Yahoo Buys Rondee and Ghostbird

Yahoo has acquired two small startups: Rondee, a conference calling service, and Ghostbird, a development firm that has several photo apps. Both companies will be shut down with their staffs joining the Yahoo team.

ValueWalk’s Aman Jain reported, “Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) continues with its shopping spree of start-ups and yesterday, it added two more to its collection. The internet firm acquired Ghostbird Software, which makes photo apps for iOS, and Rondee, which provides conference calling solutions. The terms of the deal have not been made public.”

TechCrunch’s Rip Empson added, “Users of six-year-old free conference calling service, Rondee, were tonight informed via email that the startup has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. It will also suffer the same fate met by other recent Yahoo acquisitions — like MileWise, Astrid, GoPollGo and Loki Studios to name just four — in that it will soon be going the way of the dinosaur. After June 30th, the company’s website now reads, users will no longer be allowed to access their data or create new conference calls.”

GigaOm’s David Meyer wrote, “No prizes for guessing where the Toronto-based GhostBird folks are heading – as they wrote in a blog post on Wednesday, they’re off to help the revitalized Flickr team make new iOS and Android apps. KitCam and PhotoForge 2 won’t see any further updates, and you won’t be able to download them from the App Store anymore.”

And ReadWrite’s Brian Proffitt commented, “Yahoo seems to be hoovering up as many companies as it can these days, shutting them down along the way. Growth is a reasonable part of any new direction a company make take, but at some point shareholders of Yahoo have got to start wondering when they are going to see some real results from all of these buys.”

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