The founders of Israeli Ajax spreadsheet iRows have confirmed what we wrote yesterday, they have been hired by Google and iRows will be shut down. The service is no longer accepting new accounts and will shut down completely at the end of this year. The company is providing instructions for its users to move their data to Google Documents. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.
iRows was founded by Yoah Bar-David and Itai Raz. Though Google acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Israeli student Ori Allon earlier this year, iRows is believed to be the first company in Israel to have been acquired by Google. There is no shortage of innovation coming from that country so iRows will probably not be the last.
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Interesting. Did they just hire those two founders to work for Google or was it a buy out? Got any financial details?
This is starting to sound like when Microsoft would buy a competitor just to shut down the competition. I used to think Microsoft was the Borg I am beginning to think Google is.
I believe it’s “Yoah Bar-David”, at least that’s what it says on my contacts list (and here: http://www.bardavid.com/)
That sucks that they ask their customers to move their spreadsheets over to Google Docs. What a way to piss of a customer! This didn’t happen with Writely.
I’m with Ed…that sux. Plus did you see the note about Charts (which isn’t supported by Google). Microsoft 2.0/Google punishing the users for using a *better* competitor to their product.
Oh well, the iRows guys admitted back in September that they were running out of money. I guess this is no surprise.
hope it will help google spreadsheet to beat office. at this point online spreadsheets are not so “cool”.
one more thing, there are interesting startups in other countries as well, not only usa and israel.
it’s becoming standard that to get a job at google, you launch a startup. they’ll pay you a chunk of change (stock options) and they get another proven programmer.
this is starting to remind me of microsoft and their stockpiling of talent in the 80s.
It’s not clear to me what additional function Google is getting here. iRows had some advanced features but since existing sheets lose any extra functionality by the forced migration to Google Docs and Spreadsheets it’s pretty unclear.
A few sparks of insight on what this will mean to the Google Docs and Spreadsheets offering woudl be welcome.
Perhaps dabbledb.com would have been be a better acquisition.
it’s interesting… there seem to be a lot of “web 2.0″ sites running out of Israel
Nice. Though I personally don’t use spreadsheets too much. Maybe Google should work on an app to replace Microsoft Money and Quicken QuickBooks.
… then, it’s time to move to the best online spreadsheet : http://www.editgrid.com !!!
Any one can help me with Windows Vista?
(Problems with install)
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