September 24, 2014

Yahoo acquires Bookpad

Today's technology merger news is brought to you by Yahoo, which recently acquired the Indian startup company Bookpad in a deal of ambiguous value.

The company's self-described "flagship product," Docspad, is targeted at app developers who wish to make document viewing and editing a seamless experience for their users. Docspad offers document embedding capabilities, as well as the ability to annotate and edit documents within applications themselves. Document embedding allows users to view, edit and collaborate within files in real time, without having to download the file and access it in a separate application.

According to a promotional video, Docspad accomplishes this by allowing app developers to integrate its APIs directly into their application's interface. When a user uploads a document, the client's website communicates with Docspad's server, which converts that document into HTML 5 and enables users to preview, annotate and make edits. Docspad currently supports, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF documents, among other common file types.

Bookpad itself is a young company, founded in 2013, but was supported early on by NASSCOM and Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, according to their official website. Docspad was invented after the Bookpad co-founders found themselves continually frustrated by the "cumbersome hurdle" of download dialog boxes, according to a blog post by co-founder Aditya Bandi.

They asked themselves: "Wouldn't it be easy if users could view a document inside an application itself, without needing to download it? And, better: what if users could collaborate with other users, in real time, from within their favorite app?"

Bookpad's six employees will join Yahoo's engineering team in Bangalore, India, according to GigaOm.

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