Kaltix? Ganji? Neven Vision KK? Endoxon Ltd.? Any of these ringing any bells? These are among the 24 companies that Google has bought recently. Have any idea what they do? Thomas Shmitz of SEOCritique lets you test your knowledge by matching two lists: the names of the companies and what they do. I'm telling you now, you're going to flunk this test. By a long shot.
Two of the 24 are gimmes for most of us: YouTube and Picasa.
(If you don't know Picasa, you should check it out. It's Win and Linux only, but a cool little online art program. It's also what inspired Adobe to put a free version of Photoshop on the web. From what I hear, Photoshop is a cool little art program too.)
The rest of them are complete strangers to me. I felt like an idiot even looking at the test. Even if I can't match them, it's interesting to see what Google is up to.
For example, the Google phone looks like it's crawling toward reality. Maybe. As Shmitz describes this entry on the quiz:
Operated under a cloak of secrecy, so little is known about its work. Rubin and Co. have sparingly described the outfit as making software for mobile phones, providing little more detail than that. One source familiar with the company says at one point it had been working on a software operating system for cell phones.
Three of the acquisitions have been made around mapping. I'll be honest, I'm not at all impressed with Google maps. They're not terribly accurate, and they print for poo. I assume that improvements are forthcoming.
Another intersesting one:
Deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.
Face recognition technology is an integral part of what I call the "Hollywood OS," that stuff you see in the movies and on TV that has nothing to do with any particular computer OS...since none of them can actually do that stuff.
Not that face recognition software doesn't exis; it does. The German Federal Police and the Super Bowl use it regularly, and have made some arrests. OTOH, a number of casinos have tried it, and the results have been pretty much useless.
Anyway, you're going to have fun with the quiz, even if you just take a tour of the company descriptions. While the answers will eventually be posted, for now all you'll find is a list of scores that people have posted. Most of them are pretty poor, and looking at the number of them actually listed, it looks like most visitors are as cowardly as I am.
A final note: our boy Tom has been around for a while. He was an Assistant Systems Operator for GEnie, a predecessor of AOL, and served as editor of GEnie Lamp, a periodical for Apple II computer users.
Ah, the Apple II! Apple grew massive market share that began dropping like a stone with the introduction of the Mac. Not passing any judgements here. I'm just saying.
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