Onavo, the Israeli company that offers mobile apps for data management, announced that it has been acquired by Facebook. Based in Tel Aviv, the company’s office will become Facebook’s new office in Israel as both companies have agreed on keeping the team in Israel rather than moving them to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
The three year old company has been offering free security and data management apps for mobile consumers as well as analytics and insight reports based on the usage of those apps. Onavo announced the acquisition on its company blog this afternoon.
“Today, we’re eager to take the next step and make an even bigger impact by supporting Facebook’s mission to connect the world.
As you know, Facebook and other mobile technology leaders recently launched Internet.org, formalizing Facebook’s commitment to improving access to the internet for the next 5 billion people — this is a challenge we’re also passionate about”, the company’s co-founders, Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger said on the blog post.
Onavo’s mobile applications are primarily concerned with data usage. Onavo Extend, is an app that allows mobile subscribers to compress their data usage each time they access the Internet, allowing them to maximize the use of their mobile data quota. Onavo Count is an app that monitors the data usage of each app that links up to the Internet so consumers know how data hungry their applications are. Onavo Protect offers protection against malicious websites, internet-borne malware, unsecured logins, and phishing attempts.
These apps, which aim to protect mobile consumers, ultimately allow Onavo to offer various kinds of consumer behavior insights which the company makes available both for free and as premium analytics products. The company’s access to global data usage allows it to offer reports for mobile developers and other companies to discover the behavioral patterns of mobile consumers.
“We’re excited to join their team, and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share”, the blog post said.
Internet.org is Facebook’s commitment to make it easier for billions more people around the world to be connected online. The effort has the support of other mobile companies, Opera, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Samsung. Adding Onavo into the mix will allow Facebook to realize that goal much more effectively. Onavo claims to be able to extend mobile data access by five times, allowing people access to far more websites and online services within their data limitations. In markets where Internet access is much more limited, the use of Onavo’s tools delivers more freedom to access the Internet.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but according to Onavo, the company plans to maintain the availability of its products. “When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change”.
Onavo’s VPN app received a bit of a nudge over the weekend when Path’s media delivery provider failed to operate properly, leaving Path users in Indonesia with blurry photos and videos as well as blank avatars on their streams. The use of Onavo’s free VPN app allowed Path users to bypass the faulty channel and have those images and videos delivered.
[Header image courtesy of Facebook]
