Whirlpool hopes to make meal planning an easier affair with Yummly acquisition

Whirlpool wants to make your kitchen an even smarter place with its latest announcement. The kitchen and home appliance maker is set to acquire Yummly, a digital platform for personalized recipes and other cooking resources. The deal is expected to be finalized sometime this month and Yummly will serve as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Whirlpool. What the sale could bring to the table for Whirlpool is help simplify meal planning for its users, among other things.

According to Brett Dibkey, vice president of Integrated Business Units for Whirlpool Corporation, “Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering.” Kitchen appliances aren’t as smart as some of our other gadgets so we definitely welcome tech improvements.

Source: Digital Trends

Mozilla buys ‘read-it-later’ service Pocket

Mozilla, the team behind the Firefox web browser, has made its first acquisition. The company has bought Pocket, a read-it-later service, for an undisclosed amount. Pocket will operate as an independent subsidiary of Mozilla and is said to help bring the company to more mobile devices. It’s not exactly clear how that will help but Pocket does bring with it 10 million monthly active users and new potential businesses for Mozilla, such as advertising, analytics for publishers, and premium subscription service. The acquisition is like a homecoming for Pocket as it started out as a Firefox add-on.

Pocket previously rejected an offer from Evernote after it became apparent to them that their service would just be a feature inside the bigger company’s app. But it seems with Mozilla, they can remain a standalone service. According to Mozilla, over time Pocket can help them with its “content graph” initiative, which is the company’s effort to create a recommendation engine for the web and baked into the browser.

Source: Pocket + The Verge

Airbnb acquires Montreal-based luxury vacation rental site

It’s being reported that home rental service Airbnb dropped around US$300 million in cash and stock to buy upscale vacation site Luxury Retreats. Airbnb won’t disclose financial terms of the deal, though. The figures mentioned above were from a report by Bloomberg. Airbnb has over three million homes for rent in over 50,000 cities and has expanded its business bit by bit. In the past year, it started letting travelers book day trips and excursions through the site. Now, they’re moving into the luxury space with this acquisition.

Luxury Retreats has over 4,000 homes in 100 locations around the world. They offer more upscale villas for the affluent crowd and include a concierge service. The company will stay in Montreal at the moment and act as a standalone brand but over time their listings will be integrated and highlighted in Airbnb’s own platform.

Source: CNET

Oculus buys eye-tracking company Eye Tribe

It isn’t surprising that Oculus has taken an interest in an eye-tracking technology. This Facebook-backed virtual reality company just purchased Eye Tribe. The Danish startup specializes in creating software developer kits that bring gaze-based controls to mobile devices and PCs. Oculus won’t talk about anything else outside of the acquisition, though. So, we have no word how much the deal cost, what will happen to Eye Tribe’s employees and the company itself after the purchase, or what Oculus plans to do with Eye Tribe’s technology.

However, it is easy to assume what we can expect to show up in the future. Eye Tribe has been working on a foveated rendering for VR, which is meant to boost VR performance by only rendering the part of the simulation the user is directly looking at. With this kind of technology, it’ll help improve immersion, help stop simulator sickness, and reduce performance bottlenecks.

Source: Engadget