Microsoft has recently acquired a little startup focused on producing little “videos,” picking up Swing Technologies and planning to incorporate the team into Skype, according to TechCrunch. Swng, which produces images that come alive when you mouse over or touch them, enabling short 1 second video clips:
Mouse over the embedded clip above to get the full effect.
Swng launched in 2016 as “Polaroid Swing,” licensing the name from the pretty much dead photography staple at the time. However, when the Polaroid IP was acquired this May with the idea to bring back the iconic instant photo camera, a brand change was needed, and Polaroid Swing became Swng.
The company and the app initially got a lot of buzz, with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone an early and enthusiastic investor, helping to come up with the concept and becoming the company’s chairman. That initial buzz wore off, however, and one analytics company estimated lifetime downloads of the app to be about 500,000.
Terms of the deal were not announced, but TechCrunch believes that the app will live on, at least for the time being as Skype figures out what to do with it.
Further reading: Acquisitions, Skype
