Microsoft acquires messaging app vendor Wand Labs

Microsoft is buying messaging-app vendor Wand Labs Inc. to beef up its conversation-as-a-platform strategy, officials announced on June 16. "The Wand team's expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially with the work we're doing in the area of intelligent agents and chat bots." Microsoft took the wraps off its conversation as a platform strategy at its Build 2016 conference in late March 2016. The company outlined plans to encourage developers to build bots for Microsoft's various platforms, including Skype, at that time. Microsoft is trying to make the idea of extending apps with Bing's intelligence easier.