Google is the acquisition monster. If you are an up and coming start-up in the tech industry, there is a chance you may be getting a call from Google or Alphabet Inc., its international conglomerate. It doesn’t seem to matter to Google how crazy the idea is, they buy into it just to make certain their toes have dipped into anything that can make them money. To date, Google has acquired over 200 companies, some of them pretty average and some kind of out there.
[pullquote]What puzzles a lot of people keeping an eye on Google, especially tech experts, is how their acquisitions seem to not connect any particular dots.[/pullquote] When they bought the Israeli startup SlickLogin, which developed a smart-ID login system that uses high-frequency sound waves, that made sense. Even when they acquired Nest, a company that develops internet-connected smoke alarms and thermostats, people could say, “Okay, makes sense.”
It was when Google bought Calico, a healthcare company specializing in finding a way to beat the aging process, that people starting asking themselves, “Just what is Google wanting to do, take over the world.” Maybe they don’t want to take over the world, but they are definitely trying to acquire all of the talented people. Here are some of their most notable acquisitions in a nutshell.
In 2014, Google bought Firebase, a backend service that gives developers the ability to create iOS, Android, and Web applications that operate in real-time allowing for instantaneous data storage and syncing. When Google bought Firebase, it had around 110,000 registered developers contributing to its platform. Firebase is the brain behind Android push notification service, which powers applications such as Whatsapp. So this was a pretty big deal for Google.
The exact number of robot making companies Google has bought since they went acquisition crazy is hard to know at just a glance, so for the sake of this article, we’ll simply say it has been a lot. [pullquote]Google has a fondness for robots, that is obvious enough to anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the last five to six years.[/pullquote]
In 2013, Google bought Bot & Dolly which designs and produces robotics software and hardware for industrial robots. But these robots aren’t designed to build cars, they are used in the filmmaking industry. One great example of this is when one such robot named Iris was used to move actress Sandra Bullock through the air in a way that allowed computer-generated sequences of a spacecraft interior or of a spacesuit hurtling toward earth to be created.
If you have money to buy robots and lots of them, then why not buy a drone or two – a drone that can fly for years without landing using the sun. In 2014, Google bought drone making company Titan Aerospace.
Before Google stepped on Facebook’s toes, the social media giant had offered $60 million for Titan Aerospace. What Google paid for it, no one knows. Google doesn’t like to share its personal business with anyone (even though collect all of ours), but we can more than guess that they paid more.
The Titan drone resembles a drone that was made not too long ago that could be used to conduct 24/7 surveillance of cities while not needing to land for years as well. Just one question: What are you really up to Google?
At first glance, it seems that all of Google’s buying of tech companies (and a few genetics firms) is all about stomping out the competition, just like companies in the good old days. But it isn’t all about that. The best way to build a huge pool of talent is to buy the company that the talent works for. And it isn’t just Google doing it. Facebook, Amazon, Apple and many other tech giants are battling it out trying to acquire the best, smartest workforce possible.
In 2014, tech companies like Google spent a total of $170 billion buying out startups. As these tech giants get more giant, it only makes sense to use acquisitions to stay dominate in the technology development arena. It’s kind of like buying gems in one of those mobile game applications to skip upgrade times.
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