If you’re keeping track, get out your list of Google Acquisitions for the year and add Zenter to it. Google just announced that they have acquired Zenter which is software for online slide presentations. I know, some of you are probably recalling their acquisition in April for Tonic whose technology focuses on Java solutions for “presentation creation and document conversion.” It looks like just one presentation company isn’t going to do it for Google, they need a whole line of them.
While both Zenter and Tonic focus on presentations, there’s a reason Google went after Zenter. According to the Google blog, Zenter’s technology will be used to provide presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Haochi over at Googlified gives his insight saying that Google acquired Zenter because after they purchased Tonic, they realized it would be too difficult for them to make it part of the entire Google suite of apps. Something like “Mission Impossible,” and if they want a presentation app pushed out the door by the end of the Summer, they realized it was going to take another presentation acquisition.
Garrett Rogers over at ZDNet thinks Tonic will be used solely as the exporting engine in the future because they’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how they can be “100% binary compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint.” This would mean that their focus will be saving presentations in a format that would work perfectly with Powerpoint.
While online seems to be the way to go lately, there are still people who prefer desktop applications. This is where Google Gears could potentially come in handy because Google could take their Online Suite of applications and give them offline capability. I for one, would be more likely to use docs and spreadsheets if there was the capability to take them offline.
Now I just wonder what Google will do with the name. If they stick with Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and tack on Presentations, it’s getting too long! It’s about time that they come up with a clever new name.
Thanks to everybody who sent this tip in!
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Tags: Google, Acquisition
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I’m really excited with everything Google has going on. I see Google’s constantly improving “online office suite” as a potential threat to microsoft on the consumer level for Office Applications. I know I’m more likely to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets now, simply because I can access my documents anywhere.
Once they get some sort of offline solution I think a lot more people will get hooked. I’m actually surprised that they don’t already have Google Gears incorporated with it since that would be more useful than Google Reader.