Lyft acquires Halo Cabs

US ride-hailing service Lyft has reportedly acquired startup Halo Cars, which focuses on rooftop advertising. Lyft like other ride-hailing services is looking into newer avenues in search of profitability and the acquisition of Halo Cars is another step towards.

Although ride-hailing services have gained immense popularity over the past few years, most are still running into losses. This has seen most ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft pumping money into other side businesses with the aim of registering profits.

Lyft confirmed that it has purchased digital car-top advertiser Halo Cars although it didn't disclose the buyout amount. The acquisition is being seen by many analysts as a brilliant move by the ride-hailing company, which has been struggling for quite some time and is desperately searching for profitability in its business. Halo is likely to aid Lyft in its pursuit of profitability.

Halo Cars was founded in 2018 and have operations in quite a few big US cities such as New York and Chicago. However, it is a relatively new and small company, which makes more sense for Lyft to buy the company, as it is also focusing on acquiring the team that is likely to also join its media division. Digital car-top advertising is one of the easier avenues for both traditional taxis and ride-hailing companies to generate revenues.

Twitter buys Stories Template Maker Chroma Labs

Twitter has acquired California-based Chroma Labs that develops tools for short-form Video and photo creation and was founded by seven Facebook and Instagram workers in 2018.

The Chroma Stories app lets users fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and more to Instagram Stories, Snapchat and more. According to Sensor Tower, nearly 615,000 people have installed the Chroma Stories app. During the past year, Chroma Labs has enabled creators and businesses around the world to create millions of stories with the Chroma Stories app.

Chroma Labs' co-founders include Instagram 'Boomerang' inventor John Barnett, CTO Alex Li, who was an engineering manager on Facebook Photos and Instagram Stories, and Joshua Harris who was a product design manager on Facebook's augmented reality team. With Chroma Stories, users can choose between retro filters, holiday-themed frames and collage templates.

Facebook acquired Scape Technologies

Scape Technologies, the London based computer vision startup working on location accuracy beyond the capabilities of GPS, has been acquired by Facebook.

Scape’s backers included Entrepreneur First (EF) — the startup is an alumnus of the company builder program — along with LocalGlobe, Mosaic Ventures, and Fly Ventures.

Founded in 2017, Scape Technologies was developing a “Visual Positioning Service” based on computer vision which lets developers build apps that require location accuracy far beyond the capabilities of GPS alone.

The technology initially targeted augmented reality apps, but also had the potential to be used to power applications in mobility, logistics and robotics. More broadly, Scape wanted to enable any machine equipped with a camera to understand its surroundings.