Google- The Spending Never Ends

Recently, Google has been acquiring company, after company, after company, after- you get the idea.

Aardvark was the first acquisition Google made this year. Aardvark is a social search engine that connects friends by having them answer their friends questions correctly to verify they are actually friends.Google spent $50 million to get this company. It may seem like a lot of money, but that's just the beginning.

Then there was reMail. reMail automatically downloads your mail to your iPhone and allows you to search through those emails rather quickly.

Following that came Picnik, an online photo editing that allows you to get all your photos from Picasa,  Flickr, and other photo sharing siets.

DocVerse was the next acquisition, and it brought major improvements to the collaboration in Google Docs.

Episodic is a company that specializes in online video streaming. They were the ones that introduced the advertisements and and the analytics that you see on YouTube now. Well, now you know who to rage against.

To get the knowledge for the Visual Search in Google Goggles, they purchased Plink Art, a startup company focusing on visual search.

Then Agnilux back in April.This wasn't the start of the spending spree, but this company was actually pretty interesting. Agnilux focuses on server technology and has been helping Google to maintain their servers and keep them protected from floods (massive amounts of connections).

LabPixies was one of the first developers to create gadgets for iGoogle, so it makes some sense that Google ends up buying them.

BumpTop was a pretty cool thing back when it first came out. It was changing the desktop environment on a computer to one that's more like an actual desktop.

Here's a demonstration.


But since Google acquired them, they haven't released anything new for the desktop, and they took down the old programs. Oh well, at least they put it to good use in Android.

Global IP Solutions worked on sending voice and video over IP, allowing for the Google Talk and Google Video Chat we have now.

Simplify Media was next. A startup that allowed for iTunes music syncing across multiple platforms. So Google used this to sync music with Android.

InviteMedia was another company that focused on advertising, and  you can probably guess what Google's using that for.

Then ITA Software, a travel industry software, was also acquired by Google. Recently Google has been purchasing a lot of software in the travel industry. Hm...

Anyways, that's not even all of the software they've acquired this year. There have been others such as BlindType, and they're even considering shelling out 5 BILLION to purchase Groupon. In my opinion, that's a stupid idea, since Google will probably not make that much revenue back. If you bought Groupon for 1.5 Billion dollars, and got 300 million dollars back per year, that's 5 years before you make the money back. Then there's the competition.

For a complete list, check here.

That's all for now, and probably the last post from our blog.
Have fun anybody that reads our blog.

-Teguh