Dive Summary:
- The educational literature publisher Elsevier has officially acquired Mendeley, a social network for academic research and collaboration, for a reported sum between $69 million and $100 million.
- According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, Elsevier will acqui-hire all 50 Mendeley employees while Henning himself will become VP of strategy.
- Founded in 2008, Mendeley monitors research and real-time reading data for 24 "high profile" institutions; it has 2.3 million users and its free and open application programming interface (API) is used by an estimated 300 apps.
From the article:
"... The acquisition also will mean that Mendeley can shift gears a bit. In the past, it charged users for extras like more storage space, usage packages for larger teams and so on, services that helped the company triple its revenues in the past year. Henning says that if it had remained independent there would have been more of a pressure to push revenue generation even more. 'But I think with Elsevier we can take a longer term perspective,' he says. 'What do our users want, rather than having to monetize too early. The focus will be to growing our user base rather than trying to monetize right away.'
As part of that, Mendeley also now wants to focus resources on some projects that it has been wanting to tackle for some time. The company already has a strong use on iOS devices; now it will be looking to launch an Android app later this year. ..."
