Alphonso Labs, the maker of the popular RSS news reader app Pulse, is to be acquired by social network LinkedIn for in excess of US$50m. It is understood that LinkedIn beat off competition from Microsoft and Yahoo! to acquire Alphonso Labs.
According to AllThingsD, LinkedIn is believed to have paid between US$50m and US$100m for the company.
Alphonso was founded by two Stanford University graduate students, Ankit Gupta and Akshay Khothari, who were frustrated with trying to read breaking news on mobile devices.
The app, iconic for its tiled design, was considered a breakthrough and its arrival coincided with the arrival of the first-generation Apple iPad and even rated a mention by the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs at WWDC 2010.
The app now works across Android, iOS and HTML 5 browsers.
