Facebook acquires Israeli data shrinking startup - ONAVO

Congrats to the Onavo team!

For those not familiar, Onavo publishes apps that proxy and compress traffic from your phone so that you have less data usage with your carrier. The business model was to sell analytics on this traffic to third parties.

I'm an outsider to the deal, but I suspect Facebook isn't interested in continuing the analytics product. It seems likely that they'll integrate the data into their mobile advertising platform behind the scenes. Mobile advertising is _really_ heating up, and this will be a important competitive edge for Facebook.

Disclaimer: my company, MixRank, has a competitive advertising intelligence product.

I'm rather disappointed by Onavo, despite getting in early and falling in love. They had a great product, but they kept having bugs and UX mistakes.

But good for them, getting acquired. Assuming this wasn't a burning-building acquire, which I sincerely hope it wasn't. I liked Onavo.

According to Israeli media, the price is between $150M-$200M: http://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-361422...