What Google bought in the past 18 months
Google is expanding seemingly by the minute, and acquisitions are playing a big role in the search engine leader’s quest to rule the technology world.
In all, Google has agreed to make at least 15 purchases of companies or technologies in the past year. Google usually doesn’t release financial terms of small deals, but the big ones are substantial: US$1.65 billion for YouTube and US$3.1 billion for DoubleClick (the latter deal is pending a federal investigation). A little bit more than a year ago, Google spent US$1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL.
The past year’s purchases, which we have summarised here (link to hosted page with table below), have helped Google shore up gaps in its product line, develop a better office application suite capable of competing with Microsoft Office, and build on its massive success in online advertising. Microsoft has made 13 acquisitions in the same time frame, including a US$6 billion deal during May for aQuantive, a digital marketing and advertising company.
| Date of acquisition | Business acquired | What does the business do | Price paid (US$) |
| June 2007 | Feedburner | FeedBurner is a leading provider of feed distribution and management tools. A web feed is a way for online publishers to syndicate their content and deliver it straight to readers. Each day, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content. Further, FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads. | Price Undisclosed |
| June 2007 | Zenter | Zenter is a web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show | Price Undisclosed |
| July 2007 | Postini | Postini is the global leader in on-demand communications security, compliance, and productivity solutions for email, instant messaging, and the web. Postini’s award-winning services are designed to protect customers from viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, and other attacks; encrypt messages to ensure confidentiality and privacy; and archive communications to ensure compliance with regulations and to prepare for e-discovery.
More than 35,000 businesses rely on Postini everyday to protect them from a wide range of threats, ensure reliable communications, reduce compliance and legal risks, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of enterprise policies to protect intellectual property, reputations, and business relationships. |
$625 million |
| July 2007 | Grandcentral | GrandCentral is a service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between users. | $50 million |
| April 2007 | Doubleclick | DoubleClick is in the ad-serving business and has two primary products. DART for Advertisers is an ad server that gives advertisers/agencies the tools to plan, deliver and report on their online ads. DART for Publishers gives publishers the tools to place ads on their site, optimize them, and assess placement to make the best use of their ad inventory. For the most part, DoubleClick is paid by advertisers and publishers to serve and report on ads. These are two vital and interrelated functions. Allowing agencies and advertisers to deliver ads in the right context and monitor their effectiveness maximizes the return on investment for a given ad or campaign. Ultimately, this leads to better and more relevant ads for the consume
Click here to read why Google is buying doubleclick |
$3.1 billion |
| 30/05/2007 | Panoramio | A community photos Web site based in Spain that connects pictures to the exact geographical location where they were taken, allowing users to view those photographs in Google Earth. Google and Panoramio had already been working together for several months before the purchase, and the deal is expected to lead to further integration of Panoramio content with Google mapping technology.
Panoramio, launched in Oct 2005, has 300,000 subscribers as of March and had 4 million unique visitors in February and 30 million page impressions. |
Undisclosed |
| 29/05/2007 | GreenBorder Technologies | A maker of browser-based security software. The acquisition should help Google strengthen protection against malware across its line of Web applications. GreenBorder’s software creates an “impenetrable protective barrier” that keeps all interactions with a Web site and its associated content and programs away from the internal parts of a Windows machine.
It essentially creates a DMZ (demilitarized zone) between the Windows desktop and programs downloaded from Web pages or opened from email messages in Microsoft Outlook. |
Undisclosed |
| April 2007 | Marratech | Google plans to use the software for its employees, and has not yet announced any plans to market the videoconferencing technology. | Undisclosed |
| April 2007 | Tonic Systems | Tonic Systems makes technology for creating presentations and document conversion. The purchase is part of Google’s strategy to add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a competitor of Microsoft Office. | Undisclosed |
| March 2007 | Adscape Media | Makes technology for placing advertisements in video games. The deal came less than a year after Microsoft bought video game advertising company Massive for US$200 million, a move that was seen as an attempt by Microsoft to get a leg up on Google in the advertising realm. | US$23million |
| March 2007 | Trendalyzer | Trendalyzer makes statistics more understandable by converting numbers into interactive animations. See an example here
Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations. |
Undisclosed |
| December 2006 | Endoxon | Internet mapping technology company in Switzerland, in a move to bolster European maps in the Google Earth downloadable application and the online Google Maps. | $28 million |
| October 2006 | YouTube | The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment communities with Google’s expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos, and will offer new opportunities for professional content owners to distribute their work to reach a vast new audience. | $1.65 billion |
| October 2006 | JotSpot | Do-it-yourself application publishing to enable anyone to create, publish, and share collaborative and personalized wiki applications. JotSpot’s wiki allows you to create rich web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries. It’s as easy as using a word processor — you don’t need to know HTML. Thousands of businesses are using JotSpot to manage projects, build an intranet, share files and stay in sync with colleagues and customers. | Undisclosed |
| August 2006 | Neven Vision | Specializes in mobile photo search. The deal was made to improve Picasa, a free download that helps users share and edit photos, and locate and organize photos on their computers. Neven Vision technology obtains information from photos, such as whether they contain images of people.
Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about |
Undisclosed |