Facebook has just acquired motion tracking app for iPhone and Android ‘Moves,‘ the start-up announced today via a blog post. The company founders say that ‘Moves crew’ will join Facebook team to ‘work on building & improving their products & services’ and that the ‘Moves app’ will continue to operate on its own as the standalone experience.
Currently, Moves says that there is are no any plans to bring Moves data to Facebook’s social graph directly or change how it do operates, so this sounds like the another case similar to that which ‘Facebook’ employs with running Instagram & WhatsApp.
Facebook founder and CEO ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ recently revealed his company’s broader-app strategy in an interview with the NYT and in that discussion, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company would be building the number of experiences, some of which would carry Facebook branding and some of which would be not.
No price was disclosed for acquisition, but it buys Facebook entry into emerging fitness and the activity tracking market. Moves is an only-app solution in this space, which seems to be the wise move for Facebook at this stage, as Nike also has recently shown signs of exiting hardware portion of business and there are broader indications that fitness gadget market has been slow to start it so far.
The health and fitness software market seems poised to explode, however, especially as the major tech companies like Apple & Google continue to build platforms & devices designed to better track user activity and translate that in to health related data. Companies like Moves, differentiate themselves based on their own unique movement data interpretation algorithms which turns the info gathered from sensors built in to devices like accelerometers into user friendly stats like steps taken, calories burned and much more.
According to WSJ, Moves has racked up more than four and half million downloads across the Android & iOS since it is launch last January. The application also offers an API for third-party developers to build software using its data and the catalog of applications employing that access now numbers above 40. Access to API will be remain open under the new owner-ship.
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