Plink In the Google Shopping Cart
Google |
It’s no secret that Google’s business strategy involves buying smaller, privately held companies and technologies to expand its services. The company has been in serious retail therapy post-dot-com boom with its portfolio currently amassing more than 60 acquisitions in the past 10 years.
From its purchase of the usenet portal Deja News in 2001, which was developed into Google Groups, down to the Episodic acquisition earlier this month to beef up YouTube, Google’s shopping list has allowed it to move massively across multiple platforms in search, advertising, multimedia and mobile. This week, the Internet mogul has put UK-based Plink in its proverbial shopping cart for an undisclosed amount.
Plink is the startup responsible for PinkArt, a mobile app developed for the Android mobile operating system. This app leverages on visual search technology, allowing users to take a picture of almost any work of art with their mobile phone’s built-in cam and then yielding information about it, including the name of the artist, the year it was created, dimensions and it even pulls in its Wikipedia entry. Users can also share those photos with their friends and even purchase poster-sized versions.
Despite its specific focus on artworks, PlinkArt has caught Google’s watchful eye, apparently seeing its combined backing technology and proprietary algorithms as an opportunity to further fine tune their own visual search tool Google Goggles. And as with Google’s purchases in the past, this proves to be a talent acquisition as Plink’s founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin would be joining the Google Labs, obviously under the Google Goggles banner.
“Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up.” according to the Plink’s announcement on their blog.
Since PlinkArt’s public launch merely four months ago, the app has won the second Android Developer Challenge in December and currently has more than 50,000 users. The two Plink head honchos also stressed that PlinkArt will continue to function and will still be available for downloads though they are ceasing further development.
Here, by the way, is a video as a little backgrounder on how Google Goggles works to give you an idea of how Plink’s technology can enrich Google’s visual search.
Popularity: 7% [?]
RSpears @ April 13, 2010
[...] user interface, a larger body of recognized artworks (perhaps as a results of last month’s Plink acquisition) and an expansion of recognized products and logos. You also get the capability to run the [...]