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Wheelings & Dealings: Yahoo Grabs Distill, But Not for What It's Doing Now

TMCnet Feature

February 18, 2014

Wheelings & Dealings: Yahoo Grabs Distill, But Not for What It's Doing Now

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By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

Yahoo's buying spree carries on, as the company recently picked up a firm known as Distill. Though the company was working on a rather exciting product in its own right, the reports indicate that Yahoo doesn't seem particularly interested about the product in question, and plans to bring in a completely new operation for the Distill crew.


Distill, which had previously brought in $1.3 million from a variety of investors, was working on a technical challenge that many firms—even in this slow economy—have trouble solving: hiring the right people to perform technical operations. Distill's founders, who had come previously from Google, StumbleUpon (News - Alert) and TapJoy, believed there was a way to help the hiring process along by coupling video interviews with programming challenges to show off the best skills of those seeking employment.

Essentially, Distill looked to combine the video chat capabilities of Skype (News - Alert) with a text editor and file upload mechanism, such that interviewers could essentially establish a coding session with potential hiring candidates. But Yahoo, according to reports, doesn't have much of an interest in bringing Distill's new hiring system to the fore, an unusual development in its own right given that Yahoo gets somewhere around 340,000 applications per year, and might well have wanted a means to help find the best handful out of that massive number. Perhaps odder still are the reports that suggest Distill was in private beta with its service, and had already made some pretty impressive inroads, getting firms like Box, Disney (News - Alert) and ModCloth to test the service out.

But the reports indicate that it's that TapJoy link that most drew Yahoo to Distill, as Yahoo intends to put the Distill team to work on mobile advertising. Distill's team of seven is set to work with Yahoo at the Sunnyvale location, and given that TapJoy offered up a kind of performance-based advertising mechanism that was regarded as quite successful as ads go—it was cited for providing both “deep engagement” and “monetization opportunities,” two key points for advertisers—it looked to be a prime target for Yahoo.

Yahoo's mobile ambitions are scarcely a secret these days. The recent purchase of mobile app maker Tomfoolery was a great point on that front, so too was its purchase of intelligent homescreen maker Aviate, deep linking titan Sparq, and social diary firm Wander, among a laundry list of other recent sales. While Yahoo, at last report, enjoys great presence on desktop systems, the same can't really be said for Yahoo's mobile presence. But Yahoo seems eager to augment said presence with most every tool in the toolbox, and is bringing an array of new services into play as well as new people to help design new services.

While some might look askance at Yahoo's methods of buying up companies seemingly just to get at the employees contained within, there's little doubt that Yahoo will certainly have the people—and the accompanying skills--on board to help implement the future as Yahoo wants to see it thanks to these measures. Whether or not the people involved will be able to build a successful Yahoo using those skills is a matter that only time will be able to tell. Still, Yahoo has no shortage of sheer audacity, and hopefully can bring all this skill to bear on building its future, and keeping its previous successes going.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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