You know a company is all grown up and ready to take on the world when it makes its first acquisition. Well, fine, maybe raising $10.6 million last January counts too, but today leading group messaging app GroupMe announced that it had acquired small application developer Sensobi for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition will bring Sensobi's co-founders onto the GroupMe team and likely include incorporating Sensobi's contact ranking and alert technologies into GroupMe, which hints at some interesting potential for the group messaging app.

"Sensobi was one of the first companies to recognize that your true social network is on your mobile phone," explained GroupMe in its announcement. "When we met Sensobi co-founders Ajay Kulkarni and Andy Cheung several months ago, we realized that we all shared the same vision: to help you stay in touch with your real life social network."

Can Tech Mimic Life?

All group messaging apps - and GroupMe is no exception - have suffered from a particular problem. Social groups can morph quickly over time, but the group within the app may not keep up. If a group is formed entirely around communicating around an event, but you leave and go home early, you're still part of the group and continue receiving messages.

Could Sensobi's technology potentially keep track of who is taking place and interacting and who isn't and possibly cut off alerts, automatically, so as to make the group morph with real-life circumstances? Could GroupMe create elastic groups, similar to the elastic social graphs promised by Color, the app that creates social connections according to proximity and interpersonal interactions?

Could Sensobi help GroupMe more closely mimic group dynamics? Possibly so. It will be interesting to see where this could go.

But if Google Music is so close to launch, after having been in development for over a year, why is Google just now buying the technology of a small-time competitor in this space? What hole does PushLife fill?

From Toronto-based PushLife's website, a message reads, in part:

We'll be joining Google's engineering team in Canada, and will be working on building better mobile applications for all users.

According to TechVibes and StartupNorth's coverage, the company was acquired for $25 million. To put that number in perspective, when Apple purchased the streaming music service Lala.com, it was (reportedly) for $17 million.

What Did PushLife Do?

In the service's FAQ, it's revealed that the company's application was relatively new - arriving in the U.S. in January 2011. The cross-platform mobile app supported Nokia (S40 and S60), LG, Samsung, BlackBerry and Android mobile devices. To use the service, a "PushLife-enabled" mobile phone plugs into a desktop computer, then syncs with either iTunes or Windows Media Player, depending on user preference.

This functionality sounds similar to what several third-party applications now provide for Android users: a pseudo-iTunes desktop experience. For example, with the popular doubleTwist application, users can sync their iTunes playlists, videos and photos to their Android phone, even over Wi-Fi.

So Google Music Gets Desktop Sync?

For Google, PushLife's technology could help provide a stopgap solution that bridges the planned Google Music cloud service with a service offering desktop sync. Like Amazon's recently launched Cloud Player for Android, Google's new Google Music service was going to sync tunes from the PC to the "cloud," in this case, the cloud being Google's own servers.

This functionality was revealed by accident when users on the XDA-Developers forum managed to turn on the feature on their Android devices. They also discovered a new "steam music" option.

But streaming is still an emerging technology use case for mobile music consumption, and one that's plagued by issues involving shoddy 3G connections, lack of cellular signal and other bandwidth-related problems. Not everyone can - or wants to - stream their music. Some still prefer to sync their phones with their PC, as iTunes provides.

PushLife was offering that same sync feature prior to its Google acquisition, in addition to some sort of store functionality, which allowed users to purchase music, videos, wallpapers, games and ringtones from their phone. It's reasonable to think that Google will offer at least some of these features in its new Google Music product, once the acquired technology is integrated.

If so, that means that Google is attempting to one-up both iTunes and Amazon's new Cloud Player service, the latter which provides cloud-based music streaming from Amazon's servers, but not desktop sync where tracks physically stored on the PC are directly copied over to the mobile phone.

It will be interesting to see if PushLife, once integrated, will continue to offer iTunes and Windows Media sync, in addition to support for purchases from Google Music itself, or if the connector functionality will be limited to Google services only.

