Facebook to buy firm specialising in voice translation

August 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Facebook to buy firm specialising in voice translation

POSTED: 13 Aug 2013 9:44 AM
– AFP/xq

Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a firm specialising in voice translation software, the two companies said Monday, without providing financial details of the transaction. NEW YORK CITY: Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a firm specialising in voice translation software, the two companies said Monday, without providing financial details of the transaction. Founded in 2001, Mobile Technologies is best known for developing the Jibbigo mobile application for speech-to-speech language translation.“I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that’s behind some of the world’s leading speech recognition and machine translation technology,” Facebook’s Product Management Director Tom Stocky wrote in an online posting.

“Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution.”

In a separate statement, the smaller firm said it was “excited to announce that Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies and that once the deal has closed many of us will be joining the company at their headquarters in Menlo Park, California.”

Despite having over one billion monthly users, Facebook has struggled to climb out of the wreckage of its disastrous stock market debut more than a year ago.

The social network has appeared to be on an upward trajectory, however, following an earnings report last month that showed a big jump in mobile advertising revenue and sent shares soaring more than 40 percent.

Facebook to Buy Mobile Technologies for Voice Recognition

Facebook Inc., owner of the world’s most popular social-networking service, agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a developer of speech-recognition tools.

The Pittsburgh-based company will help Facebook improve products as voice technology becomes an increasingly important way for people to navigate the Web, Tom Stocky, a product-management director at Facebook, said on the company’s website today. Terms weren’t disclosed.

“Although more than a billion people around the world already use Facebook every month, we are always looking for ways to help connect the rest of the world as well,” Stocky wrote. “This acquisition is an investment in our long-term product road map as we continue toward our company’s mission.”

Facebook is bolstering efforts to keep users engaged with its services, adding new features that help people more easily communicate and share information. The company reached 1.15 billion users during the second quarter.

Mobile Technologies, founded in 2001, developed Jibbigo, a a speech-to-speech translator application for phones, according to the company’s website. Mobile Technologies also provides an automatic interpretation service for lectures.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment