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Wikipedia says a "feature phone" is a mobile phone less powerful than a smartphone. Some run MIDlets designed for J2ME; others run BREW apps. The advantage of carrying a feature phone is 1. no mandatory data bill and 2. easier to find prepaid carriers in the United States.
Why is the titlebar of this article red?
to make you ask a stupidass noob question
next time read the FAQ you douchebag skin-flute player
Can't any large corporations today invent their own stuff? It just seems silly that most only seem to innovate by acquiring someone else that is. Oh well, the next year will bring changes.
COMMUNIST JEWS working with CIA and NSA are going to replace all phone companies.
A hooknose means they are more albino Arab than albino African.
Every company they buy in America is for anti-competition purposes against the remaining companies if they don't already own those as well.
It's why there is no public breathrough in computing performance, so they can step through every version of a processor and all bridges between to reap the most money rather than efficiently improve the world without all the dross in between.
Are there already 2500 different brands of phone?
Niggers!
jus wen u herd dat ma face was in da iwebz i got ma ugly black face on your goddamn nigger phone. Rapin your dorters n sistahs in their pockets.
"accessible free of data charges in various overseas markets" Can anyone clarify for me how this works? Using a web app doesn't incur data fees?!
subject says it all.
Be seeing you...
They aren't getting much.
Never heard of it. Seems the hype was louder than the product announcements.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
2,500 devices - are there really that many models of smart phone out there? I know there are a lot but not that many. Or do they mean that 2,500 users have this app installed?
Also I wonder how that "accessible free of data charges" is supposed to work. Is that a special contract or so? I have seen phone companies offering pretty cheap data plans with small amount of data, plus unlimited data for Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Something like that, details I forgot, not interested myself, just interesting that such contracts exist. And then limited to the mobile versions of those sites, like m.facebook.com.
This is a great program for the not-so-smart phones like my "Sony Ericsson W610i". It gives easy access to Twitter as well as many other sites. I hope Facebook will still allow us to access Twitter.
Surely they could have made a java program themselves for less than 50m :S
How can they say they won't reveal any financial details when they have already disclosed the purchase price? Or, is that not a financial detail?
Since when do phones have a mandatory data bill?
Since the majority of U.S. customers decided that they aren't willing to pay $500 for a smartphone. The beginning of the end of this came when Sprint began to offer Android smartphones under its prepaid Virgin Mobile brand in the fourth quarter of 2011.
bought a SIM card
Two out of the three major wireless carriers in the United States use CDMA2000 instead of GSM, and instead of CSIM cards, they program the subscriber identity directly into the phone. That's why one doesn't just see SIM cards for sale in the United States; instead, one sees handsets branded with a carrier's logo, and the vast majority of them are feature phones.
overseas
Oh, that's the difference.
We should still be discussing what AT&T just did to the economy by dumping $39 Billion on T-Mobile to remove the only agile competitor from the market. $70M for a few wigets doesn't seem to rate a line in the classifieds.
then this is another step on the way to more data-based communication services. If you are able to have a chat on your phone via this Snaptu/Facebook app, that uses minimal bandwidth as the article claims, then all you have to do it calculate which is cheaper: the SMS plan you are using, or the data charges for communicating with this app.