But Wait, Didn't Google Already Have Desktop Sync Functionality?

What's also intriguing about this acquisition news, however, is that the functionality that seemingly stands at the forefront of PushLife's service - desktop sync - was not something Google should have needed. In May 2010, Google bought Simplify Media, a company which also had offered desktop syncing between iTunes or Windows Media player and mobile devices.

What then, did PushLife offer that Simplify did not? Could it be that store functionality, with its easy way to purchase music, videos, wallpapers and more, that Google really wanted? Or maybe it was PushLife's ability to let its users manage their library, create and edit playlists and socially share their music interests with friends? Then again, maybe it was PushLife's recommendations feature, which could compete with iTunes' Genius?

Whatever the case may be, it's clear that Google is attempting to build a real iTunes competitor with its Google Music product - one that includes sync to desktop and cloud, plus online storage and streaming.

Snaptu builds applications for feature phones, and the startup worked with Facebook to develop its feature phone app, released at the beginning of this year. That app expanded Facebook's mobile app availability beyond just smart phone users, bringing a Facebook app to over 2500 different mobile devices.

The acquisition of Snaptu is an interesting move for Facebook, indicating perhaps its plan to expand to new markets via new mobile markets - as the company continues on its trek towards 1 billion users.

The feature phone app built by Snaptu was one part of that, as it followed Facebook's launch of Facebook 0 last year, a site where users in certain countries could go to visit Facebook and incur no data charges.

Making mobile apps available beyond the smart phone may be crucial to gaining new users as not-so-smart phones still make up around 75% of the mobile phone market. By making itself easily accessible via feature phones, Facebook is opening itself to those who might otherwise have the resources to visit the site.

Mobile Facebook Users are Active Users

Facebook says that more than 200 million users currently access the site through mobile apps. But here's a more important stat, perhaps: Facebook says that people that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. That makes a resource like Snaptu important for helping Facebook make itself the central social hub for all mobile phone users, not just iPhone or Android owners.

The acquisition of Snaptu is the latest in a string of mobile startups that Facebook has picked up recently, having acquired the group messaging app Beluga earlier this month and the local mobile advertising startup Rel8tion in late January.

Image credits: Paul Butler

There are already plenty of places to get licensed content streamed online - from Netflix to Amazon Video On Demand - and equally as many to stream video live. So where can YouTube go next with user-created online video?

YouTube's next step is just that - YouTube Next. The Google-owned video network acquired NextNewNetworks, a video network with more than 2 billion views and 6 million subscribers.

YouTube Next, writes Director of Global Content Operations Tom Pickett, "is a new team tasked with supercharging creator development and accelerating partner growth and success."

The team will also spearhead a series of YouTube Next-branded programs and services that will build off past partner development initiatives such as the Partner Grants Program that advanced partners funds based on future YouTube revenue share and the recent $1,000 creditsat B&H Photo given to partners to purchase new camera equipment. The YouTube Next team and programs will expand our partner meet-ups and community events, increase investment in partner education and training and launch new capabilities in audience development.

Robert Scoble asked the other day, when sudden Internet-phenomenon Charlie Sheen chose UStream over YouTube for his live broadcast, if we were witnessing YouTube's big fumble. Can YouTube instead find a place in this middle ground? Somewhere between the completely free, piracy-ridden world of live streaming video and the world of licensed and controlled content?

One of my favorite group messaging apps, and my (former) vote for the app to take the cake this year at SXSW, announced this morning that it has been acquired by Facebook.

According to a Facebook spokesperson and the company's announcement, the app Beluga "will continue to function as it does today." That statement is made with a huge qualifier, however - "for now."

The app was entering an increasingly competitive space - group messaging - and running head-to-head with companies like GroupMe, Yobongo, Kik and others.

If you're familiar with RIM's BlackBerry Messenger, Beluga has been compared to that popular app, as well as to the longer-running if less refined but also very popular cross-platform app PingChat. There have been many apps aiming to be "the BlackBerry Messenger for cross-platform" but Beluga's striking design, high-profile team of founders and well-timed launch helped give it an extra dose of visibility.

