Facebook buys customer loyalty service, Tagtile

They're a month away from their much-awaited IPO and Facebook has yet again taken out their wallet to make a purchase. This time, it's a customer loyalty service called Tagtile and the amount exchanged in the transaction has not been revealed. According to Bloomberg, the Tagtile team said in an email that they are joining Facebook and that the social network has acquired substantially all the company's assets. Tagtile went on to explain in a blog post that while at Facebook, their service will be different from the service that they offer today. They wrote, "We won't be taking on any new customers as of today, but the service will continue to work as is for now. We'll be reaching out to customers directly once future plans are set, but Tagtile as it exists today won't be a part of what we do at Facebook."

Facebook dishes out yet again

Facebook also made a statement on the matter saying, "We’re happy to confirm that TagTile’s founders are joining Facebook, and that Facebook is acquiring substantially all of the company’s assets. We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and we’re excited to have them join Facebook."

Tagtile is a service which provides merchants with hardware that will work to provide their customers with coupons via a mobile app. Customers can either redeem these coupons directly from their phones or can print out the coupons to redeem in store. Tagtile says that it allows merchants to track their customer base, the frequency of their visits and with the tools that Tagtile provides, merchants can send offers and coupons directly to their customers' mobiles. Tagtile was founded by two engineers who had their roots in India, Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar. Anand has had previous experience at VMWare and Mazumdar at Google.

Facebook is planning on raising $5 billion for their initial public offering, which will make theirs the largest Internet IPO till date. The purchase that they've made recently, is of course, Instagram, which they bought for a whopping $1 billion. The difference between the two purchases is quite visible. While Facebook will keep Instagram relatively intact, the services offered by Tagtile will be different once they've made their move. Furthermore, Tagtile is obviously a much smaller purchase than Instagram was. It will be interesting to see if Facebook retains the services offered by Tagtile, or if the loyalty service will be shut down like Facebook did with the Beluga social messaging service.