As a first acquisition of the company, Mozilla has recently bought Pocket for an amount they did not reveal. Pocket is in fact a content time-shifting product, and they also announced the purchase on their blog. Initially it was merely a Firefox plug-in, but in time it became a handy integration within the browser, culminating with the official announcement of the acquisition.
The thing with Pocket is that it allows you to hit a button and save whatever article you want to read later. The best part is that it doesn’t have ads and it doesn’t come with annoying formatting options. Moreover, its initial name was Read It Later, and truth be told, it had a lot of rivals that did pretty much the same thing, if not more: Instapaper, Readability, Evernote or the Reading List from Apple.
However, Pocket had a modest consistent success with its original goal, receiving funds that totaled $14.5 million. After a couple of months, it went from a Firefox plug-in to a built-in feature, and then, as the press release from Mozilla said, the two companies realized they have a common vision and shared beliefs.
The founder of Pocket, Nate Weiner, declared that there are lots of things to do until they will be able to integrate Pocket on different platforms, such as the mobile one. Denelle Dixon, who is the chief business and legal officer for Mozilla, said that both Pocket and Mozilla are keen on offering their users a great experience that shouldn’t vary across several devices or platforms.
According to their statement from last year, Pocket wants to make some profit through their content recommendation feature that runs on sponsored ads. It had some success, though not a big one, but Mozilla doesn’t want to fix something that is working.
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