Yahoo! acquires New York based startup Wander, the talent behind Days App

In what can be called another step towards strengthening the mobile first approach, Yahoo! has acquired TechStars New York backed startup, Wander. Simply put, the main product of Wander, Days app is a visual diary that lets you capture and share your whole day at once (in just a few photos a day). Earlier this year, Yahoo! had announced the acquisition of Aviate that automatically organizes apps in your smartphone home-screen, and gets to information faster than ever.

Co-founder of Wander, Jeremy Fisher wrote on his blog -

“We’ve spent the past few years figuring out how to make content creation as habitual as content consumption. That’s the idea behind Days, the daily visual diary we launched in May 2013. Nine months later, we’re excited to announce that we’ve accepted an offer to bring our work on daily habits to Yahoo. We started our company with the vision of transforming daily habits, and we’re proud to be joining a new one that shares that mission.”

The blog post on company’s website also clarifies the current status of the 5-member team:

 “Our entire team will be joining Yahoo’s NYC-based Mobile and Emerging Products group, where we’ll continue on as a startup team within a larger organization. The Days app will live on as a standalone entity, and we’ll also be working on some exciting new projects that we can’t talk about just yet.”

Wander had raised $1.2 million in April 2012. The app was launched to give a tumblr experience to the users by clicking photos and make content swiftly. It gamifies the photo experience with the help of gifs which can act as a feed or slideshow of images to describe your day.At first look, the app seems to be a good engagement tool for celebrities and brands justified by the craze in people to know how they spend their day (through images). In general, it cuts down on a lot of irrelevant content used to share an experience through blogs as images can connect to the audience more than the content. Wander creates a wanderlog, which is where one can capture experiences like adventures, a guide to a town, favorite works of street art or simply the places one loves. This in turns helps to make a network connecting places, posts and experiences bringing together wanderers with shared interests.

What Yahoo! gets from the deal

With Instagram and Snapchat, photo content is on the rise and Wander has as a team behind an app, which gives Yahoo! an insight into how people spend their day through the medium of photographs clicked throughout the day. Besides talent acquisition, this deal will support the artificial intelligence study with the data on human interactions.

Acquisition of Aviate and Wander are in sync with Marissa Mayer’s announcement in the beginning of this year, “Think about how much your phone understands about you — your contacts, calendar, emails and images — and what happens when that context becomes part of the search experience. The future of search is contextual knowledge, and we are investing in the future.”

It would be interesting to see how Yahoo!'s Tumblr evolves with these acquisitions.

We will be updating you soon with more insights on this acquisition. Stay tuned!