Google

Contents ● ● ● ● Basic information Acquisitions Google Ventures ○ Who they are' ○ What they do' ○ Portfolio Interesting facts Basic information Larry Page from Michigan and Sergey Brin from Moscow met each other in the Stanford university in 1995 men being 21-year-olds. In the university they used a web crawler, designed to traverse the web, called “BackRub” and in 1996 they wanted to rename it. After having a list of different names and hard thinking, the came in agreement with “Google”, pronounced “googol”in 1997. Larry and Sergey wanted the name to describe “a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web”. By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. Nowadays Larry Page works as a leader in productside since 2001 after still being responsible of the whole Google-company with Sergey Brin. He has been given a title “Global Leader for Tomorrow” from the World Economic Forum-organization and with Sergey they share a “Marconi”-price. Sergey Brin, an articlewriter, works in the technical side of the company and has been seen in “Charlie Rose Show”, CNBC and CNN telling about issues from technique and ABC World News Tonight named both Larry and Brin as the “Persons of the Week” in 2004. Acquisitions Google has acquired total of 83 companies during the past 10 years. Majority of these companies are located in the San Francisco Bay area and in USA generally. Most of the companies business areas are related to softwares, internet, applications and mapservices(Google Earth/google maps). DoubleClick is an advertising company as the most expensive acquisition with a value of 3,1 billion US dollars. Google has been increasing the amount of new acquisitions during this year, over 20 out of 83 have been acquired in 2010 although the market values haven’t been relatively high per company. A year ago, Google had 65% of the US search market. In April, Google had 64.4% of the US search market. This after an amazing decade in which Google gained about a point of share per month. Most Google enthusiasts expected Google to eventually own considerably more than 65% share of the US search market. As Google's competitors collapsed, it seemed Google would eventually be able to gain the 80%-90% share that Google has in many other countries worldwide. Based on Google's flatlining in the past year, however, this incremental 15-25 point market share gain now seems like wishful thinking. Google can continue to grow via increases in search usage and revenue per search. But these gains are likely to be incremental rather than explosive. And they will likely disappoint investors used to gangbuster year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, Google still has yet to find another major acquisitions to pick up growth where the search business leaves off. Conclusion of Google’s acquisitions is very clear, despite what they had originally planned that they would have 90% of the US web search market: they are on their way to become even greater talent as an Internet search and multi-media company. Google Ventures Who they are' On March 31st 2009, Google have launched Google Ventures with a $100 million capital commitment and announced that a new venture capital fund of Google have founded. Partners on Google Ventures include Wesley Chan, Joe Kraus, Bill Maris, and Rich Miner. Google Ventures are nationwide, with offices in New York, Seattle Cambridge and Mountain View. As a fact, the Google Ventures is a diverse team, which is attract different people’s attention including investors, entrepreneurs and specialists to spend their power to change the world. This big action demonstrates that Google will take advantage of their own resources and support innovation and encourager promising new technology companies. By borrowing the best reputation with highly recognized and trusted by people, Google is able to offer reasonable and even convenient sources to start a business or keep on running their business. Besides, because of Google’s unique technical expertise and brand image, they believe that they will help the young companies with truly awesome potential and guide their development into successful business. What they do' Nowadays, Google Ventures is an investment arm of Google Inc. Google Ventures is focusing on finding the most interesting entrepreneurs and helping to develop exceptional start-ups. It not only provides start up capital to different entrepreneurial projects across the globe but also helps them with all available resources of Google, provides assistance in staffing, product launches and leveraging technical resources. In other words, it not only pay more attention on a widely variety of early sectors and stages across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others, but they are also backing companies in areas that might give a surprise to you — from human anti-body discovery to smart grid platforms. Most importantly it allows the foster entrepreneur to work in an Independent atmosphere. How they do' Google ventures aim to invest about $100 million a year and the deal sizes is ranging from seed investments as small as a hundred thousand dollars to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars. In October 2009, Google Ventures makes its first investment in biotechnology and its putting probably around $10 million — into Adimab, a company with a novel method of generating protein-based drugs. There are a few areas of expertise that can be critical to the ultimate success of a startup, but which are often hard to hire for, especially early on. So they are building a full-time team at Google Ventures that works alongside their portfolio companies in each of these areas: ● Engineering Building products that are robust and scale to millions (or billions) of users can be daunting. The Google Ventures engineering experts, composed of engineers who faced these challenges at Google every day, work with portfolio companies on a wide range of problems — whether that's picking a particular piece of software or working through a complete back-end redesign. One portfolio company, for example, embarked on a major rewrite of their platform. One of engineering experts from Google Ventures worked alongside its engineering team for weeks, to help make decisions about the technology and data models, and help recode their website. Google venture company isn't afraid to tackle hands-on work if