AOL acquires mobile app Rally Up and the Santa Cruz team that dreamed it up

SANTA CRUZ - When a group of young Santa Cruz techies piled into a rented WI-FI-enabled RV with their laptops for an impromptu week-long programming retreat last November, they couldn't have imagined that one of the largest and, well, not very geeky, Internet services and media companies in the country would soon come knocking with a multi-million dollar offer.

This week, AOL announced it hired the entire Rally Up team to ignite its nascent Mobile First initiative in the Consumer Applications and Mobile division. The company also acquired the group's latest two applications, Rally Up, a location-based social network application that links "real" friends; and FacePlant, a not-yet-released iPhone video chat application that lets users see which of their contacts are on WiFi networks and available for FaceTime calls.

The deal, valued at "less than $10 million," means that the nine techies, aged 24-40, from four different Santa Cruz companies will start new jobs Tuesday at AOL's new West Coast mobile application offices in Palo Alto. The team members, whose collaborative creativity blossomed while housed at NextSpace, a coworking environment in downtown Santa Cruz, say they will be doing what they say they do best: working together to build cutting edge mobile applications.