In one recent article by Om Malik, Beluga was cited as one possible way that Google could take on Facebook, but it looks like Facebook beat them to the punch in that battle. From their statement, Facebook sounds like it is excited about the acquisition as I was about the app itself:

We're psyched to confirm that we've just acquired the talent and assets of Beluga, whose simple and elegant mobile apps blew us away as a solution to help groups of friends stay in touch on the move. We're looking forward to welcoming co-founders Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow, and we're excited that the team will continue their vision for groups and mobile communication as part of Facebook.

Will Beluga continue to live on in its current incarnation? A Facebook spokesperson had this to say, closely echoing the announcement on Beluga's website:

For now, Beluga will continue to function as it does today. Beluga accounts and data will not be lost. We'll be providing more details on future plans for Beluga in the coming weeks.

We just recently got a chance to sit down with the Beluga team and discuss the company's future. Of course, "Facebook acquisition" wasn't one of the topics, but I was rather excited to see where the app was headed. Now, I guess I'll have to be excited about what Facebook could do with this same technology.

Funny enough, it appears that Beluga's closest and strongest competitor in the space, GroupMe, appears to have just launched a new version of its app this morning that includes all of the features that really set Beluga apart. Previously, GroupMe offered an SMS-only interaction, which wasn't ideal for those of us without unlimited text messages. It also lacked a fluid integration of pictures and location. Its latest update seems to have updated GroupMe to offer in-app messaging, picture sharing and location sharing - the standout features of Beluga.

As Louis Gray notes, the acquisition could mean "dramatically improved mobile messaging, location integration and smart groups" for the mobile Facebook app. Here's hoping.

Yesterday, TechCrunch broke the news that Google had acquired Twitter sentiment analysis and recommendation engine fflick. Today, YouTube posted its blog that it, a subsidiary of Google, had actually done the acquiring.

According to the post, YouTube will be using the "technical talent, design instincts and entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team" in its effort to roll out more features "that help you enjoy and discover new videos to watch."

We've always believed that there are great conversations happening all the time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself. So today we're excited to announce we've acquired Fflick, a talented team that analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions around it.

According to the post, YouTube content is shared around the Internet to the tune of 400 tweets per minute, with "over 150 years worth of YouTube" watched on Facebook every day.

Using a service like fflick, YouTube could harness all of the surrounding commentary and data to better personalize streaming content. Leanback wasn't the only recommendation service launched by YouTube last year. In July, the company also began offering a music recommendation service. Later, in November, it began testing a video recommendation service called "YouTube Topics".

What will we see next, YouTube?

There has been increasing buzz lately over Google's potential challenge in the social networking sphere, with rumors of a Google Me in the works, and the Slide acquisition only feeds the flames.

For Google, the web is about people, and we're working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them. 

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we've already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we'll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

A similar statement is provided on Slide, saying that "this is a tremendous opportunity for the two companies to come together to change the way people socialize on the web".

If Google is working to make a Facebook alternative, as so many have suggested, then we can only expect to see a wide integration among its many products, as indicated in today's release. While little detail is offered, that seems to be the take-away from today's announcement - Google will go social across its many services, not just one. Hopefully this time, however, it takes into consideration those privacy concerns and does some testing, lest we have another Buzz launch on our hands.

1. Semantic Web Adoption by Facebook, Best Buy & Others
2. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
3. The State of Linked Data in 2010
4. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
5. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

Freebase is a massive open-structured database of information about almost anything, including books, movies and music. In fact, Google already has a relationship with Freebase, pulling in its information to provide intelligent search results within Google News. With the acquisition of Metaweb, Google can now leverage the company's tools and data even further, especially within basic Web search results.

