Facebook (META -0.42%) has ventured far overseas to nab its latest acquisition. The social networking giant has bought privately held Israeli app maker Onavo, the latter revealed in a company blog post. The terms of the deal were not made public.
Onavo specializes in apps that compress mobile data and analyze its usage. According to the firm, its Extend app can "increase the power of [a] data plan by up to 500%." Two of its titles, Extend and Count, are available for Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms. A third, the security app Protect, is only available for iOS. Onavo also runs Insights, a mobile analytics service.
Acquiring the Israeli firm should help Facebook in its ambitions to reduce the cost of Internet access for disadvantaged communities. A company spokeswoman told Reuters that "we expect Onavo's data compression technology to play a central role in our mission to connect more people to the Internet, and their analytic tools will help us provide better, more efficient mobile products."
Facebook is one of the prime movers behind Internet.org, an initiative aimed at making online access available to under-served parts of the world.
