Facebook acquired start-up assets for mail overhaul

From CNET News.com: It wasn't revealed during Monday's announcement, but it turns out that Facebook's big "it's not e-mail" messaging overhaul involved one of the talent acquisitions that the company has become known for lately.

On Oct. 8, a start-up called Zenbe announced that it had shut down its Zenbe Mail e-mail product. CNET heard from a source last month that the reason was that Facebook had acquired part of Zenbe's intellectual property and brought some of the start-up's employees on board, but the deal was not clear at the time and neither Facebook nor Zenbe was able to comment.

Zenbe plans to formally acknowledge the Facebook acquisition later on Tuesday: that Zenbe itself was not acquired by Facebook, just the Zenbe Mail product and three engineers who worked on it; and that Zenbe will continue to build new products. Zenbe will continue to be based in New York.

"You may have heard this week that Facebook is launching a new unified messaging product," Zenbe CEO Alan Chung wrote in a statement that will appear on the company blog. "We here at Zenbe are happy to have played a small role in this: a few months ago, three of our engineers joined Facebook as part of a talent acquisition. We believe that messaging and collaboration on the web are on the cusp of a new wave of innovation, and we're excited to be playing a role in that."

It's working on a new product called Shindig, which "uses the power of the Facebook Social Graph to let people share photos with their real friends, in real time, in real locations." That'll add to its Zenbe Lists task-management product, a Foursquare app called Blacktop, and a collaboration tool called Shareflow.

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