Google Acquires Omnisio, Joining YouTube
Posted at 6:26pm EST on 07/30/2008
The Omnisio team will be joining the YouTube team shortly.
News flashed today that Omnisio has been acquired by Google.
Why was Omnisio founded? “Omnisio was founded with the goal of drastically improving your online video experience,” taken directly from the about page of Omnisio.com.
A little more from the YouTube blog, “It’s in this spirit that we’re thrilled to announce Google’s purchase of Omnisio, a small California-based startup that’s focused on making online video more useful and collaborative. The Omnisio team has tremendous technical expertise when it comes to advanced video tools and having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.”
Google made a good acquisition because both YouTube and Google Video were starting to lag in actual technology behind the video platforms. Such as popular Viddler or Blip.tv were starting to garner a lot more traffic because of their added functionality. One particular note about Viddler is the ability to annotate titles and descriptions at certain segments of the video clip.
For Gary Vaynerchuk, this is critical. When he’s talking about a specific wine, he wants people to know when and where.
The amount for the acquisition was not disclosed, but the word around town is that the deal was closed for roughly USD$15 million in hard cash.
Having launched their service only five months ago, not a bad turn around to be acquired — none the less, by an industry leader like Google.
