Who Will Google Buy Or Clone In 2008?

Pizza Hut!!

Along the lines of Reuters, PR Newswire would be a perfect acquisition for Google in 2008. The company news distributor is a cash cow. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest newswires were all purchased in the last year or so (BusinessWire by Berkshire Hathaway, Marketwire by CCN mathews, PrimeNewswire by NASDAQ).

SixApart: they don’t need to buy them. They’d gain no new technology. Blogger is just as good as their MT and since MT is open source, they gain nothing by purchasing them.

Ning: Ning’s written in PHP and Google would have to rewrite it to run it on their platform. It would take them less time to write it from scratch than to rework Ning. Ning also doesn’t have huge audience and took in over $40M in VC money which means that they’re way too expensive. In short, no buy.

Reuters: what?!? Do you even know who owns Reuters? Thomson (a giant Canadian corporation) bough them for like $15B+. Do you think Google would wanna buy them for $20B+?

IMHO, there are better, cheaper buys and Google will continue buying startups, not these big corps.

Google will launch their GDrive, emulating our YDrive.

Google will buy http://Loomia.com
Google will emulate http://SalesForce.com

Many startups in China. We predict Google will buy us, who being Wojai, who emulates Jaiku, who emulates Twitter.

Google should buy the leading companies of every sector.

Techcrunch
salesforce
linkedin
Zoomr
dash

they’ll continue emulating Microsoft like they’ve been doing for a while…this means copying them, facebook, apple, Ford, Joe’s corner store, Verizon, Lucy’s lemonade stand and GE

mikebee
Reuters is still listed though, makes it a much easier starting point for an acquisition than AP who you wouldn’t even get to first base with.

AnIdea (#2)
PRNewsWire makes some sense.

Ning has no incentive to sell itself. Andreessen is not looking for a few quick google millions–he has plenty of that already.

Yahoo - they should buy yahoo! - Helllllloooooo! add 23 points to search market share, get a ton of content, and monetize search better by a margin of 4 to 1, its a no brainer. Plus, its cheap as hell. Buy Amazon the year after, when the charges from the Kindle fiasco take the stock back to the 20s.

I would bet on Microsoft and Yahoo!

“which means that they’re way too expensive.”

Heh. Aren’t we talking about Google?

I think Remember the Milk will be bought, and added to Google calendar.

On the smaller acquisition front, Google buys OpenDNS. Drops in nicely to the apps suite, follows the path of Postini, GrandCentral, and FeedBurner as a smart intermediary service. A natural way to drive search and ad traffic, though critics will cry foul that Google is in effect reincarnating Verisign’s wildcard DNS service.

Here’s my guesses:

Mint
Zoho
LinkedIn
37Signals
TiVo
Salesforce.com

Don’t forget the news of them possibly buying whatsopen.com! Didn’t you run an article on it??

Confluence
Salesforce

For consumer focused services they have all the talent they need, only purchases that give them user numbers would be interesting. They dont seem to buy strong brand names.

they will definitely buy a cellular phone company somewhere

Twitter

Jaiku has been bought by Google already.

Wojai is interesting name for Chinese user, where’s your site? Have you heard of fanfou.com?

Duncan, please, I am sick of your Google stories, no more please!

zombo.com

you know, one glance at the post and I can tell its by Duncan!

just saying, nothing personal..

They have been copying MSN for years, this pattern is unlikely to cease!

fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Thanks for the speculation. I think nothing is better than Google speculation, such as:
http://schlerplotti.typepad.co.....nd_go.html

With so many billions, I think Google will mainly snatch up dozens of $10M or so deals - just to make sure they continue to bring in bright engineers and potentially useful tools. In fact, 3-dozen $10M deals amounts to “just $360M”.

Let’s not forget about the mobile spectrum bid and that GOOG could put a billion or more into new data centers.

Never really thought about GOOG-AMZN. To me, the Epic2014 video (http://robinsloan.com/epic/) was more slick graphics than a real idea. For such a high price tag, AMZN doesn’t really fit into Google’s strategy of organizing the world’s info (and communications) quite like mobile.

