Fundings & Exits | Cheryl Waller

Wavii Confirms Google Buy, Shuts Down Its Service To Make Natural Language Products For The Search Giant

April 26, 2013 by Ingrid Lunden Leave a Comment

Wavii, the natural language technology startup, has updated its home page, and its previously-monochromatic logo, to officially confirm that it has been acquired by Google — a deal that we noted earlier this week was “north of $30 million.” And to set speculation running about what might be coming next, Wavii CEO Adrian Aoun confirmed that it will be shutting down its service so that it can use “our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.”

There are a number of ways that Google may end up implementing Wavii technology and the talent that it’s picked up along with it, with possibilities in areas across search, apps, and mobile:

When we first covered the company back in January 2012, as it first emerged from stealth mode, we noted that it wanted to make a “Facebook out of Google.” That referred to the way that it asked for keywords for things that interest you, then combined that with natural language processing and machine learning to comb the web, linking that up with your Facebook social graph, to produce pages of content relevant to you, effectively giving the whole of the web a kind of intelligent, personalized order.

After coming out with a public beta in April 2012, Wavii, as ATD notes, moved to a mobile-first business model around November 2012. Today, it’s known also for having technology similar to that of Summly, the summarizing app bought by Yahoo for $30 million.

As we noted earlier this week, Apple had also been looking at the company as something that could complement its Siri speech recognition/personal assistant product, and considering that, Wavii could also end up playing a part in developments at Google Now — Google’s own bid for personal assistant dominance.

Here’s Aoun’s full announcement:

You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won’t continue to offer this particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.

To all of our loyal Wavii users, we owe you a big thanks for all of your feedback and involvement throughout this journey. We look forward to taking our technology to the next level and delighting you with what we come up with next!

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, wavii

Google Scoops Up Neural Networks Startup DNNresearch To Boost Its Voice And Image Search Tech

March 12, 2013 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

Well, Google’s M&A strategy is nothing if not diverse in focus. In November, it acquired package delivery startup Bufferbox. Last month, Google it made its first acquisition of the year, buying eCommerce startup Channel Intelligence. Today, Google dug into the Computer Science department at The University of Toronto to acquire DNNresearch, a young startup founded by professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his grad students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever.

Incorporated last year, the startup’s website is conspicuously devoid of any identifying information — just a blank black screen. While the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Google was eager to acquire the startup’s research on neural networks — as well as the talent behind it — to help it go beyond traditional search algorithms in its ability to identify pieces of content, images, voice, text and so on. In its announcement today, the University of Toronto said that the team’s research “has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding.”

Furthermore, Professor Hinton is the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College in London, holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and is the director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research-funded program on “Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception.” Also a fellow of The Royal Society, Professor Hinton has become renowned for his work on neural nets and his research into “unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.”

In its statement, the University of Toronto said that both Krizhevsky and Sutskever will be moving to Google, while Hinton will “divide his time between his university research and his work at Google,” both in Google’s Toronto offices and at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

For Google, this means getting access, in particular, to the team’s research into the improvement of object recognition, as the company looks to improve the quality of its image search and facial recognition capabilities. The company recently acquired Viewdle, which owns a number of patents on facial recognition, following its acquisition of two similar startups in PittPatt in 2011 and Neven Vision all the way back in 2006.

In addition, Google has been looking to improve its voice recognition, natural language processing and machine learning, integrating that with its knowledge graph to help develop a brave new search engine. Google already has deep image search capabilities on the web, but, going forward, as smartphones proliferate, it will look to improve that experience on mobile.

In a recent paper published by the three founders of DNNresearch, the team found that “despite the attractive qualities of CNNs [convolutional neural networks], and despite the relative efﬁciency of their local architecture, they have still been prohibitively expensive to apply in large scale to high-resolution images … [However, the results of its research] show that a large, deep convolutional neural network is capable of achieving recordbreaking results on a highly challenging dataset using purely supervised learning.”

Get that?

The acquisition of DNNresearch also follows a $600K gift that Google awarded to Hinton and his research team to support their work in neural nets. Following its do-good thesis, the company pledged to “support ambitious research in computer science and engineering” through its “Focused Research Awards program,” which offer unrestricted, two-to-three-year grants and give recipients access to Google “tools, technologies and expertise.”

