Yahoo Buys E-mail Search Company Stata Labs

Yahoo has purchased e-mail software company Stata Labs, in what could be an investment in a coming PC search tool to rival Google and Microsoft. Stata Labs sells (actually sold) an e-mail application called Bloomba that lets people search message text and attachments.



The Stata Lab's Web site notified its users of the buyout with this message:

We are pleased to announce that Stata Labs has been acquired by Yahoo!. We are thrilled to join Yahoo!’s industry-leading team of technical experts. This acquisition will provide Yahoo! with exceptional technological expertise and strategic assets.



We appreciate the ongoing support we’ve received from our customers and partners. We intend to continue supporting Stata Labs’ existing customers for one year from date of product purchase. Again, we thank you for your support and encourage you to review the Frequently Asked Questions.

Bloomba was billed as the world's first search-based email. You can instantly find any email message, attachment or contact whether or not you use folders. Bloomba came with an integrated personal information manager that includes a searchable calendar and contacts.



Elizabeth Millard of ComputerUser interviewed Stata Labs Co-founder and CTO, Raymie Stata, earlier this year and asked him what he thought are the largest challenges that you see in providing your products?

"Our biggest challenge is the perception that, to survive as a software company, you need to out-box Microsoft. The fact is, fragmentation of the e-mail and PIM markets is inevitable, with players like us building products for heavy users. These users feel more pain at the hands of old-fashioned products like Outlook and need something new and better. Our company can not only survive, but thrive on this smaller segment, and in this role paint a brighter future for all users."

Stata described their product as a "Personal Content Database," a database that's optimized for the type of semi-structured data typical of personal data and the configurations of personal platforms. At the database level, our focus is on fast, scalable search, and on replication. At the same time, we're building applications that leverage this underlying database technology. We've started with e-mail--where the management problems have become the most acute--and we'll be slowly expanding the footprint.



It seems that the "footprint" will be expanding much faster than he had imagined at that time. Welcome to Yahoo Raymie!