Facebook acquires India's Little Eye Labs

New Delhi: Social networking giant Facebook today acquired Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs, its first take over in the country, for an undisclosed amount. The start up firm builds performance analysis and monitoring tools for mobile app developers.

"Today, we are very excited to announce that Facebook is acquiring our company. With this acquisition, Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level," Little Eye Labs said on its website.

This is Facebook's first acquisition of an Indian company and Little Eye is happy to become part of such an incredible team, it added.

Though the deal size has not been announced, reports suggest it could be in the range of USD 10-15 million.

"I'm excited to announce that we're acquiring Little Eye Labs, a company that produces world-class technology to help developers build more efficient products with Android.

This is an opportunity to welcome some of the industry's most talented engineers to our team in Menlo Park, California," Facebook Engineering Manager Subbu Subramanian said.

At Facebook, the focus continues to be on producing useful and engaging mobile apps, he added. "Little Eye Labs technology will help us continue to improve Facebook's Android codebase to make more efficient, higher-performing apps," he said.

Founded about a year ago by four Bangalore-based technology professionals -- Giridhar Murthy, Kumar Rangarajan, Satyam Kandula and Lakshman Kakkirala, Little Eye is backed by GSF and VenturEast Tenet Fund.

"The entire Little Eye Labs team will move to Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. From there, we'll be able to leverage Facebook's infrastructure and help improve performance of their apps," the note said.

It added that current customers of the firm will receive further information on its plans to offer a free version of Little Eye until June 30, 2014.

Some other acquisitions that Facebook has made to strengthen its mobile products include Parse, a mobile- backend-as-a-service startup (April 2013).

Facebook also recently made an attempt to buy instant messaging firm Snapchat, which reportedly turned down its USD 3 billion offer.

$866,902 for TN scientist to study brain

Chennai: Twenty years ago he worked on creating a telephone for hearing impaired children in Chennai while still a student at the Anna University. Now a full fledged professor , Khaleel A. Razak remains as innovative as ever and has even been awarded a five-year, $ 866,902 faculty early career development programme (CAREER) grant by the US National Science Foundation to carry on with his research into how the brain processes everyday sounds.

His aim? To find therapies for age-related hearing problems and the Fragile X Syndrome. “Age-related hearing loss is the most preventable hearing-related problem in the world,” explains the neuroscientist, who is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Riverside.

His research that involves study of mouse models of aging and the Fragile X Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, is aided by an in depth examination of the pallid bat.

“The pallid bat is a bit unusual among bats in that it uses echolocation for general orientation and obstacle avoidance, but listens for prey on the ground, like crickets, scorpions and millipedes,” Prof. Razak explains.
“We hope to identify neuron types that seem to be lost or changed during ageing. There may be combinations of behavioural or pharmacological therapies that could delay or prevent these changes.” The grant will support research on how the brain’s auditory cortex processes information about sound locations.

“Precise sound localisation can be a matter of life and death,” he explained. “The auditory cortex is necessary for sound localisation, but our understanding of the relevant neural processing is rudimentary.