Archive for March 4th, 2010
Picnik was acquired by Google
Google Inc. continue to extend its business tentacles. This time, the world largest search engine acquired Picnik, a photo editing site online. That means, Google has captured three businesses in three weeks.
Picnik, based in Seattle, currently has 20 employees. Google interested in acquiring this five-year-old company because they provide software that allows users to edit photos directly from the browser, without having to bother installing additional software.
Unfortunately, Google does not publish the value of this acquisition.
Since the advertising sector recovered from the crisis, Google primary business in the field of Internet search become more profitable. It is not surprisingly, when Google does not seem to run out of funds to continue to expand the Internet business.
Last October, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said his company will acquire one company each month and make a big deal every one or two years.
Last month, Google bought a social search engine called Aardvark and email service for mobile web named reMail. Since September 2009, Google has acquired eight companies.
Google spokesman Andrew Pederson reported via email that Picnik team is now based at the Google headquarters in Seattle and will work with Google’s Picasa group. Picasa itself is a photo sharing service in a virtual world acquired by Google since 2004.
No major changes enabled in Picnik, but they plan to do integration and adding new features. This was expressed by Brian Ax, Google’s director of Product Management.
In a teleconference on last Monday (1/3/2010), Google’s Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette confirmed that Google was trying to strengthen its business in line with the improving of company’s business conditions.
Since founded until now, Google had acquired 62 companies. The largest acquisition value is when buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for U.S. $ 3.1 billion.
Google also has successfully acquired a number of big names in cyberspace. Call it, FeedBurner, Blogger.com, and YouTube.