So, it looks like Google discovered DNNresearch through its award program and, seeing the implications that the team’s work could have on the fields of speech recognition, language processing and image recognition — all central to its core products — decided that a grant wasn’t enough.

“Geoffrey Hinton’s research is a magnificent example of disruptive innovation with roots in basic research,” University of Toronto President David Naylor said in a statement. “The discoveries of brilliant researchers, guided freely by their expertise, curiosity, and intuition, lead eventually to practical applications no one could have imagined, much less requisitioned.”

More in the University of Toronto’s statement here.

Update: Professor Hinton penned a Google+ post today that offers his take on joining Google officially, in which he says he is betting on “Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs.”

Full post below:

Last summer, I spent several months working with Google’s Knowledge team in Mountain View, working with Jeff Dean and an incredible group of scientists and engineers who have a real shot at making spectacular progress in machine learning. Together with two of my recent graduate students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky (who won the 2012 ImageNet competition), I am betting on Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs. That means we’ll soon be joining Google to work with some of the smartest engineering minds to tackle some of the biggest challenges in computer science. I’ll remain part-time at the University of Toronto, where I still have a lot of excellent graduate students, but at Google I will get to see what we can do with very large-scale computation.

Also, for those interested in some context as to the significance of Hinton within the scientific (and technical) communities, check out this Hacker News thread here. Basically, he’s Chuck Norris.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: acquisition, Blogging, DNNresearch, Education, enterprise, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, startups, TC

Social Discovery App Sonar Gets New Investment From Bing Fund, Announces It Via Vine

February 28, 2013 by Sarah Perez Leave a Comment

Sonar, a social discovery service (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) that was among the top apps at last year’s SXSW in Austin, is today announcing new investment from Bing Fund. This angel fund and incubator program from Microsoft was publicly revealed this summer, allowing Microsoft to partner with entrepreneurs, which can then receive subsidies to use Bing APIs in their applications, as well as access the technologies developed by Microsoft Research.

In August, Microsoft announced its first two companies - Buddy, an app development service, and Pinion, an advertising service with a focus on gaming communities.

In Sonar’s case, the company has worked with Bing quite a bit on past events, including PSFK’s Need to Know at last year’s SXSW, as well as New York events like Social Media Week, Xconomy Mobile Madness and the For Humankind gallery. Sonar says that, like Bing, it too recognizes the value of “understanding location and social – the intersection of time and place” in order to provide its users with great experiences.

For background, Sonar’s app uses check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare, plus geo-tagged tweets, to show you lists of nearby people, ranking them first by friends you know, then showing you other relevant people nearby. This type of app works well at crowded events like conferences – or SXSW, for example – but like Highlight, Banjo, INTRO and others, it has yet to become a breakout hit where mainstream users return to launch it daily. That being said, Sonar has also integrated into Foursquare’s app platform, where it serves to announce who’s nearby when you check-in.

Sonar could also take advantage of Bing’s discounted API access to replace its current mapping engine in its app with Bing Maps, though Sonar didn’t discuss which sort of integrations it may or may not be considering. There’s also potential for Sonar to team up with Microsoft Advertising, and find further integration with Microsoft’s own mobile apps, through this new relationship.

Sonar isn’t disclosing the size of the Bing Fund investment, either, but it did announce the news via Vine. (Please don’t let this become a thing.)

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, sonar, startups, TC

SurveyMonkey CEO Talks About Why His Company Won’t IPO After Raising $794M And Reveals Other Big-Name Investors

January 18, 2013 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

“We could go public,” SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg says, “but the cost of going public — of running a public company — outweighs the benefits.” As the founder of LAUNCH Media, which he took public before selling to Yahoo! (where he stayed for six years), Goldberg is familiar with the IPO process and isn’t in any hurry to repeat it.

In 2009, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital purchased a majority stake in online survey veteran, SurveyMonkey, installing Goldberg as Chief Exec in the deal. Fast forward to today and, as you may have heard by now (courtesy of ATD), the 13-year-old, under-the-radar survey giant has become the recipient of one of the largest private capital investments on record for an Internet company.

