Google announced today that it has acquired Zenter, what used to be an online presentation startup in stealth ‘private beta’ mode by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, for an undisclosed price.
Google’s Apps suite of products, aptly titled ‘Web Office,’ so far consists of Docs, Spreadsheets, Mail, and Calendar. We should be expecting ‘Presentation’ in there any time soon.
While this acquisition may come as a surprise after their buyout of Tonic Systems a couple months back, Zenter presumably complements the Java backend by of online presentation by Tonic, and will be used together in Google’s own Presentation app under development.
Opinion
There’s no doubt that Google has a ton of money in their pockets, and it comes clear that they’ve now realized they’re not limited to innovation that happens inside their company: they can go out and buy ‘one of these,’ which may prove to be far superior than their own technology, rebrand and integrate it, and have something that works. Congrats to the folks at YCombinator and Zenter — another few million down the pocket?