SixApart isn’t growing fast enough to warrant consideration. Ning, na.

Hey, what about Yahoo?

I’m putting all of my chips on Yelp.

You have it backwards. Ning has some interesting technology, but Six Apart is washed up and has scaling problems on Typepad to this day, they even had downtime last Thursday. Akismet comes up in a lot of meetings at Google. If it was easy to emulate they would have already, and Blogspot would be spam-free. You seem to forget that Google is already competing with its OpenSocial partners with Orkut, the #10 website in the world according to Alexa.

What if Google buys Skype from eBay? I think that is very possible given Google’s mobile ambitions.

Buy Ubuntu Linux

probably Ebay itself….. or a merger. I see more positives as it needs all three - ebay, paypal and skype in one shot, where google has shoddy products as competition. Google then focus on core competency of innovation

@lee, thanks..

Highly unlikely Google will buy Twitter (else, should’ve been already).. either Twitter didn’t want to sell to Google or Google didn’t offer a price the Twitter investors couldn’t refuse.

Jaiku, while already a Google property, sounds terrible for the Chinese users.. it strongsly rhymes with “am-crying” in Mandarin.

Wojai (rhymes with “i-am / i-am-doing”) is our natural answer to Twitter’s theme around “what are you donig?” for the Chinese users. Site is coming soon in 2008. (Aren’t we talking about 2008?) Yes we are aware that if one day Google buys us, if ever, it would neither be a technology buy (tech so simple) nor a name buy (we are not g.cn by name), but a community buy; thus, to have a good/easy/natural name is important to amass Chinese users.

Fanfou certainly heard of them, but am clueless.. it’s certainly creative.. “rice? no?” (probably mean, “want to go eat? no?”) probably name came from the myrice.com site or something.. well, we’re also aware that sometimes Google buy strange things anyways..

I think google would be higher the gmail capacity

What a badly conceived, speculative and useless article.

No individual is allowed to hold more than 15% of Reuters. A number of companies already hold the maximum (eg. News Corporation).

i vote for weebly.com. g needs this

I can’t believe you left out the one big buyout that makes sense: EBAY.

Google would never buy out amazon since it has no desire to own stores and warehouses, but ebay is much closer aligned to what google is and wants to accomplish, plus they’ll get paypal to boot. This also would be good for ebay and ebay users since google could add some of their magic to do a major overhaul on the crappy site.

Twitter. Ebay might sell Skype to Google. Google and Apple are up to something with the spectrum bid. Ning does make some sense the more I think about it as it’s a social network platform.

One of the leading Semantic Web companies … and I’ll leave it at that.

@Bubblehead

Why would they buy their largest advertiser? Wouldn’t this simply drive down reportable revenue and raise questions about bias in keyword advertising?

Google are launching Google TV Ads (see it on youtube) they need TV ads produced in a BIG way. Spot Runner is the most logical fit.

You want a genius takeover for Google? it’s right under their nose…..

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INTUIT

1. Google would get an established merchant card processing business PLUS a platform to tie the Google Checkout product to. Without a platform (i.e. Ebay for Paypal), Checkout won’t get the traction it needs.

2. Google gets Quicken/Quickbooks which they can then use to bring that data online and tie into Google Finance, etc…. with some nice UI attached to it, Mint would likely be looking for its paddle.

3) Intuit is right across the street, highly profitable, and stable and will likely see uptick in growth as economy heads south and everybody tries to organize their finances.

Huge avenue for ad revs once products are brought online (they are already to a certain extent but piss poor job)

4) Google gets what Microsoft could not

5) Intuit is highly profitable and stable

$700M in cash flow for $10B….and an opportunity to unleash a beast….

Marzipan
quoungo@yahoo.com

Duncan:
Are you not aware that Reuters already has a buyer/ (Thomson).
Here is one link to that:
http://www.reuters.com/article.....4220070515

Note, it’s from reuters.com, but found via Google.

