Facebook Buys Ex-IITian’s Start-up “Tagtile”

Recently, there’s been lot of speculation over Facebook’s buying out highly popular iPhone application- Instagram , Facebook bought in the same week, an Ex-IITian’s start-up called “Tagtile”  for some undisclosed amount and some huge shares which sums upto some millions. Abheek Anand, an IIT Delhi Alumnus and his co-founder Soham Majumdar, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus, are joining Facebook as product manager and engineer, respectively.

What is Tagtile?

Tagtile’s business model is different from that of large discount sites such as Groupon. Tagtile offer’s a hardware to merchant which can be placed near cashier’s desk.

Tagtile offers the tile cube to each of its merchants which can be scanned on the iPhone or Android application.Its actually loyalty and direct marketing solution unlike Groupon which attracts customers only once or twice depending upon the offers, while tagtile forces customers to visit to the merchant shop inorder to get discounts.

How does Tagtile Works?

Its Simple!

• There’s a tagtile cube installed in merchant’s shop at cashier’s desk
• Customer with iPhone/Android will just have to open the application and tap the screen with camera facing the tile cube
• All discounts and other benefits are displayed on the application and customer can avail the benefits.

Such services really helps and will surely have thousands of users.

Why Facebook Bought Tagtile?

Some of the reasons why Facebook bought tagtile are:

• Facebook Deals have been recently launched in many countries and they were looking for some innovative ideas to cut down the competition of Groupon deals.
• With tagtile services, Facebook can have an extra edge over other deals websites.
• Facebook are keen to focus on mobility solutions and thereby after instagram, its Tagtile
• Facebook wants their presence offline as well and with those cubes placed on merchant’s desk, their brand identity increases.

These are some of the reasons for Facebook buying out Tagtile.