The Mountain View search engine titan has agreed to purchase San Francisco Web startup Apture and Palo Alto social-networking company Katango to enhance two of its rapidly growing products. Financial terms for both acquisitions were not disclosed.
A screenshot of Apture, which allows for instant searches within a browser without opening a new…
Katango, the first startup to arise from Kleiner Perkins’s Fund, a $250 million venture-capital fund focused on social media, started its public life only just this past summer as an iPhone app to manage a user’s Facebook contacts, automatically creating lists that could receive targeted status updates or other messages without those messages being broadcast to the whole contact list, will now join the Google+ social networking team.
Interestingly, the concept of Katango’s technology is almost identical to the Circles feature on Google+, which allows users to easily group contacts.
“Katango was founded a little over a year ago to develop social algorithms that improve people’s online social interaction. We are thrilled to join the Google+ team and carry on fulfilling that mission. Google+ is seeing tremendous momentum, so it is a perfect time to join and make Circles smarter for millions of people,” Katango announced on its website.
“Very excited to confirm that we have just acquired Katango! … Are you ready for some wonders in your Circles? These folks are magicians,” Google Vice President of Products Bradley Horowitz wrote on Google+, the social network that launched in June.
Apture, meanwhile, is a relative old-timer, being established in 2008 and develops application that allows for instant searches within a browser without opening a new window or tab. Over the past few years, the company has formed a two-pronged business: the first a focused around a browser extension that empowers users to perform automatic searches on words on web pages; the second a white-label service: content companies could incorporate this feature directly on to their web pages to keep users from migrating away on the hunt for further information on a topic; or they could add in some code to their site so that Apture could create hyperlinks and in-page browsing of those links automatically.
“After enhancing more than a billion pages with our products, we think now is the best time to expand our efforts with another team just down the road that shares our vision of making the Web better,” Apture said in a statement on its website announcing the purchase.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed the purchase of Apture, saying in an emailed statement that “We were impressed by the Apture team’s approach to enhancing the Web browser experience, and we think their expertise will complement the Chrome team’s efforts in this area.”
Moving forward, Apture staff will join Google’s Chrome division, which works on the popular Web browser of the same name.