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Facebook's acquisition spree continues with TagTile

It's another play in mobile for the social network, this one focusing on commerce.

Paul Sloan Former Editor
Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
Paul Sloan
TagTile helps local businesses identify customers.

Facebook is amping up its mobile efforts, this time around commerce.

Facebook today bought a San Francisco-based startup called TagTile, a mobile-based customer loyalty business. Like Square, TagTile provides merchants with a free hardware device (see the white cube in the photo) for customers to tap on with their phone when they checkout. That, combined with the app, lets stores run coupon programs and offer loyalty rewards.

In a post on its site, TagTile said that Facebook is "acquiring substantially all of our assets." How much is that worth? Facebook isn't saying. But this acquisition clearly isn't Instagram and instead is typical of those that Facebook usually makes -- small deals to pick up the technology and the team.

The announcement also comes on a day when Facebook rolled out Facebook Offers, a way for small businesses to send promotions directly to Facebook news feeds.