Google on Friday acquired Fly Labs, a small New York-based company that makes apps for quickly editing mobile videos, and as the company’s name suggests it allows users to edit videos on the Fly. Fly Labs has already prepped video editing apps for iOS, and the team will now be working for Google Photos – the revamped storage app Google introduced back in May.
“Google Photos is a home for your life’s memories, powered by Google’s machine learning and computer vision technology. It’s a perfect match for what we built at Fly Labs, and we’re looking forward to folding our technology into Google Photos,” said Fly Labs.
The New York-based startup also said that more than 20 million videos had been created through its product.
The company says it’ll continue to offer its already existing apps – Clip, Fly, Tempo and Crop for a period of three months, during that time all in-app purchases will be available for free. Once the three-month period is over, they’ll no longer be available on the App Store, implying they will not be available for download though users who already have the app installed will be allowed to continue using them. One of its apps, Crop – essentially turns vertical cell phone videos into horizontal ones, while its newest release, Clips, turned small video fragments into so-called masterpiece short films.
The New York-based startup boasts that its apps have seen 3 million downloads in the past 18 months, which was founded by Tim Novikoff primarily to improve the quality of mobile videos. Video editing apps created by Fly allows users to edit videos by simple gestures, and also offers a slew of presets to edit videos.
At this point, its rather unclear as to how Fly’s app will get integrated with Google Photos, as the latter currently doesn’t offer video editing features but does allow users to stitch together clips and create GIFs.
As far as terms of the deal are concerned, there’s no official word from Google yet as there’s no disclosure from either side, though the New York-based startup has reportedly raised $750,000.
