Facebook scoops Indian Co Founded 'Lightbox'


Bangalore: Facebook is on a shopping spree with two out of four jaw dropping acquisitions being Indian Co-Founded. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has still not stopped his acquisition hunger; his very recent acquisition again includes an Indian Co-Founded company “Lightbox”, after taking over ‘Tagtile’, a smart phone app company in April 2012.

Lightbox Co-founded by Nilesh Patel with Thai Tran , is an application used to display large images using modal dialogs. On a Lightbox-enabled page, a user can click an image to have it magnified in a Lightbox window, which resizes itself according to the size of the image using a gliding animation.

Nilesh, a developer of mobile applications has various degrees in artificial intelligence and computer science. He was running his own company called AddictiveDroid and now intends to join Facebook to experiment more on its development.

Lightbox, a competitor for Instagram has also been taken over by Facebook. “The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love and we look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook.” Said Facebook to AllthingsD.

So it’s obviously another step toward figuring out mobile for Facebook. The company realizes it needs mobile talent; the recent purchases support this statement firmly, acquiring mobile discovery start up Glancee, Instagram, Tagtile and now Lightbox. Maybe Lightbox is Facebook’s last talent grab before going public!