Facebook buys group text service Beluga

By Laurie Segall, staff reporter


NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Facebook is making a play for a piece of the small but much-buzzed-about group text messaging market. On Tuesday, it announced that it has acquired eight-month-old Beluga.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move gives Facebook both the Beluga service and, more significantly, the engineering team behind it. Beluga has a small but skilled staff of three, all of whom are former Google employees. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company is located just a few miles away from Facebook's new Menlo Park headquarters.

Group texting -- services that let you send messages to multiple recipients at once -- is a tiny, niche field right now, but it's expected to be in the spotlight at the upcoming South By Southwest (SXSW) conference. That gathering is known as a launch pad for social media technology: Both Twitter and Foursquare took off after drawing attention at past SXSW shows.

Beluga, which just hit the "1 million messages sent" milestone, said its decision to sell to Facebook would expand its user base.

"We talked to people at Facebook, we saw how much our visions aligned," co-founder Ben Davenport told CNNMoney.

"We have a lot of fans of the app inside Facebook, and we think that by joining forces, we will have an opportunity to build something very powerful for many many more users," he said.

For the time being, the service will "continue to function as it does today," the team wrote on their blog.

Facebook also suggested that it doesn't plan to tamper with the core Beluga concept. "We're excited that the team will continue their vision for groups and mobile communication as part of Facebook," Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw said.

Also on Tuesday, Beluga rival GroupMe rolled out a new version of its app. The update allows users to share their locations through Foursquare and share photos within the app.

Another contender, Fast Society, plans to release an updated version of its group messaging service next week -- just ahead of SXSW.

"We think it's going be evolution of not only of our product, but of the space in general, " Fast Society co-founder Matthew Rosenberg said.  To top of page

Just the hot list include
Frontline troops push for solar energy
The U.S. Marines are testing renewable energy technologies like solar to reduce costs and casualties associated with fossil fuels. Play
25 Best Places to find rich singles
Looking for Mr. or Ms. Moneybags? Hunt down the perfect mate in these wealthy cities, which are brimming with unattached professionals. More
Fun festivals: Twins to mustard to pirates!
You'll see double in Twinsburg, Ohio, and Ketchup lovers should beware in Middleton, WI. Here's some of the best and strangest town festivals. Play
Index Last Change % Change
Dow 32,627.97 -234.33 -0.71%
Nasdaq 13,215.24 99.07 0.76%
S&P 500 3,913.10 -2.36 -0.06%
Treasuries 1.73 0.00 0.12%
Data as of 6:29am ET
Company Price Change % Change
Ford Motor Co 8.29 0.05 0.61%
Advanced Micro Devic... 54.59 0.70 1.30%
Cisco Systems Inc 47.49 -2.44 -4.89%
General Electric Co 13.00 -0.16 -1.22%
Kraft Heinz Co 27.84 -2.20 -7.32%
Data as of 2:44pm ET
Sponsors

Sections

Bankrupt toy retailer tells bankruptcy court it is looking at possibly reviving the Toys 'R' Us and Babies 'R' Us brands. More

Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford charts her career path, from her first job to becoming the first openly gay CEO at a Fortune 500 company in an interview with CNN's Boss Files. More

Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.