14 DAY TRIAL // Google has acquired yet another company, the first one from the UK and the latest in a growing string of small acquisitions started a few months back. The company in question is Plink, a mobile visual search startup, which got Google's attention with its image-recognition technology. The small two-man team will start working on the Google Goggles project and will move to California to join the existing team.
"We have some very exciting news – Plink has just been acquired by Google," the company's Co-founders, Mark Cummins and James Philbin, announced. "We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today. Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up."
Plink's first and only product is the PlinkArt Android app. The app helps users identify works of art and enables them to buy posters of those paintings. Users take a photo of the painting in question and the app analyzes and compares it to its database to identify it. The app has only been out for four months, but was downloaded more than 50,000 times in the first month alone. The app won the company a $100,000 prize at Google's Android Develop Challenge last December, the only funding the pair has gotten so far.
The two are dropping all development on PlinkArt and will move to the US to work on Google's own visual search and recognition tool Goggles. However, the Android app will continue to be available for users. The technology developed by them will be incorporated into Goggles in some way. As usual, no financial details were disclosed.