Google AdMob buyout latest in long line of acquisitions

09.11.2009
In light of Google's announced plan this week to , it seems like a good time to take a spin back through Google’s more notable buyouts over the years. , and given Google’s sometimes mysterious ways, there are no doubt a few that didn’t make the public list.

Oh, and I’ll focus on the ones that really did happen. Not the rumors about GoogleGoogle buying out everyone from TwitterTwitter to Skype Alles zu Google auf CIO.de Alles zu Twitter auf CIO.de

The AdMob buyout is the third announced by Google this year (though speculation is swirling that Google has also acquired SIP VoIP provider Gizmo5). First was a $106 million purchase of video compression company On2, which could help Google more efficiently deliver video. That’s a big deal for Google, of course, given that it owns YouTube through a $1.6 billion buyout in 2006.

On2 isn't the first company Google has bought in connection with YouTube either. For example, it snapped up a video editing technology company called Omnisio last year for an estimated $15 million.

Slideshow: Hottest tech M&A deals of 2009

The other deal Google made this year was for ReCAPTCHA, which brings Google some cool authentication technology that it can use to accelerate its massive effort to scan tens of millions of books and periodicals. I wrote about this project from CMU’s Luis von Ahn back in 2007 on Network World’s Alpha Doggs blog, regarding an effort to use the technology in a SETI@home-like distributed computing fashion to help digitize books. (More here on volunteer distributed computing projects)

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