Google’s Buying Someone Right Now, Maybe

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking to eWeek, Google buys a startup once every few days, at least once a week. They could be acquiring you right now, and you wouldn’t even know it!
Schmidt said that the company continues to view small technology acquisitions as the bread-and-butter of its merger strategy, mainly as a way to obtain new technology and talented engineers.
“In the past, we would buy businesses in lieu of (hiring) engineers,” Schmidt said. These days, Google buys a start-up once every few days, or around one a week, he estimated.
Two examples of this approach—Keyhole (Google Earth) and Urchin (Analytics)—had strong technical teams, a technology head start, and were bought relatively inexpensively in the hopes of later generating billion dollar revenue streams, he said.

Wikipedia lists 35 acquisitions by Google, nine in the last year, but they’re missing a few key ones, like DoubleClick, and certainly […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg