Yahoo Purchases OnTheAir Video Chat Company

OnTheAir has been around less than a year and they are already attractive to big name companies.  That has got to make the five founding members feel pretty confident in their startup.  Yahoo purchases OnTheAir just nine months after the company came into being.

Who is OnTheAir?

OnTheAir is a company that allows friends to chat and webcast split interviews.  People can set up webinars that can be streamed live and audiences could call in during a program and then be viewed through a split screen.

The five founders of the company are Stanford CS masters, an Apple iCloud employee, Coorliris founding member, Facebook intern, a Gmail interaction engineer, and a former Meebo interaction designer, along with Apple OS X engineer.  All of the members will be moving to Yahoo and continuing to work on OnTheAir.

This is the second deal Yahoo has made in just a couple of months with the goal to boost the companies mobile team.  In October, Stamped was the acquisition that Yahoo had its sights on.  Stamped provided users the ability to share information about their picks for restaurants and music from their smartphones.

This is also the second major deal made by newcomer Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO.  She was appointed to the position in July of this year.  This latest acquisition allows Yahoo to compete with Google Hangout and it follows the plan that Mayer unveiled several months ago, saying she would go after small startups to get their pool of talent.  Her goal is to make Yahoo big in mobile by 2015 and to see it become part of everyone’s daily routines.

On this news, Yahoo stock traded up to bring the share up to $18.82.  Now we wait and see what else Yahoo and Mayer have planned and who they have their sights set on.

[Image via ycorpblog]