The Internet giant Google has continued its relentless march by acquiring two more start-ups and has begun incorporating them into the Mountain View fold. The fflick service has been added to the YouTube unit thanks to the twitter mining movie recommendation site, presumably to bolster Google’s recent foray into IPTV and YouTube’s expansion into films and TV.
There are many conversations about YouTube content happening all the time, and Google plans to use fflick to analyse these and serve up more relevant and interesting content. Google has reportedly paid around $10 million for the company started by ex-Digg employees although nothing official has been released about the numbers.
In another media related buy, SayNow was also acquired by Google. SayNow aims to try and connect celebrities and their devoted fans with voice based communication. It allows users to broadcast and receive voice messages and even participate in conversations (one-to-one or in groups). There’s tight integration with social networking as well as mobile platforms including iPhone and Android. This should ease the integration with Google Voice, and provide an interesting direction for Google to go down. The SayNow site brings some 15 million users, celebrities and brands to the Google fold – and both acquisitions will add over 6000 staff to Google. Small fry for the world’s most profitable Internet company
