Hasta La Gadget!

In what may be considered as a surprise move, popular cloud-storage service Dropbox has acquired recently-launched Mailbox. The new email app that launched around a month ago to hordes of curious users is now in the hands of Dropbox. Both Mailbox and Dropbox announced the acquisition on their respective blogs.

Dropbox says that they fell in love with Mailbox right away, describing the app as “simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered.” Dropbox discovered that Mailbox’s calling was the same as theirs: “to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day.” That’s when the Dropbox folks realized they would make a team.

Mailbox said that rather than grow the app and the company on its own, they’ve decided to join forces with Dropbox to possibly achieve more than what they could do on their own. The Mailbox app itself will still be sticking around and won’t be changing, save for a few new features coming in the future, including Dropbox integration, according to a hint from Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood.

Exact plans for the acquisition haven’t been disclosed, but we should definitely be seeing more features coming to Mailbox. We reviewed the app shortly after its release, and its certainly worth a try. The developer says that 60 million emails are going in and out per day, and the company’s service capacity has grown 2,000x since launching last month.

Dropbox acquires recently-launched email app Mailbox is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Mountain View has just picked up some experts on deep neural networks with their acquisition of DNNresearch, which was founded last year by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. The group is being brought into the fold after developing a solution that vastly improves object recognition. As a whole, advances in neural nets could lead to the development of improved computer vision, language understanding and speech recognition systems. We reckon that Page and Co. have a few projects in mind that would benefit from such things. Both students will be transitioning to Google, while Hinton will split his attention between teaching and working with the search giant.

Filed under: Misc, Internet, Google

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: University of Toronto

This week the folks at Facebook have both revealed a brand new set of features for their News Feed – for you and I – and have acquired a platform for social blogging by the name of Storylane. The acquisition of this group has been announced by Facebook as a key acquisition that’ll bring their ability to showcase “real identity through sincere and meaningful content” up to the forefront, per the previous work done by the acquired group. This acquisition moves the team of five employees that make up Storylane into the fold – the Facebook fold.

Storylane takes what you’ve always been sharing to Facebook and makes it bigger – not just in a literal pixel-size sense, but in a way that’s personable and professional at the same time. Those of you that’ve been using Storylane for the past several weeks or months – you’ll be given tools to migrate your work over to new services in the near future. Of course Facebook will be on that list, but from what we’re seeing from Storylane’s announcement, you’ll be running forward with services of all types as well.

As it has been with a large collection of acquisitions over the past several years in the technology universe, we’re seeing Storylane give a message that appears both sincerely written and ready to be more than excited about the purchase. With Facebook owning Storylane, we can expect the work they’ve done over their relatively short past to be integrated into the Facebook user interface quickly. Of course in this case that means Facebook quick – which could mean anything when it comes to actual real-world show for everyday users.

Have a peek at the timeline below for additional recent acquisitions done by various companies in high power and see if you can detect any recent patterns. It’s time to pick up your favorite group and make them your own! Have at it!

[via Storylane]

Facebook acquires Social-Blogging group Storylane is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Back in October, it was announced that T-Mobile would be acquiring regional carrier MetroPCS, but the deal isn’t final just yet. It obviously has to pass through several government barriers before it can officially happen. However, there’s one less hurdle to jump now, as the Department of Justice has given the merger the green light.

Now that the Department of Justice is out of the way, the acquisition deal now needs to make its way through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Committee on Foreign Investment, and MetroPCS shareholders, who are scheduled to vote on the merger on April 12, as previously reported a couple days ago.

MetroPCS is obviously encouraging shareholders to vote yes, and they say that voting for the merger has the same effect as voting against it. T-Mobile says that if shareholders vote against the merger, “there is no assurance that MetroPCS will be able to deliver the same or better stockholder value.”

Executive boards at both carriers have already approved the merger, and T-Mobile aims to migrate all MetroPCS customers over to T-Mobile’s system by 2015. T-Mobile is the US’s 4th-largest carrier, with MetroPCS being the 5th largest. While the merger may not put T-Mobile in third place, it certainly give the carrier quite a boost that it’s been wanting.

[via eWeek]

T-Mobile, MetroPCS merger gets approval from Department of Justice is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Opera has acquired Skyfire Labs, a company that deals with mobile cloud solutions and mobile video optimization and is best known for its Rocket Optimizer software. By combining the two companies, both will offer joint products, with the announcement saying that Opera’s Web Pass is one of the main focuses. The deal is expected to be final before March 15.

The Rocket Optimizer software provides mobile operators with a way to optimize video delivered over mobile data networks when traffic is high, increasing capacity by 60-percent (on average). This is achieved by shrinking the content’s size, and can be utilized near instantaneously when users are having issues with connecting to the content or with quality.

By using this, common problems experienced with streaming videos and audio are minimized, such as rebuffering, stalled buffering, and delayed start times. On top of this, Skyfire also offers another product called Skyfire Horizon, an extension for mobile browsers that allows for personalization.

Opera’s CFO/CSO Erik Harrell offered this statement. “The market opportunity for video/media optimization solutions geared towards operators and consumers is significant. After a thorough evaluation of this market, we strongly believe Skyfire is the clear leader for the future in this space.” After everything is finalized, Skyfire’s CEO will also be Opera’s Operator Business EVP. The acquisition involved an upfront $50 million cash consideration and $26 million in escrow including earn-out payments based on performance; the total acquisition figures could reach $155 million.

[via Opera]

Opera acquires Skyfire Labs for up to $155 million is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.