Yahoo has acquired another startup, Distill, dealing in technical recruiting with an aim to improve its mobile advertising solutions.
Yahoo acquired Distill, a technical recruiting startup to strengthen its reach into the mobile bandwagon, more precisely its mobile advertising bit. The news of the acquisition came after the recruiting startup updated its web page, Thursday, with a message about joining Yahoo to help the web giant build "mobile advertising solutions." This has been Yahoo's most critical area of focus as the company is facing competition from giants like Google and Facebook.
According to TechCrunch, which first broke the news of the buyout, the team behind Distill developed the service to make the process of technical recruiting easier by setting up video interviewing and scheduling technical interviews.
"We are excited to share the news that the Distill team is off to start a new adventure! We are joining Yahoo," Distill announced on its official website. "Prior to creating Distill, we were part of the original team behind the creation of Tapjoy, a mobile performance-based advertising platform that drove deep engagement and monetization opportunities for mobile app publishers. We'll be drawing upon our expertise from the Tapjoy days to help build out Yahoo's mobile advertising solutions."
Distill's work structure is simply built around basic features of a video chat service like Skype, placing a text editor and file upload option so interviewer can easily walk the candidate through a collaborative coding session, according to TechCrunch. The service will continue to schedule interviews through February and the platform will finally be put to rest on March 30.
Yahoo's interest in Distill is self-explanatory as the founders of Distill have deep knowledge of advertising solutions. Post the acquisition, Distill's seven-member team will move to Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, next week. Deng-Kai Chen and Ken MacInnis, two founding members of the startup, have had experience working at Tapjoy, Google, Yahoo! Search, StumbleUpon and CERT and Yahoo's acquisition of the firm will benefit from their expertise. Yahoo's portfolio also includes other mobile-focused acquisitions such as Wander, Sparq and other recent startup buyouts like content-speeding startup PeerCDN "virtual venue" startup Evntlive, virtual world gaming service "Cloud Party" and voice assistant software startup SkyPhrase.
