According to sources close to the issue, Yahoo spent $60 million to $70 million dollars just to acquire Rockmelt.
Sources said the price paid was mostly in cash, with some stock incentives for employees of Rockmelt.
Rockmelt’s website and apps will go dark on Aug. 31 but Yahoo plans to revive Rockwell and integrate its technology to its myriad of media and mobile assets.
Surely, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was engrossed with Rockwell’s well regarded team as she endeavors to build her own team.
Luckily, it will not be a complete loss for Rockmelt’s founders Tim Howes and Eric Vishria. These former executives from Loudcloud and Opsware are gaining high-position seats at Yahoo.
Tim Howes will be the vice president of engineering for all of Yahoo mobile while Eric Vishria will be the vice president of product on Yahoo’s media products. The two will be incorporating Rockmelt’s technology in their new roles.
Founded in 2009, Rockmelt, originally started as a social web browser. Though, supported by Silicon Valley’s top players, it had not gained much traction with its desktop browsers since it’s launching years ago, so maybe a link with the Internet Goliath will give it a boost.
Dreams of redesigning the web browser attests hard to grasp, as it wanted to take on well-established web browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Yahoo said in a statement on its blog:
“The parallels between Yahoo! and Rockmelt are obvious: we share a common goal to help people discover the best personalized content from around the web. We can’t wait to integrate the Rockmelt technology into our platform as we work to deliver the best experiences to our users in new and exciting ways.”
As we see, not so much in the way Rockmelt projected, so it will be fascinating to see what Yahoo makes of it after that.
