Less than a month after browser-toolbar and mobile startup Conduit merged with Perion to take its place on Nasdaq, the company is making another change to its business. Today it announced that it will be discontinuing Wibiya, the social browser toolbar service that it acquired in 2011 for $45 million, as it shifts further away from its toolbar business.
In a letter mailed to customers that is living on this link — which is not yet publicly accessible through the company’s actual site — Wibiya’s founders, Daniel Tal, Avi Smila and Dror Ceder — write that the company will be discontinuing its service by the end of the year. “Most of” Wibiya’s team and innovations are getting integrated into other Conduit operations, they note. No explanation for the streamlining. “Joining a larger company is never easy,” they write. “and we learned a number of invaluable lessons along the way.” Conduit is offering Wibiya customers three months of Conduit Mobile, which costs $39/month.
Meanwhile, in an internal email that we have obtained, Ronen Shilo, the co-founder of Conduit who helped engineer the company’s reverse takeover of Perion in September, puts the decision down to changes that Conduit is making in the wake of another big corporate move, a decision to split the business back in July. That move split the company in two, with one part focusing on its mobile business and run by Shilo; and the other, Client Connect, which develops a toolbar for websites (not unlike Google-acquired Meebo) merging with Perion, the umbrella company of Incredimail (unified messaging app), Smilebox (photo sharing) and the SweetIM (an IM app). (Client Connect is currently run by Josh Wine.)
“As you know, the decision to separate the company reflects a newly focused objective for Conduit – including a shift in product strategy – which has implications beyond Client Connect. One of those is that maintaining Wibiya as a free-standing business no longer fits where we are headed,” he notes. “We acquired Wibiya as a complementary solution for our toolbar business; they delivered publisher solutions within a site, while our toolbars did that outside the site. Now that the toolbar business is no longer a focus, it’s clear that Wibiya, as a business unit, lacks a strategic role for us.”
It’s not exactly clear but it may be that the Wibiya business — which let website publishers integrate toolbars that let users do things like share links on social networks; or translate pages into different languages; and other serivces — simply was not generating meaningful enough revenue for the company as well. However, the technology and employees still hold value and are getting redeployed elsewhere.
More to come. Both letters are below.
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