Google seems trying to one of the biggest provider for social network.

Salesforce.com + Google Adwords is the real solution for the small and medium bussines. The names is GoogleForce… Check it!

I hope that Amazon will amplify their share in the web services area.

Also I hope that the search results from Ask will be more accurate because they have a very good user interface interaction.

For the new year I wish that a global price strategy will be accepted and implemented by major software developers: ADOBE

Canada. Google should buy Canada (yes the country) and use it as a test bed for a seamless web-data centric gadget utopia. Canada can’t be worth more than amazon can it???

Long Live G-anada!!!!!

Regarding Google losing ebay as an adwords buyer — it doesn’t matter. If google owned ebay, they could integrate ebay results better in universal search and ultimately drive more fee revenue to ebay to more than make up for the adwords lost. Plus, their ebay division would no longer need to spend money on adwords making the buyout that much more profitable.

Perhaps one of the big credit rating agencies or related companies.
See this Robert Cringely article: Getting to Know You: Think you have a secret life? Think again.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pu.....03391.html

If you look at the acquisitions done between 2001 and 2007, the billions deals, like the 5% share in AOL and YouTube, and the popular ones like Picassa and Feedburner and so on. These guys really know what they are doing and who they are buying. The strategic answer would be: taking over the biggest share in Online Advertising / Digital Marketing, can you imagine only the amount of ads served worldwide accross multiple digital mediums through DoubleClick? Their sensible targets should be Technorati, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Last.fm, Monster, Answers.com. These sites can help then gain control of huge disciplines in the web industry.

Parul
http://www.bhopu.com

Nobody has mentioned this I think, but what’s to stop Google in going for the recruitment market dollars? I see them buying SimplyHired or a similar service in 2008.

TomTom.

Google would
1. Acquire TeleAltas ( maps + team + knowledge )
2. Acquire one/the best gps software around ( good presence in europe, mainly exist in north america )

Last week, we’ve seen a first tech move : search for on google maps, export it to your tomtom device.

I dont know if thats the cheapest way, but thats the easiest one to have google in every/lots of car.

Reuters has already been purchased (nearly completed I hear) by Thomson.

Ustream.TV. After the Youtube acq, they need a live version.

I’ve heard recent rumors they are already in talks with Google.

Next year, I hope Google buy my early startup financial startup. I’ve talked one of former Google employees. He saw my coolest search engine. He liked it. Indeed, I like to compete Yahoo financial someday.

I believe they will buy companies specialized in
- advertising in mobile games (e.g. Amobee), but maybe in video games, too
- distributing ad-funded mobile games (e.g. GreyStripe)

I can possibly see Google buying Ning, but a more probable buy would be KickApps, which would likely interest Google more. OTOH, Google isn’t interested in social-networking other than their OpenSocial platform so that’s even very slim.

They won’t buy Six Apart, but I could see Yahoo! or, more likely, Microsoft taking a swing at buying them. As for Amazon.com, that’s a huge long shot.

The one I laughed at the most is Google buying Reuters. By the time they’d even be looking at buying Reuters, the Thomson Corp. buyout of Reuters PLC will have concluded and the Thomson family will control nearly 45% of the combined entity with a $50 billion market cap. That’s getting a little rich and hard to swallow, even for Google. Not only that, the Thomson family would not likely “sell the farm” so quickly. They’re more than likely to get out of the business, 1 or 2% at a time, by selling 1 or 2% of the company on the open market for the next 20 to 40 years. Remember, the Thomson family is Canada’s wealthiest.

Cheers,
Doug

I think they should buy my company (linked above). With the real estate market slowing down and rentals starting to boom again - makes perfect sense to me..

[note the sarcasm]

yeah, the Reuters one doesn’t make any sense at all. Given the acquisition by Thomson (just awaiting regulatory approval), it doesn’t really matter whether Reuters is currently listed or not vs. AP. Post-acquisition, Google would have to buy a $50B company, and there’s exactly 0% chance that the Thomson family would be willing to sell anyhow.

