Yahoo! is far from finished with its acquisitions as it tries to solidify its mobile web and consumer service model to survive this painful time of restructuring.

Yesterday, it was reported that Yahoo is offering $30-$40 million to acquire Xobni, maker of address book apps and plugins.  Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backwards, is said to be a perfect fit for Yahoo’s mail and productivity tools “as it neatly creates automated profiles for each email contact with correspondence history and social network data.”

Today, AllThingsD reports that Yahoo is eyeing Qwiki, a New York startup that began as a search platform that delivers a story instead of simple search results, and turned into a mobile app that allows iPhone users to create a montage based on their photos, music and videos.

Yahoo is said to be offering $50 million for Qwiki, which is not a bad price considering it was able to raise more than $10 million in funding since it launched.  The majority of the $8 million raised by Qwiki came from its first round of funding which was backed by Eduardo Saverin (co-founder, Facebook), Jawed Karim (co-founder, YouTube) and Pradeep Sindhu (co-founder, Juniper Networks), as well as institutional investors Lerer Media Ventures, Tugboat Ventures and Contour Venture Partners. Saverin will join Qwiki’s Board of Directors as an observer.

The question now is, will Yahoo kill Qwiki much like it did its other acquisitions, and how will it be incorporated  into its existing mobile offerings?  Will Qwiki somehow turn into a Vine or Instagram video competitor?  Or does Yahoo just want to expand its video offerings?

Mobile videos, whether an app for creating short looping videos or video messages, or a service that allows you to watch videos on the go, are becoming more popular.  What’s in mobile videos that has companies clamoring to incorporate them into their own services?

Why mobile video apps are gaining popularity

More than words or pics could say

Talking to someone on the phone isn’t the same as talking to someone face-to-face.  The best workaround for this is video calls, or sending video messages.  You can keep it short and sweet, or long, depending on the service or app you’re using.

With social media connecting people from different parts of the globe, users are seeing the value having an app on their mobile phones that lets them connect with people in various places without high phones bills since video chat can be used over WiFi or on their data plans.

It’s fun!

Admit it or not, you’ve tried being a videographer at some point over the years.  You wanted to be a little Spielberg, shooting anything you saw, or trying to catch your parents or siblings in some embarrassing situation.  With smartphones packing cameras featuring zoom and HD recording, in addition to the abundance of apps that can make videos more interesting, creating videos is easy, and sharing them with others is as simple as a tap on the screen.

A lifetime of memories

A few seconds is all it takes to do something either profound or deathly embarrassing, and videos allow these moments to last for eternity.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes the memories of events aren’t as clear as you want them to be.  Videos can help people preserve these memories, whether a 6-second video loop, or a longer clip that tells the whole story.