It hasn’t even been a full month yet in 2013 and already the acquisitions are rolling in (although we knew about some unknown purchase late last year).
It appears that question has now been answered with Automattic acquiring the makers of Simplenote via their parent company Simperium. A company focused on synchronization and syncing technology, the play could be wide-ranging as the core technology could be used for some of the many Automattic companies.
But who knows. Typically questions arise about whether this is a talent acquisition instead of a technology one and apparently, via Matt Mullenweg, they are going to keep running the application and technology and improving them instead of adopting the technology and shuttering the company:
“Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service,” said Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg yesterday. “And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it’s just darn handy.”
Mullenweg said he first wanted to invest in Simperium, then wanted to do a deal with them, then ultimately acquired the company to get access to the “brilliant” team and make sure their service was backed up by Automattic’s systems and infrastructure.
Sure, they are acquiring the three main employees who announced that besides joining the official Automattic team they are open sourcing the core tech as reported by AllThingsD:
The three-member Simperium team, led by founders Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng, has already joined Automattic. They will announce today that they are open sourcing their iOS and JavaScript client libraries.
And via their own blog:
We’re going to keep expanding Simperium as a tool for building apps. Adding Simperium to apps that can work from a local datastore lets you automatically synchronize data across different instances and platforms.
This way of building apps feels natural, a model where the developer can focus purely on the data itself, not networking or APIs. Synchronizing data is just part of the problem though. We’ll be adding better support for things like binary syncing and collaboration, along with a wider variety of client libraries.
I’m excited about this alliance of sorts and the continued product development of a well-known and well-used application. Time will ultimately tell how it all folds together but that talent coming into Automattic is going to be a big plus.
Congratulations on the acquisition and we’ll be watching!
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