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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 456 posts

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#22

Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits.

This is Mozilla's first acquisition.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#23
post #5

So much for my hopes of them removing it from Firefox. Uhg.

You want them to remove one of the most useful feature of Firefox?

You can remove it easily, but I'd advise you to try using it.

It personally helps me go through interesting news and "pocket" it if I don't have the time to read it now, or want to keep my time for more important articles but still think it's an important piece of news.

I have both the desktop Pocket application and the mobile Pocket application. They download the web view offline, like that I can read articles wherever I am, when I have some down time.

It's been a huge time saver when it comes to only reading what is important during the day. Having less tabs. And being able to see what I deemed important to read after a while.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#25

> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. ...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?

It has a huge user-base, so we can disagree on crappy. And obviously the latter part is fixable.

Pocket was originally a Firefox add-on.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#26

> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. ...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?

On the plus side, now it may still be crappy but at least it won't be proprietary anymore!

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#27
post #7

This is weird. Has Mozilla acquired any startups in the past? Feels weird to me for a browser non-profit to own a web app product.

It is weird - the press release itself notes that this is the first such acquisition Mozilla has ever made. In their defense, it won't be the first time they've gotten into operating a service -- there's Sync, for instance. So if they see expanding FF's bookmarking abilities as a key strategic differentiator, buying an existing read-it-later service they're already familiar with could be a simpler/cheaper way of gett…

First acquisition but not first investment. For example see https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#28

Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits.

The only other example is the hiring of three co-founders of Humanized, https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-hu...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#30
post #7

This is weird. Has Mozilla acquired any startups in the past? Feels weird to me for a browser non-profit to own a web app product.

Right, I thought pocket was actually one of the Mozilla sponsors, given the default installation in Firefox.

It was stated several times that Mozilla didn't get any money from Pocket for the integration.
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