Mozilla, the creator of the ever popular Firefox, has shelled out an unknown sum of money to make its first acquisition, Pocket. Pocket is, of course, the highly used read it later service that allows its customers the ability to bookmark various web content such as articles or videos and read or watch them later. This is a great product for individuals who have low data plans or bad receptions in certain locations as they can bookmark articles, save them for offline reading, or even share them with their friends.
As of right now, Firefox has no plans of changing anything. Pocket will continue to work as a subsidiary of Mozilla and Nate Weiner will continue to lead the way with the same team of 25 on board. In fact, they are still moving forward with planned updates for its 10 million monthly active users. Pocket is hopeful that with Mozilla’s help, it can expand its reach as Mozilla already has tremendous worldwide resources and a global scale that can carry it further. Mozilla plans to work with Pocket to integrate a recommendation system into its browser. So it’s a win-win for both parties.
According to Weiner, Pocket can already identify articles and videos based on the number of times they are saved, read, shared and reviewed. If you add that to Mozilla’s recommendation algorithms, it would help them on a far greater scale than it could do on its own. Considering Mozilla’s not so strong showing in the mobile market both companies stand to benefit and learn from one another.
Pocket started up in 2007, oddly enough as a Firefox extension who originally went by the name Read it Later. Since 2015 Pocket has been the default save for later service for Firefox. So the two are not strangers when it comes to working together. There has also been one attempt to purchase Pocket by Evernote but was turned by the founder as not the right fit for Pocket. It also had a solid investment run in 2015 with funding totaling $14.5 million from several investors such as New Enterprise Associates, Axel Springer Digital, GV and more.