By Charles Clark, The Seattle Times
Following its $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn this week, Microsoft made another acquisition Thursday, buying messaging app developer Wand Labs for an undisclosed amount.
In a blog post, David Ku of Microsoft’s Information Platform Group wrote that the move furthers Microsoft’s goal of building “conversation as a platform” and that Wand’s technology and team will strengthen the company’s position in the field.
Ku wrote that members of Wand Labs’ team will be a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team.
In a post on Wand Labs site, CEO Vishal Sharma wrote that the company would be shutting down its service, but that familiar elements will be seen in future work.
“Our deep experience with semantics, messaging and authority are a natural fit for the work already underway at Microsoft, especially in the area of intelligent agents and cognitive services,” he said.
Wand Labs, founded in 2013 by Google alum Sharma, developed the Wand app, which enables users to use and share apps and services within a chat. For instance, if you and your friends were trying to figure out where to eat, you could open up Yelp while in the Wand app chat environment and share a restaurant review as well as access to your Yelp account.
Wand Labs small team of seven is based in Redwood City, Calif., and backed by venture capital firms Lightspeed, InterWest and Khosla Ventures. The app hasn’t yet reached general availability.
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