Darrell Etherington writes:

Yahoo! has acquired Jybe, the company announced today via a post to its corporate blog. Jybe is a startup founded in 2011 by three ex-Yahoo! employees, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was VP of Yahoo! Search Technology when he departed the company. The startup’s mission was to help connect people to the physical world around them, a mission for which it released an iPhone app late last year to help connect people with recommendations about things to do, stuff to eat, books to read and movies to watch.

I spoke with Jybe co-founder Arnab Bhattacharjee about the move, and he said that it basically stemmed from a desire on the part of Yahoo! to get into personalized recommendations in a big way.

“Basically we’ve learned a lot about how to use search scale techniques, both on the data science side but also large-scale engineering, and apply it to signals to really do personalization well,” he said. “We really want to take those technologies and apply that across most of the Yahoo! properties.”

The future is mobile. And personal.

Also fascinating: Pinterest acquired a mobile personalization company called Livestar, ALSO TODAY. Read more.

I'm keeping track of Yahoo Acquisitions 2013.

Just updated the page: http://pandawhale.com/post/14607/yahoo-acquisitions-2013