Facebook acquires staff behind file-transfer startup

IDG News Service - Facebook has acquired the team behind file-transfer startup Caffeinated Mind, which offered an on-demand peer-to-peer file sharing system.

The staff from Caffeinated Mind will work on tools that will help Facebook employees share files internally, and will not be working on a file sharing service for consumers, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Facebook is only acquiring the people, and not the company and the technology.

Starting with Sendoid, the file transfer system, Caffeinated Mind in California started to tackle big data transfer problems for enterprises with a tool called Expresso.

"We can't think of a better place to continue this journey than Facebook, where we'll be developing internal tools to improve the inner workings of the company and product, applying our technical and product expertise to their rapidly growing service," Caffeinated Mind said on its website.

Over the next two weeks, Caffeinated Mind said it will be winding down Sendoid and closing the corporate pilot for Expresso. It reassured users that it has purged all transfer history logs on its servers, and does not retain their personal data.

On the Sendoid site, Caffeinated Mind said Sendoid's web interface will be disabled on March 7, though users of the Sendoid desktop application will have services through March 14.