14 DAY TRIAL // When Google says it's in “acquisition mode,” it's not kidding. After staying mostly quiet on this front for the past two years or so, Google made its fourth acquisition in just a month. The company acquired AppJet, the startup behind EtherPad, a real-time collaborative word processor, for an undisclosed amount that some put around $10 million. EtherPad will close down on March 31 and the team will go on to work on Google Wave.
"We are happy to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google. The EtherPad team will continue its work on realtime collaboration by joining the Google Wave team,” AppJet and Google announced on the EtherPad blog. “If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted."
For EtherPad users, the deal is not exactly good news. The product will be shut down, no new Pads can be created at this point and they have four months to get all their documents out. Professional Edition, the paid version, users will be able to export all of their data in one big ZIP file, the rest will presumably have to do it one at a time. But there's some good news as well, all users will be getting a Google Wave invitation in the mail.
The company had raised just $700,000 in funding from Y Combinator, making for a pretty good exit. Three of the five-man teams at AppJet are ex-Googlers and CEO Aaron Iba, President and Chief Scientist David Greenspan, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens are all moving to Australia to join the Google Wave team. All in all, it looks like a typical, if not particularly heart-warming, Silicon Valley story and Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick does a good job of telling it like it is.