The Facebook Companies | Rajat Poonia

Facebook family of companies

Facebook Inc. (FB), the social networking website started by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, has evolved into a huge company. Since its founding, Facebook has purchased many different companies, the most famous of which were Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

 Improving Facebook :

    As a young technology company, Facebook needed to stay innovative and continue developing products and services that its clientele didn’t know they needed. For this facebook  purchased -

FriendFeed - technologies include facebook  “like” button or the newsfeed.
Karma - a gift-giving service that has since been used to develop Facebook Gifts.
face.com - Facebook now uses to recognize faces and find your friends whenever you upload new pictures.
Atlas (Atlas Solutions, LLC)- Atlas Solutions, a limited liability company, was founded in 2001, when ad serving was in its infancy, and has helped advertisers navigate the digital ecosystem ever since. Atlas pioneered Engagement Mapping in 2008, or what is now known industry-wide as multi-touch attribution.
In 2013, Atlas was purchased by Facebook and operates as a separate entity. Atlas is now in more than 24 global markets.

Talent Acquisition:

These are software engineers who challenge themselves to create new technologies. Facebook began to snap up companies that employed talent that they wanted. These are better known companies that Facebook has purchased for their employees and quickly shut down.

Nextstop - social recommendations to increase users’ travel experiences.
Drop.io - a file exchange service similar to DropBox.
Hot Potato - a site that allowed users could “check-in” to a place or event.
Moves (Activity Diary App) -to develop a pioneering all-day activity diary for smartphones.

Mobile Strategy:

Instagram- an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service.
WhatsApp -  a personal real-time messaging mobile app .
Mobile Technologies Inc. (Jibbigo translator app) -a world leader in speech recognition and machine translation technology.
Parse (Cloud Application Platform for Developers) -a cloud app platform that enables users to add a scalable and powerful backend to launch a full-featured app.

Diversification:

Facebook’s strategy to grow earnings is through diversification.For example, in 2014 Facebook bought Oculus VR, Ascenta, and ProtoGeo Oy.

Oculus VR- perhaps the most interesting of the acquisitions, is a company that produces virtual reality headsets.

Ascenta - is a drone-maker that Facebook plans to use to bring the internet to remote places of the world.
ProtoGeo Oy - will be used to help Facebook enter the fitness and health monitoring market.

Others - ConnectU, Friend.ly, Lightbox.com, Branch                                          

Zuckerberg has said Facebook's mission is to "unbundle the big blue app". It wants to provide multiple and different experiences on mobile - and Facebook's name doesn't have to be attached.
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