In March 2006, writing about Google's acquisition of Upstartle, the company behind Writely (which is now Google Docs), I speculated whether Google would buy iRows (a web based spreadsheet). In November Google recruited the founders of iRows, at which time I guessed:
"If I had to predict what's next, I would say that Google will acquire a web-based audio and/or video-conferencing service."
On 22/4/2007 the northern Swedish firm Marratech AB announced that Google had acquired Marratech's video conferencing software, software that originated in research that began in 1995 at the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology (CDT) at Luleå University of Technology, in Sweden. (Colleagues in the Italian Trade Union Confederation CISL were very positive about the effectiveness of Marratech when they showed me it in use last year.) Press reports, which have been countered on the Official Google Blog, imply that it is not just the software that has been bought, but the company as a whole.
Marratech's technology requires the user to download an application that you need to run locally as a discrete application, unlike most of Google's services (Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs etc). However, plenty of other Google services, for example Earth, Talk, and Desktop Search, involve users in downloading and installing software. It remains to be seen whether the acquisition will result in Google offering audio or video conferencing as one of its free or paid-for services, or whether Google will instead be using Marratech technology for internal purposes. Certainly for people who use Google Docs or Jotspot as collaboration tools, provision of a synchronous communication environment would be of great value.
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