August – another “Google” month!

So many exciting acquisitions take place every passing month! And social acquisitions became an inseparable part of my mentions – Twitter and Facebook continue growing their kingdoms. 

But it’s the second time I call my list a “Google” month, as most important acquisitions occurring in August were Google’s achievements: in May Google had 6 acquisitions, in August - 5, starting from a travel guide to cloud-based software. Who is the target for the next month?

August 1 - Twitter Buys Password-Sharing Startup Mitro

August started with Twitter acquiring password-sharing startup Mitro. Founded in 2012, Mitro’s primary product is a web browser extension that allowed users to store  and share passwords.  Mitro team will join Twitter’s location team in New York, focusing on a variety of geo-related projects!

August 6 - Google Acquires Emu, Texting With Built-In Assistant

Google has acquired Emu - the app creates reminders from messages based on time and location, as well as showing movie times and schedule restaurant reservations from text message.

August 6 – Google Acquires Directr, An App For Shooting Short Films On Your Phone

On August 6^th Directr has been snatched up by Google. It helps users and businesses shoot videos that were a bit longer than your average Vine — think ads, or promo clips, or family holiday videos. The Directr product will live on under its own branding, but the team behind it is joining YouTube’s video ad team.

August 7 - Facebook Buys Secure Server Technology Provider PrivateCore

Facebook announced to acquire PrivateCore, a Palo Alto-based secure server technology company. PrivateCore’s early users have included large financial institutions and a Non-Governmental Organization funded by the US government. PrivateCore’s technology, however, could protect Facebook users’ private data better.

August 17 - Google Acquires Smart Travel Guide Startup Jetpac

Google is buying the travel app startup JetPac founded in 2011. The technology is a system of algorithms that can be trained to recognize different elements within photos, creates visual city guides by analyzing photos from social media to infer key information about the places they were taken. Google will integrate the app's artificial intelligence technology into its image search and map services.  

August 23 - Google Acquires Mechanical Engineering Firm Gecko Design

Google’s forth acquisition of the month became Gecko Design, a small, Los Gatos, Calif.-based company specializing in product design for consumer electronics. The five-person industrial design shop was founded in 1996, specializes in developing consumer-electronic products, working with engineers early in the process before manufacturing begins. Gecko’s clients have included FitBit, Logitech , Sonos and H-P , according to the company’s website.

August 26 – Google Acquires Zync To Bring Visual Effects Rendering To Its Cloud Platform

And the final Google acquisition in August was a Boston-based Zync Inc., the maker of Zync Render,“cloud-based rendering software.” That’s software that helps movie studios take simple, computer-generated pictures of things like a giant robot bashing through a wall and make it look real. Zync’s data and technology will be integrated into the Google Cloud Platform, and move off Amazon Web Services.

August 29 – Amazon buys Twitch
Amazon and Twitch have officially announced the deal, which will see Amazon purchase all outstanding shares of Twitch for roughly $970 million in cash. Twitch is the largest live-streaming website in the US, a live video-game-streaming site with more than 55 million users that's like YouTube for video games.

Mayday Made a "Button" Revolution

Introduced in autumn of 2013, Amazon Mayday intrigued the whole population. Not only Kindle users were interested in the support button.

And all this has been done for differentiating from the competition. While we used to say that competition is one click away, now we can also say that the best customer service is one button-press away.

“Help” buttons are becoming an important sales tool. In the future it may become a must for many companies. This can have two explanations: people keep hands in pockets to get replies to their questions themselves or life became so busy that we have no time to lose.

Several months passed with positive and negative reviews. Mobile in its turn became an important tool with more and more people using it.  So, at the end of April 2014, mimicking Amazon Mayday, Salesforce added the SOS button, which allows companies to offer service via a mobile app. It’s a one touch live video support with an on-screen guided assistance – what else is needed for the best customer service?

Although there is no pricing announcement for the service yet, Salesforce SOS has support for both iOS and Android.  Similar in concept to Amazon Mayday button, the Salesforce SOS also allows other companies apply the button on their own customer support system. A great tool to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction through better support.

What will the next company call the ‘‘help” button? And when? I guess we’ll not have to wait long.

February Acquisitions

As promised I’m going to inform my readers about most important acquisitions of the year. If in January I thought that it’s the beginning of the year which is due to great changes, now I can say that I changed my mind and decided to call 2014 an “acquisition” year.

