Yahoo acquires Ptch

[aaronbrethorst]

I am so tired of the upbeat acquihire 'hey, users, this is good for you!' spin.

    Our passion and our mission was to give you
    the best way to make and share beautiful movies
    made from the photos and videos on your phone.
    Well, someone noticed!

    ...Ptch will shut down on January 2, 2014

[jmathai]

If it is an acqui-hire, then think of the scenario. A team that's probably burned out. The passion probably died a while back and along with it went the mission.

What type of announcement do you expect?

  We appreciate that you signed up for and used our product. 
  Things haven't gone as well as we had hoped and we're 
  exhausted.   The truth is we'd be shutting down the site 
  in due time anyway but this is a better option for us and
  doesn't make any real difference for you, our user.

It says they launched a year ago so this particular company was still very new. It may not apply to them but I imagine this applies to most acqui-hires.

[gamegoblin]

One of the online services I used most, Meebo, gave a similar goodbye message upon being acquired by google. Something like "We're excited for this! It's going to be great! By the way, we will be gone soon, bye!"

And then they were gone. I use Pidgin now, but I prefer just having it in the browser to use on any machine any time.

[grandpoobah]

Its a bit of a joke delivering bad news go the users with a positive spin... There is nothing good about this as far as the user is concerned.

[gregcohn]

Ptch was incubated at Dreamworks and was a pretty high-profile project internally there. As another commenter noted, it was something along the lines of an instagram video type of app, with very notable enhancements (think the equivalent of instagram filters, powered by dreamworks technology and content).

It was publicly available in the iOS App Store but didn't get much traction. I'm not sure what's left of the team, as I believe all of the original mobile engineers were already poached.

[ulfw]

Next: Yahoo! acquires an extra vowel for it's businesses

[001sky]

I'd like to but a vowel for $100MM, please...

[ch4ch4]

Yahooo!

[junto]

Rule 1 when announcing your imminent acqui-hiredness: tell us what your company did when making your announcement, otherwise it is just gloating.

Can anyone tell me what ptch actually did?

[swang]

The first paragraph says:

"Our passion and our mission was to give you the best way to make and share beautiful movies made from the photos and videos on your phone."

[_s]

As far as I can tell it's an instagram for film clips (never used it or heard of it before).

[Hovertruck]

How do you pronounce the name of this company? Patch? Pitch?

[codegeek]

Their homepage says

"Make a ptch (pronounced "pitch") by combining the photos and videos on your phone, or using media from your social networks, like Facebook or Instagram.

Personalize it by easily adding captions, music, and effects."

[jotm]

Putsch. It's actually a revolutionary online e-government service.

/jk

[uptown]

Yahoo(whimsy)!

[wangweij]

Ask the users to download the data? Since they are about photos and videos, why not simply say "if you can provide us your Yahoo account, we will move all your data to Flickr in a private photo set"?

[spader725]

You're assuming everyone has a Yahoo Account, and they like using Flickr

[chadwickthebold]

Does anyone have any idea how this fits into Yahoo's overall strategy?

[3am]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/26..., Marissa Mayer has made several statements about not having enough clip inventory for all of the ad inventory they have. User generated content is cheap... I have no idea if it's that, technology, acqui-hired, or what, though.

[camus2]

The only strategy is pumping and dumping the stock.