Facebook Buys Mobile App Moves, A Fitness Diary With 4 Million Downloads

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mark zuckerberg on phone 2

AP

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Moves, an activity diary for your smartphone, has been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount. It will continue running independently, and Facebook says it will use Moves to help people "take small steps toward more healthy habits and lifestyle," The Wall Street Journal reports.

The fitness app was founded in Finland in 2012. It has been downloaded 4 million times and it raised a small round of financing from Lifeline Ventures, PROfounders, AJP Holding, Juha Lindfors, Jyri Engestrom, and Tekes.

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Mark Zuckerberg hasn't talked much about fitness apps specifically, although he did note that he was impressed by another app, RunKeeper, a few years back. RunKeeper is much larger than Moves with more than 23 million users, and collects exercise information via a phone's GPS.

Facebook has been focused on beefing up its mobile portfolio. The apps, like Moves, are "part of the full ecosystem of different ways that people want to share with different people," Zuckerberg said during Facebook's latest earnings call.

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This type of acquisition also aligns with Facebook's recently formed "Creative Labs" initiative, which allows small teams within the company to work on mobile innovations in a scrappy way. It's like a startup incubator within Facebook; Paper, a newspaper app, was the first project to come out of Creative Labs.

Moves uses a patent-protected algorithm to present a user's daily activity in a series of charts. It retrieves loads of information from a phone, including accelerometer information then separates the data into types of activity, such as running or walking. It also has a calorie counter and a timeline feature that shows your most active moments throughout the day.

Here are a few screeshots of the app.

moves app

Moves

moves app

Moves