{"id":524145,"date":"2010-04-12T07:55:23","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T11:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"tag:contentnext.com,2010-04-12:article\/419-google-buying-visual-art-seacher-plink-its-first-uk-acquisition"},"modified":"2010-04-12T07:55:23","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T11:55:23","slug":"google-buying-visual-art-seacher-plink-its-first-uk-acquisition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/524145","title":{"rendered":"Google Buying Visual Art Seacher Plink; Its First UK Acquisition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Google’s mobile picture-based search service Google Goggles<\/a> is about to get more cultured<\/em>. Google’s buying Oxford, England-based Plink<\/a>, an Android mobile app<\/a> that will identify any work of art photographed by users.<\/p>\n

The two people at the start-up – founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin – are joining Google (NSDQ: GOOG<\/a>) to work on Google Goggles<\/a>, which was launched in December<\/a> to enable Google searching by mobile photo.\n<\/p>\n

Plink is Google’s first ever UK acquisition, but a small one; largely a developer hire. Google Goggles already offered art identification by mobile pic<\/a>; it likely needed to improve that offering and augment the team with more talent as mobile search becomes increasingly important to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said<\/a> in January Google would acquire a company each month, but mostly small ones.<\/p>\n

Plink already won $100,000 from Google<\/a> in December after Android users picked it as one of the platform’s best reference apps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Google’s mobile product development director Hugo Barra, based in London, is mad keen on that area, suggesting that mobiles – because they have new “sensors” like camera, mic and GPS – open up new kinds of search possibilities (see Barra’s presentation on this in my video<\/a> or our recent audio interview<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Cummins and Philbin write<\/a>: “For Plink as a company, it\u2019s been a short but exciting ride \u2013 only four months since our public launch. We shot past 50,000 users in just four short weeks … we won\u2019t be updating the app and will instead focus our development efforts on Google Goggles, so you\u2019ll see new functionality appearing there in the future … We\u2019re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you<\/strong>. “<\/p>\n

The Goggles team is distributed across several offices.\n<\/p>\n

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Google’s mobile picture-based search service Google Goggles is about to get more cultured. Google’s buying Oxford, England-based Plink, an Android mobile app that will identify any work of art photographed by users. The two people at the start-up – founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin – are joining Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to work on Google […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":705,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}