Fitness apps are fast becoming the hot deals of the tech industry. Facebook has joined the fray by acquiring Moves, a notable motion-tracking app which is available to both Android and iPhone users.
Like many of its other recent acquisitions, Facebook will apparently be keeping the ‘Moves’ app independent and unaffected of this acquisition. According to the app’s creators, Moves app will continue to work just like before although the Moves team will move over to Facebook and work on other products and services.
The deal sounds a lot like Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp. The social network has kept the messaging app independent so far and if Mark Zuckerberg’s word is anything to go by, Facebook plans to keep WhatsApp that way in the long run. However, the social network will certainly leverage the data from both WhatsApp and Moves to create new products or build upon existing Facebook-branded services.
The details of Moves’ acquisition have not been disclosed yet. The deal is a very timely move by Facebook. Nike recently pulled out of the fitness hardware business but there are other giants gearing up for the industry. These include the likes of Apple and Google while Samsung is already on its way with smartwatches. So while the bigwigs prepare the hardware to do the job, the likes of Nike and Facebook seem poised to leverage the software-end of the fitness market.
Moves is a smart app in that it is able to interpret the users’ movement with the help of data from simple sensors such as accelerometers. In the long-run, this data will be a precious treasure-trove for the fitness hardware that Apple or Google may create in the coming months.
Source: Moves
Courtesy: TechCrunch
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