Since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo, the Group’s strategy is characterized by a strong dynamic external growth, primarily driven by startups.March of 2014 started with a new acquisition, the seventh since the start of the year. After Aviate (host “smart” screen), Sparq ( mobile marketing ) , Cloud Party ( online games) , Incredible Labs ( PDA ) , Wander (photo diary “social” ) and Distil ( aid recruitment video ), Yahoo sets its sights on Vizify – online startup , which turns your social media data into interactive infographics, videos, and more.
Before Yahoo acquired Vizify, interactive infographics and videos startup was developed by young American company SteamFunk Labs , based in Portland ( Oregon ). Officially Vizify was launched back in June 2011. Vizify allows its users to create interactive infographic profiles from the data they have posted on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , Foursquare or Instagram.
The information from these social networks are transformed into a “digital biography” decorated with photos, videos, infographics, etc. . and presented in various forms : maps, slideshows, customized dashboards … This visual approach allows to highlight data and specific statistics of the career, keywords or other specific items.
Founded by Todd Silverstein ( the current CEO) , Jeff Cutler- Stamm and Eli Tucker, Vizify participated in incubation programs of private funds Portland Seed Fund – specialized in the financing of young companies in boot process – and the start-up accelerator TechStars . The year 2012 began with a fundraiser : over a million dollars obtained from several business angels including Jonathan Sponato (CEO of Picnik , an online image editor ), Matt Shobe (with the original FeedBurner RSS reader) and Dan Shapiro (founder of Photobucket photo sharing service online ) . A peak of infographics startup popularity was reached in December 2013 , with 100,000 new accounts and over one million unique visitors.This acquisition shows growing potential of data visualization and infographic design.
Earlier this year, infographics giant Visually, the startup that’s best-known as an infographic marketplace, announced that it has raised $8.1 million in Series A funding. With the rising demand for timely, relevant data visualization and infographics among communications and news publications organizations, Visual.ly is filling a need in the infographic design marketplace. Right now, most companies and organizations that produce quality infographics have to hire out a graphic designer and dedicate resources to gathering information — a process that can be both costly and time intensive.
