Hi there,

We’re writing to let you know that Apture has been acquired by Google.

Since day one, we’ve been working on getting the Apture experience into as much of the web as possible. While we’re proud of having helped thousands of publishers enhance their websites, we think now is the best time to expand our efforts by joining Google’s Chrome team to help build the next generation user experience directly into the web.

On December 20 we will discontinue Apture’s product and services. When this happens, users will no longer be able to highlight and search terms with Apture on your web pages. Your website will continue to work as normal even after our service is suspended; however, you are free to remove the Apture code from your site as well.

We want to thank you personally for your support and positive feedback over the years, and we hope you’ll stay tuned for some amazing new Chrome experiences coming your way.

You can view the announcement here on our homepage, or check the FAQ below.

Sincerely,
The Apture Team

We at GoogleWatchBlog used apture sometime ago and can commend that the team would do fantastically well at Google!

All the best guys and we wait to see something new with Google Chrome!!

The Motorola’s handset division was acquired by search giant last month for $ 12.5 billion – 100 times more than the supposed amount paid by Zagat.

This new siny Google toy(Zagat) is supposedly going to help Google Expand its local offers verymuch.

It looks the first half of the rumor was indeed true. Google is acquiring BUT not RIM instead, Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billon. This new acquisition gives Google 706 total patents and patented applications, making Google 317 patents + Motorola mobility 706 in total = 1023 patents richer!

This deal is more about defending the Android platform from patent attacks. For most companies, $12.5 billion is a ridiculous price for patent protection, but remember Google has about $39 billion in cash on hand. With that kind of bank, it could keep shopping.

Google CEO Larry Page said in a blog post on the purchase:

We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

This blogpost confirms the acquisition…. Seems like Android is here to stay – Go Google!

So far, ResearchInMotion has a 3134 mobile device-related patents and patent applications in major technology companies by topping the list. Nokia has 2655 such patents and patent applications, ranked No. 2. Microsoft in 2594. In addition, Samsung Electronics ranked sixth, with 1529 patents and patent applications; Sony owns 1055, No. 8 – Motorola Mobile has 706, ranking 12th.

Motorola Solutions has 1019 patents and patent applications. If the two companies together, it actually has a 1725 Motorola patents and patent applications, enough at No. 6, a manifestation of this long-established phone makers of the potential strength.

Apple has become the second, world’s largest smartphone vendors this year… However, this mighty technology giant in the mobile phone industry can only be regarded as a recruit in 2007, it launched the first iPhone. Therefore, the company only has 477 patents and patent applications, ranked No. 16.

Google’s patent count for mobile devices is far less than the RIM, Nokia and Microsoft and other companies and this somehow tells us there could be an Google acquisition coming real soon to level the mobile patent field!

The notice on PittPatt site says: Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.

Maybe this new shiny company in Google’s armour would become very handy with the new Google Plus Hangouts!

Most possible things that can come out of this acquisition are:

1. Use the facial recognition for Youtube videos
2. Photo tagging in to Google products.
3. This tech from PittPatt could get added to android (take a pic and search social profiles with Google )
4. More patents registered in Google’s name.

Maybe I’m watching too many sci-fi movies .. What do you think, is coming out of this new acquisition?

So, that’s another +1 to the list of Google acquired companies list!

SageTV could help Google TV build the A perfect Home Theater PC (HTPC).. Although many users dislike the acquisition, certainly many more users would profit from being a part Google.

This acquisition could be because sageTV is better than Win7 Media Center in a number of ways a user comments on engadget.. It could be awesome for Google TV but they still have to beat Windows7 Media Center vs AppleTV and many more to come.

The announcement on SageTV site says:

Since 2002, we’ve worked to change the TV viewing experience by building cutting-edge software and technology that allows you to create and control your media center from multiple devices. And as the media landscape continues to evolve, we think it’s time our vision of entertainment management grows as well. By teaming up with Google, we believe our ideas will reach an even larger audience of users worldwide on many different products, platforms and services.