The whopping $794 million debt and equity financing round values the company at $1.35 billion, and the amount raised rivals the mega-investments generated by Groupon and Facebook on the road to IPO. Companies typically raise this kind of funding when they’re gearing up for a public offering, but not in this case. Instead, the SurveyMonkey CEO tells us that the company plans to use the massive recapitalization cash out employees and early investors by buying back shares from its employees and stakeholders and, in turn, eliminating most of its existing debt.

It’s a big win for SurveyMonkey’s two primary existing stakeholders, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital. The former, for example, has reportedly seen more than a 7x return on its $64 million investment.

Not bad for a day’s work. And, hey, if you don’t need cash, why not?

“We don’t need the cash to run; we’re profitable,” the CEO tells us in an interview. “The money isn’t going into the business, it’s going directly to investors and employees. For us, this approach affords many of the same benefits — like the liquidity — of an IPO, without the roadshow, the distractions and the demands of meeting quarterly projections.”

Another reason Goldberg may not be eager to IPO? As if Zynga and Groupon weren’t reason enough, it happens that the SurveyMonkey CEO is also married to Sheryl Sandberg — the same Sheryl Sandberg who became the COO of Facebook in 2008. Sandberg played a key role in turning Zuck’s Social Network Project into a legit, profitable business, and in setting the stage for the “largest Internet IPO in history.” Of course, while Facebook is back on track today, we all know how that IPO went. (It was a disaster, in case you were in a coma.)

Seems reason enough to add another check in the “Reasons Not To Rush An IPO” column, even though SaaS (especially SaaS that’s consumer-facing) is a hot space, and SaaS IPOs have tended to fare better than their consumer web counterparts. Plus, there’s reason to believe the SaaS IPO market will continue to be active — a check in the opposite column.

Nonetheless, SurveyMonkey’s massive round means it can put the public markets on hold, at least for now. Of its $794 million raised, $350 million came in the form of debt financing (from a syndicate led by JPMorgan). Why debt, you ask? Because it allows the company to reduce its share cap, the CEO says, and enable new investors to own a larger proportional stake in the company. Without that debt raise, he continues, SurveyMonkey wouldn’t have been able to pull off the additional $444 million it raised in equity.

While Spectrum will continue to hold a stake in the company after the raise, it reduces the firm’s share of the company, although it remains one of the top shareholders. The same is also true for Bain Capital, as the investment means that the firm is no longer one of the top three shareholders, Goldberg confirms.

Instead, the largest chunk of its equity investment was put up by first-time SurveryMonkey investor, Tiger Global, leading the VC giant to replace Bain as the top stakeholder. Google followed, putting up the second largest share of the investment, with Google’s head of corporate development, David Lawee, joining the company as a board observer. In turn, Tiger Partner Lee Fixel gained a directorship.

The round also saw significant contributions from Goldberg himself, Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership, LA-based VC and private equity firm Laurel Crown Partners and, of course, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

While much of this has already trickled out in the press, no one has of yet detailed the involvement of Iconiq Capital in SurveyMonkey’s equity raise — specifically, the handful of notable tech industry CEOs that contributed significant investments via the under-the-radar money management firm. Goldberg confirmed that Yammer Founder and CEO David Sacks participated in the investment, along with Dropbox Founder and CEO Drew Houston, early Facebook employee/CTO and Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, former Yahoo COO, Guitar Hero CEO and current Chief Exec of Chegg, Dan Rosensweig and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.

Of course, given the significant capital put up by Tiger, Google and an impressive list of investors, the question remains: Why SurveyMonkey? Well, when it comes to affordable, easy-to-use online surveys, SurveyMonkey is the service of record. Its cloud-based, consumer-friendly and freemium SaaS model has created the foundation for a sustainable, high-growth business. Over the last four years (since its deal with Spectrum and Bain), the company’s traction has increased significantly, to the point where it today has 14 million free users, 360K paying customers (who pay $200 to $300/year) and its website averaged 65 million monthly visitors last year.

In addition, the company saw $113 million in revenues last year, which have been growing 30 percent year-over-year, the CEO said. And, according to Fortune, its earnings last year were $61 million at a 54 percent margin.

Given its capitalization, SurveyMonkey manages to remain lean compared to its constituency, employing around 200 people. This has allowed the company to reinvest significantly in its technology, and over the last three years, it has completely rebuilt its entire stack. In turn, it’s been hard at work on APIs and a developer portal and recently debuted an entirely redesigned analytics platform.

