Forget buying an entire company, Facebook on Monday announced the acquisition of a firms entire staff. The team at iOS app developer Pieceable Viewer are moving in to Facebook’s new corporate headquarters.

The announcement was revealed via the Pieceable website and notes that Facebook is not buying the company, its technology or its stored customer data, instead choosing to hire all of its workers, integrating them into the Facebook team.

The Pieceable Viewer allows developers to upload existing apps to Pieceable servers which then allows that applications functionality to be reproduced within a browser window.  Pieceable lists more than 800,000 app demos among its greatest successes.

Pieceable will cease operations at the end of 2012 but will release an open-source version of the Pieceable Viewer for Mac hardware.

The Pieceable staff will join the Facebook mobile team but it is not yet clear how they will participate in the overall Facebook mobile ecosystem.  It is possible that the Pieceable staff will work closely with the Facebook App Center team given their focus on mobile application control systems.

Here is the full acquisition notice posted on the Pieceable.com website:

We created Pieceable Viewer in early 2011 to provide an easy, low-friction way to demonstrate native iOS apps within a web browser. Since our launch, we’ve served over 800,000 app demos. It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience to become part of the daily workflow for so many companies. To our customers: thank you!

We will be winding down the Pieceable service at the end of the year so we can focus on the new challenges and opportunities at Facebook. Facebook is not acquiring the company, technology, or customer data. We know many of you have come to rely on the Pieceable service, and we want to make sure that you can continue to do so even after we shut down our hosted service on December 31, 2012. In a few months, we’ll be releasing an open source version of Pieceable Viewer that you’ll be able to run on your own Mac hardware – we’ll have more details on that soon.

We want to give special thanks to I/O Ventures. Without their support, guidance and insight we wouldn’t be where we are today. We sincerely thank Paul Bragiel, Ashwin Navin, and the rest of the team at I/O for their partnership.

We can’t wait to begin working with the Facebook team to help our friends, family, and more than 900 million others connect and share in new ways.

Fred, Bob, and Jameson

Facebook Acquires ‘Pieceable Viewer’ Staff is a post from: The Inquisitr