We’ve seen how Google’s developer efforts are designed to stimulate innovation across the web, and as developers have played a core role in the success of SageTV, we think our shared vision for open technology will help us advance the online entertainment experience. We look forward to joining Google, and while we don’t have anything specific to announce at this time, we encourage interested developers to email:
sagetv-dev@google.com

Source Via: ZatzNotFunny & Engadget

Google was working on its own tablet and bearing in mind who like to be innovative on the finder, we join the point A and point B for Google could implement the 3D desktop in its new tablet and so different from the rest of dozens of tablets to compete with it. Video after the jump.

I’m imagining what I already cool, but also practical, which is the concept of the desktop into a tablet to handle with your fingers where you can amass icons next to the table and in the real world and feel at home. It’s a new idea that has not appeared so far in the world of the tablets and, of course, our speculation, but has many papers to become reality. If not, why buy something that is not going to use?

In any case, you can still download the software for Mac or Windows and try it on your computer. If you just want to see how it works here I leave you a video where you see moving. What are your opinions on, “3D desktop background or desktop?

LabPixies is a platform for large number of Google applications, like iGoogle, iPhone, and Android platform development etc. Google likes development platform, but if there is a lack of application, then the platform loses its use.

iGoogle is now using OpenSocial standards, Yahoo, Hi5, MySpace and Orkut have also adopted the same Open standards, which means that applications using OpenSocial standards can run on all these platforms. LabPixies also works with the Facebook platform applications.

LabPixies said on its Website that after the acquisition by Google, the company’s business will not change,

Infact they say that “Google acquisition will help us to get more users and provides us (labpixies), more learning opportunity to help both the developer community and itself. “

iGoogle team staff Don Loeb posted a blog post saying, “Labpixies were among the first developers to develop applications for iGoogle. Over the past few years, we have many projects carried out in close cooperation, which including the release of a large number of OpenSocial application. Recently, we believe a merge of the two sides can help develop more products, so we decided to buy LabPixies. “

DocVerse would be similar to Google Docs and Zoho. This web-based collaboration tools, with the world’s most powerful document processing procedures for most users to integrate Office can provide in the Office where the real-time sharing and editing functions, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. It is the biggest advantage is that you do not need to re-learn new ways of working exclusively as a seamless plug-in work in the Office Lane.

Although DocVerse do not use Google Docs as a real-time integration of the back support of the plugin.

Google says:

People are still accustomed to using desktop software, so this acquisition will help users in their favorite desktop software, where most familiar experience of cloud services.

Two former Microsoft employees wrote on the DocVerse official blog,:

We believed strongly that the world of productivity and collaboration was changing.  The world started moving toward easy-to-use web applications, like Google Docs & Apps, offering a new way to work with all kinds of benefits.   However, for the many people who use desktop software, like Microsoft Office, transitioning to the cloud was a challenge.   Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds.  Even worse, teams who use both products find that Office and web applications do not play well together; most times, teams choose one product or the other.  Google’s acquisition of DocVerse represents a first step to solve these problems.

Currently, you cannot create a new account, but you can still download their Office plug-in, and create an account for the first time use.

It looks like Google will hit most of the Microsoft foundations in 2010 – including, Microsoft Windows and Office packages.

Via Google Operating System

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Picnik is a fast, fun, easy to use and powerful set of photo editing tools for editing, sharing and printing images using any internet browser on any computer platform. Picnik is integrated with a wide variety of websites like Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail and Photobucket. With Picnik, you can edit your photos wherever they are from wherever you are.

Picnik uses Flash technology, and Google’s Picasa online photo editing services are using lower rate of Javascript technologies. However, Google is using its Native Client technology to enhance Javascript code execution speed.

Picnik was founded in 2005, the first name of the company Bitnik, about 20 employees. Google has also announced the acquisitions on the official blog.