Tags: Apple

Yahoo! acquires Konfabulator, makes it free

Yahoo! is doing a Google. Google has bought several startups like Blogger and Picasa and made them free bringing excellent software to its fan. Now, Yahoo! is going the same way. Recently, they acquired a popular online photo-hosting website Flickr and now they have taken over another interesting firm Konfabulator. The company develops Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop.

This application is pretty similar to Apple’s Dashboard application, which allows mini softwares to run on desktop without consuming many resources. The search engine company has also announced that they would now be giving away this software application for free. It is currently retailing for around USD 19.95 in the market.

The company said that the reason for this purchase was to make its APIs available to the developer community. These details would now be available on the Yahoo! website. Now, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information. Tony Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo! Developer spoke to a media group: “What we can do with Konfabulator is wrap these services that we are opening up into an environment that is really easy for people to now become developers.”

The company also plans to refund customers that purchased the product in the last two months. This would bring more smiles to the fans of this funky utility.