Adobe Acquires Thumb Labs

Adobe took another step towards making it a real force in the cloud storage and use market. The company recently announced that it had officially acquired Thumb Labs, a New York-based startup that specializes in mobile applications design.

This appears to be another move by Adobe to push its Creative Cloud project into the forefront of the market and follows another mobile app design company acquisition. Towards the end of last year, the company acquired Behance but has not really been able to put that company to good use quite yet.

It seems that Adobe has finally found a way to put Behance to work, after paying about $150 million for it in December. The company wants to take advantage of the social and community features that Behance is well versed in when it comes to mobile application development. Thumb Labs knows how to work with Behance quite well; in fact, the first application Thumb worked on was for Behance. Thumb Labs even created a new version of the Behance application.

Thumb is the very definition of a young startup company, boasting just 10 employees. All of those employees will now join Adobe and will apparently continue primarily servicing Behance’s needs. There is talk that the smaller firm could even begin work on an iPad application for the new subsidiary of Adobe. They will also be working to make Behance’s home page more mobile friendly.

Adobe does not believe that Thumb needs to be permanently hitched to Behance as there are indications that the new acquisition will eventually be working on other Creative Cloud projects. That seems to be a natural marriage when looking at just how interlinked the cloud has become dealing with smartphone and tablet applications.

Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs, issued a statement shortly after the takeover became public. In that statement, Verdi said that he felt that his company was a natural fit for what Adobe was looking for in the near future.