Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has spelled out that the beleaguered media company would be buying its way to mobile dominance — not through big product purchases but with smart, mobile talent pickups. Mayer made good on that promise by snatching up the ex-Googlers and former Apple staffers behind video platform OnTheAir.

OnTheAir ceremoniously announced on its website Tuesday that it was joining Yahoo. The deal, VentureBeat has confirmed, is a talent grab designed to bring more mobile expertise to Yahoo. Yahoo is currently in the process of trying to figure out how to better distribute its content to mobile audiences.

“Hiring the most talented mobile product thinkers and engineers is a big priority for us moving forward. Abel, Dan, Erik, Josh, and Mike are a great addition to Yahoo!, and we can’t wait to work with them to create the best possible mobile experience for our users,” Yahoo’s Adam Cahan, senior vice president of emerging products & technology, said in a statement.

OnTheAir made a 9-month-old online video site for people who wanted to stream to large audiences and incorporate viewers in their live broadcasts. It was kind of like a less intimate version Google+ Hangouts, except Google+ also now offers a Hangouts On Air feature for people who want to broadcast to bigger groups. The OnTheAir team admitted in a post today that the product never reached the “widespread daily use” that they had hoped. Yahoo said that it will no longer offer the product.

“When we first met with the team at Yahoo!, it was clear that everybody there is committed to making mobile products the backbone for the world’s daily habits,” the five guys behind the product wrote in a post-mortem note.

The guys moving to Yahoo are Abel Allison, Daniel Hopkins, Erik Goldman, Josh Schwarzapel, and Mike Kerzhner. According to their bios, Goldman and Kerzhner previously worked at Apple, Hopkins helped build the infrastructure to support Gmail and Google+, and Allison and Szhwarzapel (OnTheAIr’s CEO) came from startups Meebo and Cooliris, respectfully.

Yahoo did not disclose the exact terms of the deal. OnTheAir appears to have raised less than $1 million in seed funding.

Photo credit: acme/Flickr

It’s not an acquisition per se, but Facebook has just snapped up the seven-person team behind photo-sharing app Lightbox.

And yes, Lightbox is another mobile-focused company — the latest in a string of mobile acquisitions by the social network.

As Facebook leads the charge with regard to mobile web standards and development, it’s bringing on more and more people, teams, and products that have specific mobile web core competencies. Lightbox is one such team.

On the startup’s blog, we read that the Lightbox devs had been focusing particularly on Android and HTML5 mobile development, making them a perfect fit with Facebook’s current direction and focus.

Lightbox was founded in late 2010 and has taken a total of $1.2 million in funding from such big-name Valley entities as SV Angel (Ron Conway), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), Index Ventures, Accel Partners, and many others.

The Lightbox product will be shut down June 15, and bits of the startup’s code base will be made available on GitHub. Existing users are being asked to download their photos from the service before it’s shut down. Facebook will not take any of the original Lightbox product or user data.

Facebook named mobile as a weakness and/or risk when its S-1 was first filed. Since then, the company has snapped up mobile-focused startups Glancee and TagTile.

And of course, there was the splashy, $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. That deal is likely undergoing some FTC scrutiny based on the pricetag alone, and Facebook no longer expects to close the deal before Q2 ends.

In addition to all these acquisitions, Facebook has given its own mobile apps a big, photo-friendly facelift just days before it is scheduled to go public.

We’ll see if all this mobile activity will inspire investor confidence. The truth will lie in the IPO numbers at the end of the week.

Twitter has snatched up the talent behind social marketing automation company RestEngine.

“We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two-and-a-half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph,” the company said in an announcement on its website. “We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

RestEngine is said to be especially adept at helping developers with targeting, filtering, and personalization, areas that Twitter has shown plenty of interest in of late. Earlier this month, Twitter released a new Discover tab to better predict stories people want to see. And, of course, the information network has a big business interest in improving how it targets ads — ahem, “sponsored” content — to its users.

Three of RestEngine’s four-man founding team are migrating to Twitter. Co-founder Joe Waltman is going on an entrepreneurial hiatus, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch calls the deal an acquisition, but we’re going to peg this as an acqui-hire. Here’s why: Twitter made no noise about its get (not even a tweet), the RestEngine service appears to be shutting down, neither Twitter nor RestEngine is lobbing around the “acquisition” word, and one of RestEngine’s co-founders is flying away.

Twitter has made a few other buys this year. The information network purchased social news aggregator Summify in January and blogging platform Posterous in March. The former seems like it would tie in nicely with RestEngine’s personalization capabilities.

Photo credit: FadderUri/Flickr

File-sharing service Drop.io announced today that it has been acquired by Facebook.

The New York startup’s blog post said that the social networking company has bought “most of Drop.io’s technology and assets” and that chief executive Sam Lessin (pictured) will be joining Facebook. It sounds like Facebook won’t be hiring the rest of the Drop.io team, though when I asked Facebook directly, it only said: “We can confirm that we recently completed a small talent acquisition for Drop.io and acquired most of the company’s assets. We’re thrilled that Sam Lessin will be joining us at Facebook.”

Drop.io is also shutting the down its service. It will no longer allow users to create free “drops” (filesharing pages), and current users are being asked to download all their files before they’re deleted on Dec. 15.

This follows Facebook’s pattern with previous acquisitions like Hot Potato and FriendFeed, where its aim was to hire an executive or a team rather than add a service or new technology. (At least it kept FriendFeed running, albeit without real support.) At this year’s Startup School event at Stanford, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We have never once bought a company for the company. We buy companies for excellent people.”

(I didn’t include that comment in my post about Zuckerberg’s interview.)

Lessin has a history with Zuckerberg, according to David Kirkpatrick’s book The Social Network, having gone to Harvard with him and introduced Zuckerberg around New York during Facebook’s early days.

Drop.io raised $3.95 million from RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham, most recently in 2008. Given the timing and the relatively small amount of the funding, it seems likely that Drop.io needed to raise more money now-ish if it wanted to stay in business — and without new funding, it got acquired.

Update: Drop.io actually raised another $4.85 million earlier this year, according to a regulatory filing. It looks like the company was trying to raise $6 million, so it was still about a $1 million short — and that may be why there was no coverage of the recent round. So that weakens my speculation, but I don’t think it completely kills it … maybe?

[Story via Cnet. Image from Flickr/Amit Gupta.]