The current analytics offerings that accompany its surveys have been sufficient but have been without support for more complex analysis. The new platform aims to fix that, offering a more robust solution for individual and enterprise users.

Going forward, Goldberg sees big growth potential in international markets. While its English language surveys are now in every country in the world, it got a slower start in non-English-speaking countries. While the site now supports 15 languages (and accepts payments in 29 currencies), the CEO says it has a long way to go.

Luckily, that measly little $794 million investment buys SurveyMonkey a lot more time. Down the road, restlessness will grow among its new investors and the company will have to head to the public markets. But until then, quarterly earnings calls are far from Dave Goldberg’s mind.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Bain Capital, Blogging, Dave Goldberg, ecommerce, Education, enterprise, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, Spectrum Equity, startups, surveymonkey, Surveys, TC, tiger global, Venture, venture capital

Microsoft Wins Out Over Apple And Google, Acquires Home Entertainment And Automation Company R2 Studios

January 3, 2013 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Late last year, it was reported that Microsoft, Apple and Google were all speaking to id8 Group R2 Studios Inc. about a potential acquisition of the startup, and now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft has indeed sealed the deal. R2 is a home automation and entertainment media startup, founded by Blake Krikorian, former founder of Sling Media. Microsoft hopes to use the startup’s resources, tech and personnel to enhance its Xbox division.

R2 released a product called R2 Control for Crestron that allows it to control home automation systems, managing audio visual and home theatre equipment, lighting, thermostats, security and other connected home devices on Android phones and tablets both at home and remotely. The group holds patents for controlling electronic devices as well as providing the control app for Android, which will be acquired by Microsoft. Krikorian and “a small team” will join Microsoft as employees as part of the deal.

Microsoft could just be buying the company to extend its existing plans to make the Xbox the hub of the family entertainment center, but as I suggested in a previous post, the opportunity is there for Redmond to now build connected home control directly into their software platforms. Software that can control home automation and remote triggering of in-home events, built into Windows on mobile, desktop and into Xbox, could go a long way toward extending the paradigm of the constantly connected mobile consumer. I suspect the Internet of things will be a strong theme at next week’s CES, and I think this is a good sign that the big players are starting to mobilize to make sure this is a space they can claim ownership of, too.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apple, Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Gadgets, Google, Home Automation, Microsoft, mobile, r2 studios, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google Replaces Its Head Of M&A With Don Harrison, Will Open A New Late-Stage Investment Group

December 7, 2012 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

According to Reuters, Google is making major moves in its mergers and acquisitions group, replacing David Lawee with Don Harrison, a high-ranking lawyer at the company.

Here’s what Reuters shared about the move; we have reached out to Google for comment:

Google Inc is replacing the head of its in-house mergers and acquisitions group with one of its top lawyers and is planning to create a new late-stage investment group that longtime and outgoing corporate development chief David Lawee will oversee, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Don Harrison, a high-ranking lawyer at Google, will replace Lawee as head of the Internet search company’s mergers and acquisitions team.

This move would be interesting for many reasons, including the fact that Google already has an early-stage arm called Google Ventures, which has been cracking away on investing in smaller teams with big ideas.

Basically, Google has a lot of money to play with to grow and can have a hand in helping other late-stage companies grow. Why not do it?

UPDATE: We’ve confirmed that Don Harrison will be leading Corporate Development beginning in 2013, and that David Lawee will be working with Google on other initiatives.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, investors, M&A, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google Acquires Waterloo-Based E-Commerce Startup, Amazon Locker Competitor And YC Graduate BufferBox

November 30, 2012 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Google today announced their acquisition of YC alumni BufferBox, a Waterloo-based startup that specializes in providing users with temporary lockers to receive delivery of packages from online e-commerce retailers. The company is led by a founding team of three University of Waterloo graduates, Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah. The startup actually already shares a building with Google’s Waterloo office, and is located in the Communitech accelerator VeloCity Garage offices in that city.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed (update: we’re hearing $17 million+, see below), but the purchase of the two year-old startup is definitely an interesting one. BufferBox founder McCauley told the Financial Post in an interview that the company hopes to “build out [its] vision a bit quicker” thanks to the resources and talent newly available from Google. BufferBox will retain its distinct brand as part of the deal, according to Google speaking to the Financial Post, but the company didn’t elaborate on its plans for the startup, beyond sharing the opinion that there are lots of opportunities related to “end-to-end” relationships with shoppers.

