Balaraja blog

Facebook Hires Engineers from E-Mail Startup Zenbe

Facebook has snapped up several engineers from e-mail provider Zenbe, both companies confirmed Wednesday.

"We can confirm that we hired three employees from Zenbe earlier this year as part of a talent acquisition," a Facebook spokesperson said.

Zenbe said its employees moved to Facebook a few months ago and "played a small role" in the new Facebook Messages e-mail service launched this week.

"We believe that messaging and collaboration on the web are on the cusp of a new wave of innovation, and we're excited to be playing a role in that," Zenbe said in a Wednesday .

Earlier this week,and framed it as a conversation, not a traditional e-mail client. There's an inbox and an @facebook.com e-mail address, but it's more tightly integrated with chat and text rather than a standalone e-mail service. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during the launch that Facebook had been working on the upgrade for about a year's time.

Going forward, Zenbe said it will focus on building products "designed around sharing real experiences with the people who matter most in our lives. The company pointed to its Blacktop product, which "lets users visualize their check-ins in the context of a 'trip,' so they can share a complete story of a vacation, a day trip or a night out."

Zenbe worked with the Facebook Places team as an early beta partner, and the company said it is "excited to dig deeper into the intersection between location and messaging." Zenbe is now working on a new app, known as Shindig, which uses the Facebook social graph to let people share photos with friends in real time, in real locations. More details will be forthcoming, Zenbe said.