Facebook has acquired the mobile messaging
company Beluga, according to a note on Beluga's
website. Financial details were not disclosed. Beluga's application allows groups of friends to
communicate in private using their smartphones.
A user can create a so-called pods, to which
friends can be invited.
Within a pod, users can send messages and
share images and locations, according to Beluga's
website. The free application is available for
Apple's iPhone and Android-based smartphones. For now, Beluga's application will continue to
function as it does today. Existing accounts and
data will not be lost, the company writes. Recently, Facebook has stepped up its
smartphone push. The company has, for
example, worked with HTC and INQ on
smartphones with tighter Facebook integration.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a video
message to HTC's news conference at the Mobile World Congress last month -- where it launched the Salsa and the ChaCha -- to say users can expect many more phones with much deeper
integration with Facebook to arrive this year. Today, there are more than 200 million active
users accessing Facebook via their mobile
devices. What Facebook's plans are for Beluga and its
three founders -- all of whom have at one time
worked at Google -- remains to be seen, but
more details will be released in the coming
weeks, according to Beluga.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
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