Microsoft is going to buy news application Prismatic
Recently, Microsoft has bought 143 startups. But it seems the company is not going to stop there. Apparently, the new acquisition will be Prismatic - a news application that gives users recommendations on what news they may be interested in.
Microsoft offered the highest price for this startup ($ 30 million), leaving behind companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
According to Crunchbase, to date Prismatic has received about $ 15 million from several major investors: Accel Partners, Jim Breyer, Yuri Milner (Yuri Milner) and Alex Gurevich (Alex Gurevich).
The founders of Prismatic are natural language recognition and processing experts: Bradford Cross, who is now the CEO, and Eray Heghai. They created an application for iOS, Android and a web-service that provide the user with recommendations on what news he might be interested in. These recommendations were based on an analysis of user behavior: which links were left unattended for him, what news he shares, which saves, and so on.
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Analysis of application downloads according to App Annie for the past 2 years shows that the company first ranked fairly high among the news iPhone apps in the US and was among the top ten. But over time, this figure dropped to 758 places. The overall rating of the application has never risen above 200.
Last year, the Android version was launched, but the number of downloads was small - between 5,000 and 10,000.
Of course, one cannot say that now is the best time to search for investors. There was an ambiguous situation, from which some employees "left" in the truest sense of the word. So, co-owner Hegkhai left the company, as well as chief engineer Jenny Finkel.
On the other hand, the technology that Prismatic has developed has great potential. If you use it for a larger project and recommend not only news, but various web resources, applications, music, etc., then completely different perspectives open up. So, the Prismatic acquisition fits into the plane of interests of companies such as Microsoft.
Microsoft offered the highest price for this startup ($ 30 million), leaving behind companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
According to Crunchbase, to date Prismatic has received about $ 15 million from several major investors: Accel Partners, Jim Breyer, Yuri Milner (Yuri Milner) and Alex Gurevich (Alex Gurevich).
The founders of Prismatic are natural language recognition and processing experts: Bradford Cross, who is now the CEO, and Eray Heghai. They created an application for iOS, Android and a web-service that provide the user with recommendations on what news he might be interested in. These recommendations were based on an analysis of user behavior: which links were left unattended for him, what news he shares, which saves, and so on.
')
Analysis of application downloads according to App Annie for the past 2 years shows that the company first ranked fairly high among the news iPhone apps in the US and was among the top ten. But over time, this figure dropped to 758 places. The overall rating of the application has never risen above 200.
Last year, the Android version was launched, but the number of downloads was small - between 5,000 and 10,000.
Of course, one cannot say that now is the best time to search for investors. There was an ambiguous situation, from which some employees "left" in the truest sense of the word. So, co-owner Hegkhai left the company, as well as chief engineer Jenny Finkel.
On the other hand, the technology that Prismatic has developed has great potential. If you use it for a larger project and recommend not only news, but various web resources, applications, music, etc., then completely different perspectives open up. So, the Prismatic acquisition fits into the plane of interests of companies such as Microsoft.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/286308/
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