"This is a huge win for the Semantic Web," Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, the semantic technology company behind GetGlue.com (and occasional ReadWriteWeb contributor), told us. "It could not be bigger, because really, we had the biggest company on the Web buy the biggest player in the Semantic Web space."

Google already provides some smart search results, including basic math, sports scores and birthdays of public figures, to name a few. For the most part, however, Google merely serves up links to Web pages; knowing more about what is behind those links could allow the search giant to provide better, more contextual results. To get a better idea of how that could happen, have a look at the video below.

Microsoft made a similar purchase when it acquired Powerset two years ago. Since then, Bing has bested Google in terms of providing smart search results, and has been nibbling at its market share for search. In an effort to keep Bing from eating its semantic lunch, Google is taking Metaweb's technology and data under its wing.

"What about [colleges on the West Coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one Oscar]? These are hard questions, and we've acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we'll be able to provide better answers," writes Jack Menzel, Google's director of product management.

Metaweb says that Freebase will remain free and open as always, and will be improved upon due to the Google acquisition. The service's quarterly downloadable data dumps will now be served up weekly, and the company hopes the acquisition will encourage more companies to contribute to Freebase.

Control of RedLaser SDK/API

Occipital already offered an SDK which allowed third-party apps to embed the technology into their branded experiences, so if a barcode scanner is all they wanted, eBay could have simply licensed the technology. eBay apparently wants to control that network of third-party applications, which includes other major retailers like Target.

With eBay's past history of questionable acquisitions, one would hope the company has larger plans for RedLaser than to simply integrate it into their line of applications. eBay is providing the resources and man power to take RedLaser to the next level that Occipital didn't have.

In a phone interview with Robert Scoble today, eBay's VP of mobile Steve Yankovich said the company plans to expand the application beyond the iPhone in order to attain the largest footprint possible. An Android version is coming "in the short term," he said, and he hopes to provide it to other mobile operating systems as well. He also added that the company would not be commenting about its plans for the future of the SDK and API, but said they would be increasing support for developers.

What This Means for Occipital

The purchase is interesting because instead of just gobbling up the entire Occipital company, eBay chose to just purchase this one app and its related technology. Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers told ReadWriteWeb that the company wanted to remain independent to continue with its other projects, which means it is likely eBay originally wanted to buy the entire company.

"Frankly, we didn't start this company to scan barcodes," said Powers. "Our vision for Occipital, and the groundwork we've laid over the past year expands beyond barcodes. We felt we absolutely needed to remain a freestanding company to pursue this vision."

As for Occipital, the company, which has been heads down on new projects for several months, is continuing full-speed-ahead toward their next front: augmented reality and computer vision. Powers mentioned today on Occipital's blog that their next major release "begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital's primary focus for the foreseeable future."

"The next application we're releasing next makes heavy use of new raw-video access on the iPhone, and dramatically improves the way people capture 360 degree panoramas," said Powers. "From there, we'll be continually increasing the ability of our interface to understand the world visually. We don't call our stuff AR because AR has been associated with a watered-down experience that doesn't make use of the most powerful mobile sensor -- the camera. Instead, we prefer to call our work augmented vision. Kind of like what Iron Man had for his helmet."

Today, the company introduced a few new members of the team that will be leading these efforts into augmented vision and computer vision. The team has recently added two computer vision engineers and an augmented vision engineer, including one with a PhD in computer vision. The company is taking these efforts very seriously, and should have some interesting releases in the near future.

Smallthought's Trendly service helps Google Analytics users better understand the data they are receiving by finding trends among key data points. Twitter could potentially use this technology to better understand its own data and create more intriguing ways of looking at trending topics.

Twitter also says the service will be used to create better analytics tools for commercial partners. Microsoft, which just recently launched a combined social trends portal for Twitter and Facebook, could benefit from Twitter's enhanced analytical data to provide more relevant results to Bing users.

For Dabble DB users (which until a year ago included Twitter), Smallthought assures them that they "will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately." The company also says it will provide two months notice of any significant changes to the product, and will provide users with the appropriate tools to export their data to other platforms.

