Facebook Hires Team From Sofa, a Dutch Development and Design Company

Facebook has hired the team of Amsterdam-based startup Sofa, and will incorporate it within its design group. The talent acquisition does not include the Sofa's software products, which include Kaleidoscope for tracking differences in text and images, Versions - a Mac client for Subversions which offers code version control, Enstore for managing sales and accounting of physical retail stores, and ecommerce platform Enstore. The Sofa team will move to Palo Alto to work at Facebook HQ, but its products will remain live and supported. “We were just blown away by the Sofa team’s work, from their Mac and web software to the interfaces and brand identities they created for clients," Facebook director of design Kate Aronowitz said in a statement. "The more we got to know them, the more we realized that their passion for working in small teams and iterating to find solutions to hard problems matched our own culture. We can’t wait for them to join the team.” Aside from working within the design team, Sofa's expertise could help Facebook with a variety of products. Its knowledge of tracking file changes could keep Facebook from indexing redundant data, such as when identical copies of a photo are uploaded. Its experience building ecommerce products could allow Facebook to offer better support to the growing developer ecosystem of Facebook Page ecommerce storefronts. The Sofa team could even work farther behind the scenes, assisting with development of Facebook's internal engineering tools it has built to handle the unique complexities of its scale. This is Facebook's seventh talent-focused acquisition this year, following personal analytics developer Daytum, HTML5 experts RecRec, hyper-local advertising startup Rel8tion, feature phone app developer Snaptu, social recruiting site Pursuit, and group messaging service Beluga.

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Facebook Hires Team From Sofa, a Dutch Development and Design Company

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