When contacted for comment, a Google spokesperson shared the following statement about the acquisition:

We want to remove as much friction as possible from the shopping experience, while helping consumers save time and money, and we think the BufferBox team has a lot of great ideas around how to do that.

Google is apparently building a big chunk of the mobile commerce side of its business out of Waterloo, where’s there’s a steady stream of engineering talent from the nearby University of Waterloo, which supplies graduates to Apple, Facebook and a number of the other top Silicon Valley tech companies and startups.

BufferBox will already offer 100 of its delivery lockers in the GTA and Hamilton area in Canada by the end of next year, located primarily at transit depots, to allow users to sign up for one-time use delivery. Amazon currently offers a similar service, through its Lockers program, which expanded to Silicon Valley this summer and which likewise uses temporary codes to enable single-use delivery. This looks like it could be a move by Google to directly compete with Amazon at least on this aspect on online retail.

Update: We’re hearing from our source that the price paid by Google for BufferBox was north of $17 million. Also, it’s worth checking out Om Malik’s piece on BufferBox from earlier in November, which he pointed out to me on Twitter predicted a possible Google buy of BufferBox.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: acquisition, Blogging, buffer box, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, startups, TC, yc

Google Acquires U.S. National High-Traffic Broadband Wi-Fi Provider ICOA Inc. For $400M [Update: Nope]

November 26, 2012 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Update: It turns out that a PR agency or some other individual gone rogue was dead wrong on this. The announcement that crossed the wire is said to be not true at all, as per ICOA’s CEO, and now also confirmed by Google.

We were wrong on this post, for not following up with Google and the other company involved and instead posting assuredly before getting a solid confirmation from either source. We apologize to our readers, to the companies involved, and we’ll be sure to act in a more responsible manner for future stories, rather than blindly trusting the word of a website that doesn’t necessarily hold itself up to any journalistic standards.

Google today announced that it has acquired Rhode Island-based ICOA, Inc. in a deal worth $400 million, as it looks to “further diversify it’s already impressive portfolio of companies.” ICOA provides wireless broadband Internet in high-traffic public areas, which include marinas, restaurants and airports, and offers Wi-Fi hotspot design, installation and maintenance.

ICOA, Inc. owns or manages over 1,500 broadband hotspot locations in the U.S, spanning 45 states. Some of its largest networks cover RV parks and campgrounds, and it also offers service to a large number of retailers. It partners with Boingo, iPass, Broadsky and a number of other public Wi-Fi providers as well. Originally founded as Quintonix in 1983, the company changed its name to ICOA, Inc. in 1989.

Google has displayed interest in building out public Wi-Fi networks in the past. It introduced Google WiFi in Mountain View in 2006, providing free Wi-Fi access to around 12 square miles encompassing most of the city where its headquarters are housed. Originally, Google had committed to offering it for free only until 2010, but as of this writing it’s still available.

Providing user with Wi-Fi access in an expansion of that program is one possible outcome of this purchase. Google clearly gains by getting users online; I’ve argued in the past that its hardware strategy is based around providing Internet access to the most people for the least amount of money. Taking control of public Wi-Fi networks could be another way to approach that same goal.

Google also announced in September that it would be sponsoring free Wi-Fi access at 4,000 Boingo hotspots in the U.S., available to Android mobile devices and notebook PCs. The sponsorship was linked to the Google Play brand, and was clearly aimed at getting more Android smartphone users doing more with their devices on public Wi-Fi networks.

We’ve reached out to Google for more details on this acquisition, and will update when more info becomes available.

Update: Now All Things D is reporting that sources inside the company are denying this initial report of a Google purchase of ICOA. We’ve yet to hear back from Google officially, but are trying to get a firm confirmation or denial from someone at the company.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, icoa, public wi-fi, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Rumor: Google Wants To Acquire Facial Recognition Startup Viewdle For $30M

October 1, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google, according to a report by Forbes, has acquired Viewdle, an augmented reality and facial recognition startup. Forbes says the price was likely around $30 million, but we are still trying to confirm both the acquisition and the price. The Viewdle board, the Forbes report says, approved the acquisition last week and the company plans to tell its employees about it tomorrow afternoon.