In its decision (PDF), the FTC acknowledges these changes in the mobile advertising marketplace and notes that it "reached this decision based on important developments in the mobile advertising marketplace, particularly actions by Apple that should mitigate the anticompetitive effects of Google's AdMob acquisition." According to the FTC, the acquisition of AdMob isn't likely to result in a "substantial lessening of competition."]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ftc_clears_googles_acquisition_of_admob.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ftc_clears_googles_acquisition_of_admob.php Google Fri, 21 May 2010 09:42:13 -0800 Frederic Lardinois According to a number of well-informed sources, Apple just acquired Siri, the personal mobile assistant that won the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator competition last month. Nobody at Siri is allowed to talk about this acquisition before Apple makes its own announcement, but our own sources confirm that this acquisition has indeed happened. These rumors are also substantiated by this recent FTC disclosure (PDF) by Apple and Siri.

Why Apple?

For Apple, this acquisition makes perfect sense. Siri was spun out of SRI International, and its core technology is based on the ambitious DARPA-funded CALO artificial intelligence project. With VoiceOver, Apple already features some voice recognition in its projects. This acquisition, however, will allow the company to take it to a completely new level. You can, for example, ask Siri - by voice - to check for a dinner reservation through OpenTable at a local Italian restaurant nearby or check on local movie listings.

When we first looked at Siri in February, we described it as one of the "most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years." Siri's ability to understand natural language will give Apple a major advantages over other players in this market.

It remains to be seen, however, if Apple will continue to develop Siri in its current form, or if the company is mostly interested in Siri's intellectual property. When we first talked to Siri about its roadmap, the company's CEO, Dag Kittlaus, told us that Siri also planned to offer an API and versions for other mobile operating systems in the future. After this acquisition, it is probably safe to say that we won't see Siri for Android anytime soon.

For Google, this acquisition would make a lot of sense. After all, with Picasa Web Albums, Google offers one of the most popular online photo sharing sites and while it offers some basic editing features, it doesn't offer anything close to Picnik's feature set. Picasa, too, is one of the few Google services that still relies heavily on a desktop client and as Google continues to push its online services, it's only natural for Google to want to offer a better online photo editor as well. Indeed, according to Google own announcement, the company will work "hard on integration and new features."

The Picnik team will move to Google's Seattle offices and judging from the announcement, there will be no changes in the company's management and engineering time.

What about Picnik's Relationship with Flickr?

Picnik has a close partnership with Yahoo's Flickr, where it is the default photo editor. It will be interesting to see if Flickr plans to make any changes to this agreement in the near future. In today's announcement, Google notes that it plans to continue to support "all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks."

We contacted Yahoo and Flickr for a statement, but all we got so far was "no comment."

Maybe Google is also interested in hiring back some of the engineers that left Google for Aardvark. Among them are Ventilla, who used to focus on "strategy for Google's marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications," co-founder Nathan Still, who was the head of Google News for three years, Javascript specialist Fritz Scheider, and Bill MacCartney, who designed a Q&A system for Google Research before he joined Aardvark.

This is not the first time that we've heard rumors of an Aardvark acquisition, but in the past the deal either fell through or was nothing more than a rumor. Now, however, we have confirmation that Aardvark has indeed signed with Google. We don't expect the companies to disclose the exact price of the acquisition, but we expect to see official statements from both of them soon.

A Natural Fit

Combining Flixster's user-generated reviews and Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews from top movie critics, seems like a natural fit.  Flixster also has a strong presence on social networks through its Facebook and MySpace apps.

Even before this acquisition, Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes already partnered in some key areas. Critic reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, for example, already appeared on Flixster's site and in the service's mobile apps.

According to today's press release, IGN plans to refocus its efforts on building out its game-related and men's-lifestyle offerings. Rotten Tomatoes clearly didn't quite fit into this new focus.