Some unconfirmed reports say that a Social Networking company called HotPotato has been acquired by facebook recently for an unknown amount. HotPotato is a New-York based startup that offered geo-based social activity updates and has been in a successful business for quite a while. The company announced that it would soon be closing their business. As there is no specific number on the amount for which the company was sold, different sources have got different numbers to crunch. Peter Kafka of MediaMemo estimates that the sale was of somewhere between $10-15 million, while Techcrunch estimates it to be around $10 Million. The CEO of HotPotato avoided commenting on the amount of acquisition so its still unknown. Johnny Thaw, the spokesman of the company said in his statement:
“We’re excited to confirm that we recently acquired Hot Potato, a service that helps people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends. We’ve admired for some time how Hot Potato is tackling this space and look forward to working with them to bring Hot Potato innovations to Facebook.”
Thaw also did not make any comments on the acquisition price of HotPotato and left it as a mystery. HotPotato currently has eight employees and all of them would soon be shifting to facebook’s office to work for their parent company now. HotPotato in stakes has raised around $1.42 Million so far along with its other ventures. Facebook has not mentioned so far on how they have planned to use this acquisition or what they are planning to do with it. Apparently, facebook has hired HotPotato after the impressive sales result which their mobile application showed after being launch in the November last year and they plan to impose that particular technology for their Facebook place feature that was recently announced – a new feature from facebook that allows you to check-in to places and see near-by friends. HotPotato has also announced that some of the features would be integrated with facebook.
“Today, we’re thrilled to announce that some of the features and thinking behind Hot Potato are going to be exposed to a much larger audience: We’ve been acquired by Facebook.”
According to HotPotato, they will be deleting all their user information base and related sources within a short duration of time and no details whatsoever would be kept by facebook. If you are interested in getting something similar developed for you business, then please feel free to call or Email us to get a free quote for your project. We are an iPhone application development company with immense experience in this field. Contact us or visit our portfolio for more details.