Many biggest companies buy more and more companies. But the “Wow” acquisition of the year (and not only year - it’s one of the biggest tech acquisitions since 2001 when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion) became Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition. February also became the biggest acquisition month for LinkedIn. Let’s go by date:

5.02.2014 - Amazon Acquires Video Gaming Studio Double Helix Games

Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years. Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of their ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.

6.02.2014 - LinkedIn makes its biggest acquisition by paying $120m for Bright
LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition deal ever! Bright is a natural fit for LinkedIn as it makes a bulk of its revenue from its Talent Solutions group. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made several updates and launched new features to improve the process for recruiters - Bright may kick things up a notch.

11.02.02014 -Yahoo Acquires Social Diary Wander For A Price Over $10M

Originally, Wander was focused on sharing travel experiences in a diary, but soon pivoted focus onto an app called Days. The app lets users create a series of photographs and gifs in a package called a “Day,” which can be shared the next day. Days is about sharing an entire story of how your day went. 

13.02.2014 - Yahoo Acquires Technical Recruiting Startup Distill
Distill was working on a way to make technical recruiting easier by pairing video interviews and programming challenges. Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. 

14.02.2014 - Rakuten buys Viber for $900 million to expand digital empire
Rakuten aims to be the world's number one Internet services company, and buying Viber complements its strategy in the digital space. Viber has rocketed in popularity as a potential rival to Skype, announcing 100 million worldwide users in September 2011, and then more than 200 million in May of 2013. The Viber app is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows 8, Mac OS X, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or Wi-Fi connections. Besides providing Rakuten access to new markets, the deal will offer new potential markets for Viber through Rakuten users. 

16.02.2014 – Google acquires SlickLogin to kill the password

SlickLogin is a small startup, whose product involves a unique, sound-based system for logging into websites.

19.02.2014 - Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform with 450 million MAUs, which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! 

21.02.2014 - Apple acquires TestFlight creator Burstly

Burstly offers a full suite of products to power the entire app lifecycle. The app ecosystem is crowded but Burstly provides tools to help you navigate with ease. 

21.02.2014 - Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn't succeeding.

24.02.2014 - IBM Buys NoSQL Cloud Provider Cloudant
Based in Boston, the privately held Cloudant offers a hosted version of the ApacheCouchDB open source data store. Its own version, called BigCouch, can be run across multiple servers, providing a way to build and maintain an extremely large and fast data store for a front-end application. 

Kindle on Fire – Mayday Needed!

While chat solutions exist for years, Amazon decided to make a customer service revolution. It announced about a new support service available on Kindle HD products called Mayday.

Many people know what Mayday is, but I’m sure not all are aware about its being an emergency word used internationally. It derives from the French expression “venez m'aider", which means "come to help me".

“It’s a little odd when a company selling a new gadget says one of the most exciting features is its “help” button”, mentions “The Seattle Times” tech columnist Brier Dudley. Yet it’s a revolutionary new functionality, which will change Kindle’s future and… why only Kindle’s?

Will this button really help Amazon sell more stuff? In general opinions differ and it’s a normal procedure: some are happy to have a virtual assistant like “Amy” helping them; others express their negative feedback and make many people alter (Amy's real name is actually Amy - Amy Paffrath).

How “Mayday” Works

It’s so simple: you just click on the “Mayday” button and an expert connects with you and it is 24x7, 365 and totally FREE. The goal is – 15 seconds response time. The expert will ask the user to verify his identity before offering to help. You can see the expert on your screen. While some may be concerned about privacy, Amazon assures that the experts will not be able to see you. It’s up to the user to allow the Mayday expert control the screen and even change settings.

From Negative to Positive

People cannot think the same and if opinions don’t differ our life won’t be so interesting. First I’d like to mention negative sides: the Mayday functionality works only with Wi-Fi access and there are people who don’t want to see the expert and more...

• “I am not sure if this is a feasible solution because it would cost the provider a lot of money to provide this level of support for free” (source - Quora)
• "Mayday" is a pretty poor choice of a name for a product/service” (source - Commercialsihate) 
• “I don't want Amazon CS accessing my tablet and looking through my internet history” (source - NeoGAF) 

In opposite to the above said some intriguing software enhancements:

• “This feature is amazing and needs to be in every piece of tech”
•  “As the tech head in my family I wish every single electronic device came with this goddamn button" (source - NeoGAF) 
•  “What really caught my eye is that not only she can help you by telling what to do but she can point stuff in your screen” (source - Youtube) 

• “Just got my Kindle Fire HDX and am trying out the #Mayday feature. Now THIS is customer service. Wow!”(Facebook comment)

And with this “Wow” opinion let’s take every innovation for granted.

"Knowledge is true opinion" Plato