Actually, even w/o the acquisition, this still doesn’t make any sense. Yes, Reuters has a media arm, but 90% of their revenue comes from providing business information / solutions to financial services companies. So unless Reuters had been willing to divest their media arm (again unlikely), I don’t think competing with Bloomberg et al is really part of Google’s strategy.

I have thought for awhile that Lexis/Nexis would be an ideal acquisition target for Google.

A blog post from the Chronicle of Philanthropy this morning suggests Google may be getting into the Charity “business”. With 2 million nonprofits in the United States (accounting for 5% of the GDP), this is a big sector. Here’s the link to the blog post:

http://philanthropy.com/givean.....al#comment

Or they could acquire a user driven news website such as http://www.cjreport.com instead of Reuters. It sure is cheaper.

@48

Last.fm was acquired by CBS for $280M
del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo
Stumbleupon was acquired by Ebay for $75M

I think Google should acquire Motorola’s handset business for $20B, but that’s just me thinking outside the box.

They are that big now they could buy almost any site they want. Reuters would make a great buy. Most news sources in Australia get the content from Reuters.

So definitely profit with them

Dale
http://dzrbenson.com/blog/

If you understand SEO then you can understand Google. Google’s mission is to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The more traffic a site obtains, the more important it becomes for Google to “access it universally,” and place their 10,000 advertisers on the network. This is why they did deals with Myspace, AOL and Youtube.

Google will be looking at all of the top firms in the Alexa 500. Facebook, Friendster, Baidu and the like. Count on it.

I think google will develop a domain parking service offered by most registrars. This way they can expand their claws even deeper into the internet.

purely speculative article… and a great way to spend (waste?) time reading / commenting on google’s bazillions.

keep ‘em coming duncan

I think its more likely Google would partner with ebay than amazon. Amazon really doesn’t have anything better than what google can engineer.

Google should buy a credit reporting agency like trans union. This would instantly kill all competition and force MS to buy equifax or experian. Google is in the information gathering game, and there is no industry that has more information on us than credit monitors.

An alliance of Google and major credit firm would be a game changing move that would expose your personal information to more entities than you thought was possible. Forget single signon, just boot up your computer and Google will know everything about you, and then show you custom ads.

Just my thoughts, i think that google is amazing and moving fast and into different areas which i really respect unlike facebook but for some reason i feel they will enter the dvd service business like netflix and blockbuster have. I also feel they will take over grocery to house shipping like i believe amazon does in seattle.

on Google acquiring Reuters first Reuters was bought by Thomson just few months ago for like $16Bn and secondly NEWS constitutes less than 10% of revenue for Reuters.

Google scholar should HOST papers from conferences and scientific society journals, without the stupid paywall. If I want a copy of my own paper published in “Artificial Intelligence” (Elsevier Science), I must pay US$30. That’s the price of a book. Moreover, authors never get any of that money. The economics of science publishing has been changed forever, and we need an iTunes for science.

BTW, Elsevier is a >10B Business, Springer is a little behind, and google scholar could also attack webofscience, another billion dollar dinossaur that needs to die (with its paywall).

thank my friend for the valuable information

Google should also be in political areas.

ExtJS ….a move to Web 2.0 ….Jack S and friends (http://extjs.com/)

Google may enter the industry specific search market…
Trulia, Zillow, Propsmart or similar. This is a growing field but something tells me we cannot take our eyes of a Common Sence Engine, Google could hire that thing out by the hour.

Maybe instead of Ning Google will gain more power with LinkedIN proffesional social network or Facebook- yes Microsoft partially owns it, but my idea is going web 2.0 with these kind of social networks

The economics of science publishing has been changed forever

Google recently acquired jaiku and with Android looks set to go head to head with Nokia.

My bet is google will now acquire Motorola!

ithink they might go for Trap Solutions

http://wwwinternetconsultantonline very nice it’s true story