Yahoo has bought Tomfoolery, a developer that focuses on enterprise-related applications.
The acquisition shouldn't come as a surprise since recent reports claimed that the Internet giant was in advanced talks to acquire Tomfoolery. At the moment, the most notable app to come from the company, is Anchor, a real-time conversation platform designed for the workplace. Users of Anchor can simply create groups of different threads on any particular subject. For example, users could create a group about tomorrow's work plan. Users can also upload photos to Anchor and share them with friends or co-workers. In addition, Anchor integrates well with other apps such as EverNote, DropBox, and social media apps to help make for a smoother workflow.
The first time TomFoolery came on the scene was in 2013. It had a seed funding of $1.7 million from well known investors, such as several employees from AOL and Yahoo. The idea behind the company, which is led by ex-Yahoo employees and ex-employees from AOL, was to design apps for enterprise users based on consumer principles.
It appears everything went according to plan, as it didn't take Yahoo too long to get TomFoolery under its wings.
Unfortunately for users of Anchor, the Yahoo acquisition means the app will be shut down. Furthermore, it is not certain if some features of Anchor will be reborn in whatever project Tomfoolery will be working on at Yahoo. Maybe this will come in the form of an app designed for the consumer market, or both the consumer and enterprise market.
This is an important acquisition for Yahoo, another "boomerang" hire, a term loosely used by Yahoo CEO. To her, this term means doing what must be done to get the company back into shape and returning Yahoo employees.
The four co-founders of Tomfoolery, CEO Kakul Srivastava, Chief Product Officer Sol Lipman, VP of platform Simon Batistoni, and VP of mobile Ethan Nagel, will join Yahoo's Jeff Bonforte to work on communication products, such as Yahoo Messenger, Mai, and Calendar, according to TechCrunch. What the rest of the team will be working on is a mystery at this point, but we're inclined to believe they might be put to work on current internal projects, or something new entirely.
The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed but The Wall Street Journal puts it at around $16 million.
