Pinterest Acquires Instapaper

Pinterest ads UKPinterest has acquired Instapaper, the bookmarking web service created by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, for an undisclosed sum.

This isnt the first time the company has been bought out. In 2013, it was acquired from Arment by Betaworks, the startup studio which also  owns Digg and Giphy.

Instapapers basic offering is the ability to save online articles to read later, across devices – not too dissimilar to pinning an image or webpage on Pinterest. On top of that, it has added text-to-speech, speed-reading and highlighting features.

For Pinterest, the appeal seems to be taking Instapapers tech, most commonly used for news, and applying it to its own products. Its parsing technology, which picks out the salient parts of a website to be bookmarked, will also be tested for some of Pinterests Rich Pins.

Instapapers team will move from the Betaworks office in New York, to Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters in San Francisco, and the majority of its products will remain open to users as normal. The exception is Instaparser – a developer product making the aforementioned parsing technology available to third parties – which is closing in November.