San Francisco — Popular social networking giant Facebook continues its acquisition spree, ramping up its mobile arsenal, following its major acquisition of Instagram last week, this time around commerce. Facebook has just acquired another San Francisco-based startup called TagTile, a mobile-based customer loyalty business for an undisclosed price.
Anyways, the social media leader Facebook has confirmed that it has acquired a San Francisco startup that helps merchants court shoppers with rewards for checking in with smartphones during visits, but this time around, under the wraps the social network has moved to buy up the team of developers behind Tagtile.
Facebook’s acquisition of Tagtile for an undisclosed sum comes on the heels of a billion-dollar deal to acquire the startup behind wildly popular smartphone photo sharing application Instagram. But according to TechCrunch, it is a pretty safe bet that the cost for the startup would not run near the same sort of money coughed-up for Instagram.
Facebook wrote in an e-mail statement: “We are happy to confirm that TagTile’s founders are joining Facebook, and that Facebook is acquiring substantially all of the company’s assets. We have admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and we are excited to have them join Facebook.”
The idea behind Tagtile is simple: connect mobile customers to physical stores. Similar to Square, TagTile furnishes merchants with a free hardware device (see the white cube in the photo) for customers to tap on with their phone when they checkout.
You walk into a store, tap your phone against the Tagtile Cube, and you reap the discounts or rewards. However, customers have to first download the Tagtile app (available for Android and iOS), which pushes targeted marketing material to their smartphone based on stores they visit. The Cube meanwhile provides data to help businesses pinpoint marketing efforts that work.
TagTile helps local businesses identify customers…
Tagtile announced in a statement on its website: “Today, we are happy to announce that we are joining Facebook, and that they are acquiring substantially all of our assets. It is a huge opportunity for us to take our goal forward–helping businesses grow–and do it on a much, much bigger scale than we could have on our own.”
The two-person team will be soon join Facebook, though they would no longer be continuing their operations on Tagtile. Tagtile further noted that while it would not be taking on any new customers as of now, it will continue to operate its normal service for the time being. Tagtile also notes that its service will one day shutter since “Tagtile as it exists today would not be part of what we do at Facebook,” according to a post by the company.
Interestingly, Tagtile was established by former VMware engineer Abheek Anand and one-time Google engineer Soham Mazumdar. The entrepreneurs created a system that empowers customers to use their iPhones or Android-powered smartphones to check in at shops and get rewarded with discounts, coupons or loyalty points. The developers are now certain to become part of Facebook’s grand plan to tie in e-commerce and social shopping with its network, and explore further avenues of making money from retail businesses with various offers.
Nevertheless, Facebook has been beefing up its mobile arsenal and capabilities as lifestyles increasingly revolved around smartphones and tablet computers. More than 10 million Instagram applications tuned to Apple or Android-powered gadgets have been downloaded since the acquisition by Facebook was announced on Monday, raising the total number of users to about 40 million.