Your Groupon Deal Has Been Cancelled
The top story this week with Google news was the intense rumors of a deal to purchase group deal site Groupon. Groupon is this uber cool website that brings you insane local deals they call Groupons. It’s the word coupon and group combined. It works like this, Groupon makes up a deal with a local retailer, restaurant or service and puts the deal out as their deal of the day. The only catch is that in order for the great deal to go live a group of XX participants needs to “buy in” to the deal, in other words they must commit before the deal is released. If there arent enough people in the deal you get an email that says, well “Your Groupon Deal has been cancelled”. That’s what happened to Google this week.
Last weekend the internet was running wild with stories saying that Google had purchased Groupon for $2.5 billion dollars (that’s billion with a B). However we learned about midday Monday that those reports were false. We did however learn that Groupon was holding a board of directors meeting via conference call on Wednesday and by Thursday evening/Friday morning we began hearing that Groupon turned down a $6 Billion dollar offer from Google. Although they were in negotiations with Google Groupon was still buying up internet real estate in the shadows. They purchased a development company in Silicon Valley along with three deal sites in Asia
source: thedroidguy
Google TV Making Positive Moves
Despite not getting that awesome Groupon deal this week, the coffers at Google were very busy buying up other companies. The first of which is Widevine. Widevine Technologies specializes in video optimization, digital rights management and content access.
Widevine is a leader in DRM solutions and has provided Netflix among others with backbone technologies to protect the rights of studios. Although some on the internet speculate that this purchase was focues on Youtube bringing premium content, it’s about Google TV first. Last week, Disney TV Chief Anne Sweeney said directly that one of their main issues with allowing Google TV access to it’s streams was piracty and content protection. Having the geniuses at Widevine in the Googleplex will only help those efforts to curb studio fears. The next big piece left for the Google TV network issue is monetization for the networks.
As Russell Holly likes to say though, people are missing the small picture which is, Google TV is just a large browser and therefore shouldn’t be put through anymore hoops than say Mozilla or Opera.
Source: Widevine Blog
Google Puchases Phonetic Arts
The buying didn’t stop after Widevine. It’s also been reported via Google’s Blog and others that Google has purchased Phonetic Arts. Phonetic Arts is a team of UK based developers who specialize in voice synthesis and voice recognition. The thought behind this purchase as that Google will be able to offer speech recognition as part of Google apps. Currently you can use Google Translate and have words said back to you but they sound like Stephen Hawking. Of course we all know that Google Maps Navigation sounds like Stephen Hawking’s twin sister.
The integration possibilities for Phonetic Arts are endless. Hopefully they can help with the translate part of Google Voice. Although it’s about 10x better than the original Grand Central translation, Google Voice still has a hard time converting voice mails to text.
Whatever their intention, mums the word but according to Google’s Mike Cohen “excited about the technology, and while we don’t have plans to share yet, we’re confident that together we’ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future”
Source: T3.com
Google Buys a City Block
Maybe Google wanted to show their stuff off after being rejected by Groupon (Actually this deal has been in the works for months). Google has been looking for a New York base of operations for years now. This week it was announced that they’ve finally found that home, and it’s a big one.
In true Google fashion, they have purchased an entire city block in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Their NY address is 111 8th Avenue, New York and it’s from 8th and 9th aves between 15th and 16th streets block wide. The Googleblock has over 3 million square feet of office space which at the rate they are buying up companies it won’t be hard to fill up.
Source: Thedroidguy
