Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

On Monday, hi5 announced that it has acquired PixVerse, a flash based live social chat tool. hi5 is one of the world’s leading social networks. PixVerse is already used by hi5 and other social networks. It contains applications like Pix Chat and Pix Wall. In April this year the social network opened its platform for third party applications and since then, PixVerse’s applications are running on top of it along with several other applications.

About PixVerse, its co-founder Charles Ying said:

PixVerse is a next generation virtual world company

Based in San Francisco, California, hi5 claims to have over 50 million unique visitors each month. Though the service is not as much popular in US as it seems to be in regions like South America, Europe and Asia. It is presented in 23 different languages. Right now they have around 80 million users.

On the current situation, the PixVerse co-founder added:

When we set out to build our applications, we were immediately drawn to the hi5 platform.

Access to the social graph enabled us to leverage hi5’s 80 million users to drive our growth. And the fact that hi5 is part of OpenSocial, rather than a proprietary platform, meant our work was extensible and reusable.

According to Ramu Yalamanchi, hi5 CEO:

PixVerse has great technology that delivers a very immersive end user experience.

Communicating with friends is one of the primary benefits of hi5, and this technology and team enables hi5 to deliver a much richer, more visual medium of interaction for users of our network

Founded in 2007, PixVerse was backed by Vernock (a venture capital firm), PixVerse adopted Google App Engine™ initially, which allows developers to build their online applications on the similar infrastructure which powers Google’s own applications. It is also a pioneer in developing applications on the platforms of the prominent social networks.

hi5, which was sued by EMI Group Limited last month, claims that it is one of the top 20 sites globally. Thousands of applications are being installed on hi5 platform everyday and almost 50% of its users interact with atleast one application daily.

The financial figures of the acquisition are yet to be disclosed.