Google snaps up Android mobile data company Behavio

Google has snapped up Behavio the fledgling company behind Funf, the Android 'open sensing' framework that aimed to provide better access to and use of information from smartphones using Google's mobile OS.

While the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed — Behavio's most notable achievement is the Funf framework which gathers vast amounts of data about a person and their location via a phone.

By using information about an individual in combination with other data about their surrounding area, Behavio can better predict their future actions, for example, places they are most likely to visit next or other patterns of behaviour.

"We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn't be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google," the Behavio team said in an announcement on its site.

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The team's open source Funf framework will live on, although not as part of Google — the team will take care of it in their own time. Behavio's other closed alpha project will be closed down shortly, the team said.

Behavio didn't say exactly what the team would be working on within Google, only that it would be "working on exciting things" but it doesn't take too much of a leap to see Google putting the expertise behind the Funf framework to use on the features such as Google Glass and Google Now in order to deliver a more personalised, and therefore, potentially profitable experience.

Data that has been collected by the Funf framework can then be used in a variety of ways, for example, they can be represented as data visualisations or reports, or could be used to trigger notifications and even provide the base data source for other apps.

Google had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.