Mozilla has acquired Pocket, a read-it-later service. The nine-year-old company is Mozilla's first acquisition.
Mozilla Acquired Pocket App
Pocket is a company that makes tools for saving articles and videos to view them later. Before expanding its team and building a suite of apps for every major platform, the Pocket app began life as a Firefox extension. According to The Verge, Mozilla said Pocket will operate as an independent subsidiary.
According to Tech Crunch, the amount of the transaction remains undisclosed. Both companies announced the deal simultaneously on their blogs. Pocket started as Firefox's default read-it-later service, a plug-in for saving articles users didn't have time for. Since 2015, when the plug-in came first on Firefox, it became more and more closely integrated with the browser.
Mozilla is best known for its Firefox web browser. The company did not adapt well to the mobile era, spending years on its failed Firefox phone project. The global release of Firefox on iOS was delayed until 2016. Meanwhile, Mozilla's broader future has become uncertain due to the slow decline of the desktop web.
Pocket To Help Mozilla Expand To Mobile Devices
Pocket would help bring Mozilla to mobile devices, where the company has historically struggled to attract users. The application has 10 million monthly active users. Pocket has also the potential to bring a set of new businesses to Mozilla, including analytics for publishers, a premium subscription service, and advertising.
Pocket allows its users to hit a button to save a long article for later reading, except any annoying formatting or ads. The application that was originally known as Read it Later has many competitors among apps that accomplish much the same thing. Among them include Readability, Instapaper, Evernote and, eventually, Apple's own Reading List.
Pocket has a user-first mentality. Unlike Mozilla's existing mobile products, people seem to enjoy using the read-it-later app. Six years ago, Evernote offered to buy Pocket. However, CEO Nate Weiner rejected Evernote's offer, preferring to keep the app as a standalone product.
Pocket had raised $14.5 million from various investors including and Axel Springer Digital Ventures and GV. After the acquisition, the company's 25-person team in its San Francisco office will continue working independently. For the moment, Pocket won't make any major changes to its business or product.
Mozilla said that, over time, Pocket would assist in its "content graph" initiative to build a recommendation engine for the web integrated with the browser. This initiative would take advantage of Pocket's ability to identify high-quality articles and videos. The application identifies web content by using an algorithm that takes into account the number of times videos and articles are viewed, read, saved and shared.
Mozilla also said that this acquisition is contributing somehow to the health of the internet. The internet could be kept healthy by discovering accessible high-quality web content. This could also help fighting against the rising tide of centralization.
The Pocket app provides people with the needed tools to engage with and share content on their own terms. This could lead to a safer, more empowered and independent online experience, not depending on any hardware platform or content silo. Pocket, as a native app on mobile phones, could make the web more useful and expand the reach of high-quality journalism on a large scale.
