Facebook snaps up Snaptu for £43m

Facebook has agreed to purchase mobile app developer Snaptu in a deal reported to be worth up to $70m (£43.1m).

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Snaptu, which specialises in producing apps for mass market devices, confirmed the deal via a post on the official company blog on Saturday.

The deal is aimed at increasing the social network¹s mobile user base which numbered 200m in November according to official Facebook figures.

The social networking giant has yet to comment openly on the purchase and neither party has publicly disclosed the financial terms of the deal.

Although several reports citing industry sources have valued the deal between $40m (£24.6m) and $70m (£43.1m).

Snaptu was founded in 2007 and earlier this year it launched a Facebook app designed specifically for mass market mobile phones.

“We soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development,” read a post on the Snaptu blog which confirmed the acquisition.

The post went on to reveal that the acquisition is expected to close within weeks and that both parties intended to launch Facebook apps designed for “virtually every mobile phone.”

Last week professional social network LinkedIn confirmed that it launched a mobile app for mass market phones using Snaptu’s technology.

A blog post confirming the launch read: “This new LinkedIn app brings a smartphone-like user experience to over 2,500 different types of feature phone devices, about 80% of the devices sold worldwide.”

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk

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