The shopping fest is on and even Facebook doesn’t want to miss it. The news is Facebook has acquired Chai Labs; a California based start-up company which specializes in making platforms that allow for structured content extraction and semantic search. The price of the purchase is not yet confirmed but analysts believe it to be around $10 million.
Chai Labs was founded in 2007 by Gokul Rajaram, a former Google Adsense executive. Its investors include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications, as well as LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman and Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus.
Chai Lab provides Structured Content Extraction and Semantic Search platform using proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies across specific vertical such as Travel, Entertainment etc., NBC local, Associated Content, Travel Ad network are some of the prominent clients which the company claims of.
Clearly, the Social-Web arena is heated up with both Google and Facebook eyeing for the first place. Facebook though holds a slight advantage over Google but the latter has made its intentions clear. In that case, Facebook surely would not want to lose an opportunity to gain an edge over its competitor. So, what advantage does this acquisition of Chai Lab bring to Facebook? We believe that Chai Lab’s ability to create unique, engaging user experiences for publishers and application developers will help Facebook in enhancing its user engagement. Moreover, Chai Lab’s experience in certain verticals and its rich talent base would make perfect sense for Facebook, which according to Advertising Age is set to hit $1.285 billion from global advertising sales in 2010.