Update: Viewdle just returned our email: “We do not have any comment.” ~~Google has not yet responded to our emails~~. Google also just responded with a comment that it doesn’t comment on rumors and speculation.

Update 2 (3pm PT): We have learned a few more things about the company since we first posted this story. We’ve updated parts of this post to reflect this.

The company was founded in the Ukraine in 2006 and is currently headquartered in Silicon Valley with operations across Europe and South America, including, of course, Ukraine. Viewdle, which won the 2008 LeWeb startup competition, previously received funding from numerous venture firms, including KCP Capital, Anthem Venture Partners, Best Buy Capital, Blackberry and Qualcomm. The company, we hear, raised about $250,000 to $500,000 from an angel investor. Anthem Venture Partners then invested about $2 million in a Series A round in 2008 and Qualcomm, Best Buy and Blackberry invested in a $10 million Series B round in 2010. The founders’ equity in the company, a source close to Viewdle tells us, was heavily diluted in the process and the entrepreneurial team will likely see very little of the purchase price.

We’ve also learned that this is the second time Viewdle is in acquisition talks with Google. The two companies first talked in 2008. In 2011, Motorola was also interested in acquiring the company, but the acquisition fell through after Google acquired Motorola.

Its apps, including SocialCamera and games like ThirdEye, are currently all available on Android, though the company is also currently testing an iOS version of its Face Recognition SDK. Viewdle also owns a number of patents related to facial recognition. While Viewdle’s technology has always been impressive, it looks like the company’s business never took off.

Google previously bought at least two similar startups in the past. In July 2011, the company acquired the Pittsburgh-based facial recognition company PittPatt and all the way back in 2006, it bought the Germany biometrics company Neven Vision.

There is clearly a lot of interested in facial recognition startups right now. Face.com, for example, recently acquired Face.com for just under $60 million (though some of that was in Facebook stock, which is likely worth less now). Still, as Facebook’s recent run-in with German privacy advocates shows, facial recognition is still a rather sensitive subject.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: acquisition, Blogging, Facebook, Fundings & Exits, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, viewdle

Google Acquires Online Virus, Malware and URL Scanner VirusTotal

September 7, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

VirusTotal, an online malware and virus scanner, was just acquired by Google. The company already used a number of Google services ahead of the acquisition, including App Engine and Google Storage. VirusTotal will continue to operate independently and maintain its existing partnerships with other antivirus companies and security experts. The two companies did not disclose the details of the announcement. It is worth noting, however, that VirusTotal describes itself as a “small resource-constrained company.” The company was founded in 2004 and uses a large number of antivirus engines from third-party providers to offer thorough checks of files that users can upload to its service.

In addition to checking files, VirusTotal also allows users to enter a URL and check web sites for potential malware threats. The service also offers browser plugins for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Google just confirmed this acquisition to us and a spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

“Security is incredibly important to our users and we’ve invested many millions of dollars to help keep them safe online. VirusTotal also has a strong track record in web security, and we’re delighted to be able to provide them with the infrastructure they need to ensure that their service continues to improve.”

It’s not clear how (or if) Google plans to use VirusTotal’s technology in its own products, but given that the service will continue to operate independently, this is likely not an acqui-hire. It’s possible, however, that Chrome could soon get an improved built-in virus scanner for downloads courtesy of VirusTotal, for example, or that parts of Google Search’s or Gmail’s malware detection could use some of VirusTotal’s assets.

Here is the full announcement from VirusTotal (via Mikka Hypponen and TNW):

An update from VirusTotal

Our goal is simple: to help keep you safe on the web. And we’ve worked hard to ensure that the services we offer continually improve. But as a small, resource-constrained company, that can sometimes be challenging. So we’re delighted that Google, a long-time partner, has acquired VirusTotal. This is great news for you, and bad news for malware generators, because:

The quality and power of our malware research tools will keep improving, most likely faster; and

Google’s infrastructure will ensure that our tools are always ready, right when you need them.

VirusTotal will continue to operate independently, maintaining our partnerships with other antivirus companies and security experts. This is an exciting step forward. Google has a long track record working to keep people safe online and we look forward to fighting the good fight together with them.

VirusTotal Team