Facebook is set to acquire Snaptu, a feature phone App development company based in UK and Israel. The company specialises in making popular social networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, available on feature phones.
With the completion of the deal, people with low end phones across the world may expect better and bigger apps on their own feature phones, without the need to spend huge sums on smartphones.
Notably feature phones make up a large majority of all the phones in the world. About 80 per cent of all the handsets sold in 2010 are feature phone, according to a study.
The feature phone apps developed by Snaptu are Java-based and these apps currently work on close to 2500 feature phones across the world.
Snaptu, a four year old company, said in the blog post that the deal was expected to be completed within next few weeks.
The deal is estimated to be worth $70 million.
Facebook already has about 500 million members and the company is now planning to expand its presence among the mobile users also.
This is the fourth acquisition by Facebook this year with other acquisitions being Pursuit (social recruiting service), Rel8tion and Beluga.
Snaptu has already built the feature phone app for Facebook, and the step appears to be very important for Facebook to move beyond its current base of users.