Mountain View, California — The Googleplex is once again embarked on a shopping spree, and the global search engine titan Google has just acquired Canadian mobile music startup Pushlife for a cool $25 million, buying its third start-up from the land of maples, both companies have confirmed the acquisition on Monday.
It is quite apparent that the music player is not one of Androids strong points, but all the Pros heavily outweighs the music player. While it is not clear what purpose PushLife will serve, it is pretty easy to guess how the technology could be added into the mix of last week’s news about Google’s rumored music service.
Apparently, the California-based company wants to incorporate Pushlife’s technology into the Android music platform, allowing users to pull in playlists from iTunes.
“We will be joining Google’s engineering team in Canada, and will be working on building better mobile applications for all users,” a PushLife representative said in a statement. A Google representative also confirmed the purchase of PushLife.
Interestingly, syncing iTunes to devices is the main goal of it. Furthermore, PushLife’s existing Android and Blackberry apps act as stand-ins for the iPod app found on Apple’s iPhone. Users can purchase and play music from the app on their phones, and then sync with either iTunes or Windows Media Player on their computers using a desktop plug-in.
Besides, Pushlife also allows mobile carriers to develop apps that would combine a user’s personal music collection with songs available in the carrier’s store. The idea was that customers are more likely to buy a song if it is directly integrated into the playback experience — sort of like Apple did with iTunes on the desktop. Only here, the carrier controlled the transaction and the billing, rather than Apple.
“The past three years have been an incredible experience and, while we will be ultimately discontinuing the PushLife service, we look forward to more adventures at Google,” Pushlife announced on its website.
PushLife is a pretty smart and fancily designed all-in-one music solution for all your needs, and hopefully will be the same way for Google. Pushlife for those that do not know, extends a seamless media solution similar to iTunes. You can stream music, buy music with a click, and even access your music from your PC on the cloud. This would be great for Android.
Now, for Google, the most essential components of PushLife can be viewed at the 1:16 mark in this video below. It describes how the user browsing his computer’s music library from the phone, and transferring individual songs with a single tap.
In other words, Google could be bestowing music buffs the wireless music syncing that iTunes notoriously lacks. But let us take this a step further: a key component of Google Music, the leaked screenshots of rumored service that appeared on the Internet last week, with the images showing off an appealing set of Google Music features. They are taken from the cloud-based Android Music 3.0 app, which someone from the blog Tech From 10 found, tested and leaked on the Internet.
Pushlife, established and led by former Research In Motion corporate development executive Ray Reddy, who leapfrogged from the BlackBerry environment to create a company based on technology that allows users to shift their iTunes libraries to non-Apple phones.
The company also had deals with the Virgin Mobile Live BlackBerry app in the Canadian and UK market but so far it is vague whether Google will continue with this contract.
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