Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Google seems to hit them when and where you don’t expect it. Now they have acquired Postini. What I really like about the Google acquisition strategy is that it does not seem to be fueled by hype but is a real long term strategy. Let’s look at the last few Google acquisitions starting 2006 as I feel like it ;):

1. dMarc Broadcasting for radio ads … ok, they want to do radio ads and they did not have the radio experience, so it’s a non brainer.
2. Measure Map for Blog analysis … they are building out Google Analytics so it was probably for the team. The analytics part just gives them oodles of data.
3. Upstartle for Writely … they need an online office for their entire Hosted Pro scheme. This was well before the pro part of Google Hosted came out.
4. @Last Software for SketchUp … must have been cheap … at least I still can’t use the software but ok, I might not be the target group
5. Orion for advanced search methods or rather for a cool algo by Ori Allon … so “team” buy
6. Neven Vision for image search typ things and more research power.
7. JotSpot for the entire Google Hosted push … it’s a really good wiki though awfully slow at the moment.
8. YouTube … probably also knowing that you want to integrate videos into search and then you’ll send oodles of traffic and hence want to own the site anyway.
9. Endoxon again a team buy of a team of experts in mapping in Europe.
10. Adscape for video game ads … everyone wants to have something in there. Better than hiring a team.
11. Trendalyzer … ok just watch Hans Rosling perform (and I mean perform) at TED and you know they just wanted to make sure he can continue his research. Hans now has a video blog via google
12. Tonic Systems is a presentation software to complement their Google Hosted tools.
13. Marratch is for video conferencing which again helps the hosted part.
14. Greenborder is about entireprise desktop security.
15. Panoramio is a geo photo sharing thing and if they want to move local it’s good and again the same thing as YouTube, if you are sending tons of traffic there anyway …
16. FeedBurner … something lacking in their stats was RSS. There now.
17. PeakStream … who better to buy something about parallel processing
18. Zenter … ok, with Tonic Systems … this presentation thing seems to be hard
19. GrandCentral … I presume this is also a local advertising play, useful for their extensive VoIP number routing knowledge.
20. Postini is again about security.

So if you look at it, they are buying stuff to complement what they need strategically, not really to have it make money for them directly. They need presentations, security, local ads, new markets/channels for ads, good teams, … . Really looking forward to seeing what they buy next. Up till now I do like it.

Update: Just saw this post on the Google blog welcoming the team from Postini.  Nice bit of information: Over 1000 small businesses sign up each day. We use it for some time now here at Ormigo and are happy with it. Good to see usage is growing.

Thanks to Feld for pointing me to (his investment) Lijit. Feld already invested early in Feedburner, now belonging to Google (thanks for making the pro stats free by the way ;)). Hence, I needed to at least give Lijit a try and I do like it. Install is easy enough, also on Wordpress if you know a bit of HTML (tiny bit) and the Lightbox version for keeping search on your site is great. The entire idea holds great promise. If you search on my blog via the Lijit search it will first go over all my blog posts, then include things like Bluedot and my OPML file from my RSS reader. Not sure how it all ties together as it should take the blogs from the OPML file and include results form those pages, which I presume it does. Above that it has my LinkedIn connection and Xing connection (but I would probably have to give up my login credentials) so it can (theoretically in the future) look at my network and see which people I trust, possibly knowing their Lijit accounts … and the list goes on. Very cool indeed.

One short request: Please give me the code to just add a search box with GO at the end without the bells and whistles as I would like to exchange the search box at the top of the blog too. And there should not be any Lijit there and such. People will see it soon enough when they search.

Techcrunch is reporting that Google is now giving out subscriber numbers to their feed services. So people subscribed to your feed via Google Services are not showing up in FeedBurner. I for one, just added 46 new subscribers. Well not really, but now I know about them.