In an ongoing effort to branch out into more mobile platforms, Yahoo announced on Wednesday they've purchased the popular video making application Qwiki for iPhones.
The app lets users edit music, photos and videos together in order to create short films automatically. Yahoo made the purchase in the hopes Qwiki, and applications like it, will help propel it to be a major player in the mobile market.
AllThingsD reports the estimated price tag Yahoo bought the app for is between $40 million to $50 million, the figures are based on various sources from about two weeks ago when rumors began about Yahoo's discussions to purchase the app. Almost immediately, Yahoo wanted to suppress any rumors it would kill off the brand as it has done with most of its smaller acquisitions.
"We will continue to support the Qwiki app, and the team will join Yahoo! In our New York city office to reimagine Yahoo!'s storytelling experience," a spokesperson for the company wrote on Yahoo's blog. "Stay tuned... there's much more to come!"
Qwiki released the app recently, however, it began as a multimedia search offering along with another iPad app that would create video summaries off search terms and other video creation storytelling tools. Last year it even got help from Yahoo news partner, ABC News, to publish a platform that quickly creates interactive stories. Although it's moved around a lot in recent months, it has indeed locked itself down as a mobile platform, which is exactly what made it so appealing to Yahoo.
According to AllThingsD, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been looking to create a series of daily apps and services, centered on people's mobile devices, in hopes of reinvigorating its offerings.
CEO and co-founder Doug Imbruce and co-founder Louis Monier, the founder of AltaVista, lead Qwiki.In an interview this past February, Imbruce discussed the company's mobile goals.
"We don't want to be the world's 10th video-sharing app," he said. "There are plenty of those. We want to be the first real storytelling app."
