Yahoo buys Indian startup Bookpad to strengthen Yahoo Mail

Yahoo has acquired Bookpad - a Bangalore-based startup who are the makers of an online file-editing service called Docspad. The company will be joining the Yahoo team in Bangalore, where they will be working on strengthening the Yahoo Mail experience.   While other terms including the cost of acquisition have not been revealed yet, The Economic Times speculates that the deal has been sealed at around 50 crore. Bookpad is only a year old, launched by IIT-Guwahati graduates Niketh Sabbineni, Aditya Bandi and Ashwik Reddy.   Bookpad’s product, called Docspad, allows users to view, create and edit files from within their apps. Docspad supports all popular document formats and works on desktops as well as mobile devices. It runs on HTML 5, so it’s also pretty nippy to use. You could think of it as a humble alternative to Google Docs that also allows integration with other business apps.   With the latest acquisition, you can expect Yahoo to bring Google Docs-like features in it’s Yahoo Mail service so that users can share and edit documents on the move. This means when you receive documents as email attachments in Yahoo Mail, you can open, edit and save them on the cloud - whether you are at work or accessing emails on your mobile device.   The take over adds to the multiple acquisitions Yahoo has orchestrated. In September, Yahoo completed a long-awaited, $7.6 billion deal for Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba to buy back nearly half of Yahoo’s 40 percent stake. Following this, Yahoo bought 17 companies since Marissa Mayer took over in an effort to strengthen its tech expertise and obtain more engineering talent to help build better applications. All of the deals have been relatively small, with the exception of Tumblr.