helpful to the entrepreneur. ● UXDesign & Research One of the most significant team in Google Ventures is in-house user experience team and they have the responsibility of helping Google Ventures’ portfolio companies understand “who are your users'How do they use your product' How can you make their experience seamless and fun'” For example, their user experience designer helped a portfolio company redesign one of its key products and improved the product's performance by over 2x. their user researcher conducted interviews with users and analyzed the results to help another portfolio company understand how to position a new product in a hypercompetitive market. ● Recruiting Finding great people is critical, especially when the third person makes up 33% of the team. They are building their own recruiting team at Google Ventures and along with the broader resources of Google Inc.They give these companies training course about recruiting and help founders hire their first five employees and teach them how to hire their next 50. So far,they have worked with Google Ventures company to help them find top engineering talent, interview candidates, build a strong recruiting pipelines, think through compensation packages, and more. Portfolio At present Google is supporting businesses based in North America only, as the Google is a global company and it plans to work in other countries in future years. Till now, all these companies are being supported by Google Ventures. Their names are: ● Adimab is a fully integrated, yeast-based antibody discovery platform. ● Corduro offers a range of payment services for Internet, mobile and traditional retail transactions. ● English Central makes improving one’s English fun and effective by turning popular web videos into powerful language learning experiences. ● OpenCandy exists to solve distribution, monetization and discovery problems in the consumer application space. OpenCandy's first product is an ad network for consumer applications. ● HomeAway is the world’s leading online marketplaces for vacation rentals and bed&breakfast connection homeowners property and managers and innkeepers with the millions of travelers who seek the space, privacy and affordability of alternative accommodation instead of hotels. ● Pixazza is a Web service that converts static images into interactive content by revealing the "products in the picture" across popular Web sites. ● Recorded Future extracts time and event information from the Web. Recorded Future offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present, and the predicted future. ● SCVNGR is the game layer on top of the world. It's part game, part gaming platform. Play SCVNGR by going places, doing challenges and earning points. Or, build on SCVNGR by adding challenges to your favorite locations. ● Silver Spring Networks is a leading smart grid solutions provider. Its hardware, software and services help utilities reduce carbon emissions, operate more efficiently, and empower their customers with new ways to monitor and manage their energy consumption. ● VigLink is a tool for publishers of all sizes to make monetization of their outbound links effortless, transparent, and honest. ● iPierian is creating new therapeutics discovered using cellular reprogramming and directed differentiation of patient cells. ● Miso is a social platform that makes watching TV more fun. It's a new and engaging way for people to enhance their entertainment experience at home through a "second screen." ● Next Autoworks is a new American car company that will introduce a safe, highquality, fuel-efficient car for the U.S. market - at a very competitive price. ● ngmoco games are played more than 50 million minutes a day and have been downloaded more than 60 million times on Apple's iOS devices. The company's Plus+ social network has over 13.5 million registered users. ● Signpost is a community-powered deal site that helps people find compelling local deals. ● Trada offers the first and only crowdsourced pay-per-click marketplace, allowing businesses and advertising agencies to run PPC campaigns across all major search engines by leveraging the skills of hundreds of the world's best paid search experts. ● 23andMe is a leading personal genetics company dedicated to helping individuals understand their own genetic information through DNA analysis technologies and web-based interactive tools. Interesting facts Google's name comes from the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. Googol was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. It was popularized in the book "Mathematics and the Imagination". Google employs of more than 2,668 people known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex. Google also has approx. 450 000 servers aroud the world and their index contains thousands of millions of pages. Google also stores all information for at least 18 months. Google own more than 150 patents (187 on 2008), not including the pending ones. They have for example advertising, design and event modeling, modeling, mapping, game and search indexing patents. All of them are not originally assigned by Google. Google have also invested in genetic testing. 2007 Google invested approx. 4.4 million US dollars in a genetic screening company 23andMe. The company was founded by Anne Wojcicki, who is the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, with her business partner. Google has also invested to another genetic screening company Navigenics, refusing to tell the exact amount of money. Google CEO have said: “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Google slogan is: “Don’t be evil.” References http://web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/backrub.stanford.edu/ backrub.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#larry http://www.google.com/corporate/milestones.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-blodget/big-bad-news-for-googles_b_574041.html http://www.google.com http://www.google.co.uk/press/funfacts.html http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2010/01/possible-google-acquisitions2010.html http://www.theequitykicker.com/2010/08/26/googles-acquisitions-a-europeantake/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7973783.stm http://orkutheroes.com/google-venture-boon-for-entrepreneurs/ http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2008/ tc20080418_112207.htm