When you are a small company, you are extremely nimble and can navigate yourself through choppy waters with greater ease than behemoths, but somehow do not happen to have the kind of money that the big boys have – which requires you to be more creative in order to keep up with the competition. However, when a small company eventually “grows up” to be the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla, then allocating resources to develop new technologies might be considered counter productive when you can use the very same resources to snap up the up-and-coming small fry that have the technology which you are looking for. This is what Facebook has done, where they intend to move into the future by acquiring Mobile Technologies.
Mobile Technologies happens to be a company that specializes in speech recognition and translation, which means this acquisition does give some insight into what Facebook intends to do for the future. In fact, Mobile Technologies already has an app known as Jibbigo which is capable of translating text into different languages, while offering pronunciation cues via audio. This app might not have a long shelf life after the acquisition, but the technology could be used by Facebook to augment the social network giant’s future endeavors. [Facebook Post]
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