Yahoo! Inc. announced Monday its acquisition of Flurry Inc., a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco. Yahoo announced the acquisition which is expected to close for anywhere from $300 million to $1 billion on their company blog. Flurry is a mobile analytics and advertisement application that monitors app activity from approximately 1.4 billion devices a month and 5.5 app sessions a day. 

Flurry analyzes data and information from smartphones users and helps developers and companies better understand their users. Being used by 170,000 developers globally, the acquisition will help Yahoo better understand how applications are being used. 

According to Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf, the information generated by Flurry is very important to small app developers who are highly dependent. They use the information to present data to their advertisers. The partnership with Yahoo can bring both additional data to present to advertisers and connections to more advertisers. 

This partnership can be very helpful has Yahoo is trying to build a substantial mobile advertising business. Currently, Yahoo does not sell mobile advertisements on its own apps. However, more than half of Yahoo’s monthly audience is from mobile devices, creating a market with huge potentials. The acquisition will open doors for Yahoo who is currently trailing behind in last place. Google, Facebook and Twitter have all already wet their feet through acquisitions and internal developments to sell ads beyond their own applications. 

Facebook purchased Israeli based company Onavo in December of last year for a whopping $120 million. Onavo developed an application that helps their users minimize smartphone data collection. The biggest value to Facebook was Onavo’s analystics biz that allows application makers to gauge how their apps fare on the open market and provide information on how users use the apps have they have been downloaded. 

“It’s a way for Yahoo to spread its wings much more broadly into the mobile ecosystem,” said Scott Burke, Yahoo’s senior vice president for advertising technology, in an interview. “It enables a lot of the mobile app developers out there to get access not just to analytics but also a blend of Yahoo’s mobile monetization solutions.”

In a statement released on the company blog, Khalaf stated: “As part of Yahoo, Flurry will continue to serve the application developer community in the way we always have, only better. With Yahoo, we will have access to more resources to speed up the delivery of great products that can help app developers build better apps, reach the right users for their apps and more importantly, make money from ads that look great and blend into the app experience. We have accomplished a lot on our own, but joined with Yahoo we are in an even better position to achieve our goals.”

Flurry has raised more than $60 million from investors to date. 

Topics: Apps, Delaware, Facebook, Small Business, Startups, Yahoo