UPDATED 09:29 EDT / NOVEMBER 11 2011

From Acquisitions to Trashed Products, Is Google Too Diverse?

Google has been stacking up their cards with acquisitions.  In the past few months, they bought Fridge, the social network startup, PittPatt, the facial recognition technology, The DealMap, a daily deals service, and just last month there was SocialGrapple, a social graphs analytics company.  These acquisitions were seen as either a talent or technology buys, but they all indicate Google’s goals around expanding its products.

Google is not done with their acquisition-spree, as they bought two more startups this week–Apture and Katango.  Apture provides instant access to information with their award-winning in-page search technology.  It works like this, most webpages have hyperlinks that, when clicked, will redirect to a new page.  But Apture eliminates the need to open a new page as a highlighted word/s or phrases when you hover your cursor on it, it automatically give you additional information.

“After enhancing more than a billion pages with our products, we think now is the best time to expand our efforts with another team just down the road that shares our vision of making the web better. :) That’s right — we’ve been acquired by Google and will be joining the Chrome team to continue driving innovation and creating a better user experience on the web. The modern web is an amazing platform, so stay tuned for even more enhancements to your Chrome browsing experience.” – The Apture Team

But it’s still not clear if the Apture team will literally move to Google’s backyard or if they would stay where they are, but one thing is for certain–they will be working with the Chrome team.

Back in September, news surfaced that Google was in talks to acquire Katango, a Kleiner-Perkins startup that uses algorithms to sort out your friends into groups.  Now, Katango and Google officially announced the acquisition.

Katango’s circle just got bigger – because we’re joining Google!

Katango was founded a little over a year ago to develop social algorithms that improve people’s online social interaction. We’re excited to join the Google+ team and carry on fulfilling that mission. Google+ is seeing tremendous momentum, so it’s a perfect time to join and make Circles smarter for millions of people.

We’re incredibly grateful to our investors, team members, and users who made Katango awesome. We can’t thank you enough.

See you on Google+!

The Katango Team

Google+’s VP for product, Bradley Horowitz welcomed Katango on Google+, saying:

Welcome Katango!
Very excited to confirm that we’ve just acquired Katango! In the earliest days of Google+, I alluded to the fact that we had big plans for Circles. Are you ready for some magic in your Circles? These folks are magicians! – Horowitz on Google+

This is seen as another take on one of Facebook’s new feature, the Smart List, which automatically segregates your friends into groups based on location, interests, etc.  This could spark another round of word-wars between Mark Zuckerberg and Horowitz.

But not everything is pushing forward, it looks like Logitech will no longer make the Google TV set-top box Logitech Revue.  Logitech CEO Guerrin De Luca stated that it was just a costly mistake.

“To make the long story short, we thought we had invented (sliced) bread and we just made them. [We made a commitment to] just build a lot because we expected everybody to line up for Christmas and buy these boxes at $300… that was a big mistake,” De Luca said.


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