Skype buys huge sums behind GROUPME: Crisis of location

GROUPME founder Steve Matoc (Steve Martocci) and Jered Hockett (Jared Hecht) Lead: U.S. Science and Technology blog Gigaom contributor Oum Malik (Om Malik), published in Monday, said　　Skype's acquisition of mobile phone Group Chat Service company GROUPME will enhance its service interactivity and help to counter Facebook in the future. The following is the full text of the article: the Internet Voice service provider Skype, which is being audited by Microsoft, will buy the mobile phone Group Chat Service company GROUPME, which has not yet been confirmed by Skype and GroupMe, which is rumored to be priced at $85 million. GROUPME has already received $11 million trillion in funding through two rounds of financing.　　GROUPME currently employs 20 people and is seen as one of the most popular mobile chat applications. The switch to interactive issues is why Skype is willing to pay a large price for a company with a larger size and a smaller user base than itself, in fact, earlier this year, I said in an article about Google's competition with Facebook: "To avoid getting caught up in phone calls, emails, instant messaging, The mire of traditional communication concepts such as texting, companies should consider introducing interaction. Personally, the interaction is synchronized, highly personal, geographically aware and allowed to share experiences.　　Interaction should allow people to visit their environment, virtual integration into the reality. In today's highly interconnected world, to be an important service provider or device manufacturer, manufacturers must constantly attract their end-users and keep their attention to ensure that they have a demand for your product. As Neil Young, the US game developer, Ngmoco, says: "The longer you get in touch with the user, the more opportunities you have to make a profit." "Skype is still reliant on its instant messaging and video-calling business, which has attracted hundreds of millions of users, but mobile phones have shifted the focus of user behavior to GROUPME services and social networks, mobile phones, beluga chats, Twitter, Facebook　　Messenger and email and other media. As one of the early beneficiaries of the iphone's rise, Skype has realised that GroupMe's population Chat Service is starting to pop and is worried.　　Since GROUPME is using the back-end platform of internet phone startups Twilio, they can easily add voice chat to the system and, in the future, may involve video and become a competitor to Skype immediately. Why GROUPME sell at least on paper, the future of GroupMe is promising, but fierce competition from Facebook Messenger, Google Huddle and Apple imessage communications servicesThey were alarmed, which made them decide to look for a big company as a backer.　　Skype's exchange first, Skype can use GROUPME and other developing apps to create a communications platform for Microsoft Windows Phone 7, a strategy that allows Skype to compete with Microsoft for Facebook. Although Skype and Facebook are partners now, they need to think about the future, and Facebook will eventually become a competitor.　　Just as Skype reduces voice to an application on the Internet, Facebook will also reduce its reliance on voice calls. When Facebook announced that it was partnering with Skype to launch voice services, I thought that while Facebook might be able to get more users from Skype, the strategy was risky, which could or could lead to a reduction in the viscosity of Facebook users,　　Just as IBM once thought Microsoft could help them sell more computers and earn more money. Skype has a large user base, but they cannot stall. AOL and MySpace were once billions of registered users, but now they are shrinking rapidly.　　The acquisition of Groupme,skype has the opportunity to create a new mobile experience that increases attractiveness and visibility.　　Whether the acquisition of GROUPME is enough to meet Skype in the long run, Skype will experience a positioning crisis, they can not be determined to position themselves in the user's friends, or focus on the company's corporate partners. The chaos of desktop apps and the bad user experience only exacerbated the Skype crisis, which is also highlighted in the blog statement of Skype CEO Tony Betz: "This acquisition has led us further to the global multimodal, multi-platform communication experience goal, and strengthen our leading position in the field of voice and video communications. In conjunction with our acquisition of the Qik of streaming media Services earlier this year, the acquisition of GROUPME will further enhance our position as an innovator in the promotion of mobile user experience. "I think the big decision that Bates and Skype will have to make is: what kind of company they want to be." (Xiao Ming)