Google has acquired the Web start-up Angstro this week while also moving co-founder Rohit Khare to the Google team.
The search giant has been in an acquisition frenzy over the past few months, purchasing a plethora of sites and services that will help their upcoming assault on the social networking world and its champion Facebook.
Khare is a respected Internet researcher and entrepreneur.
Earlier in the summer, Google purchased the social gaming siteSlide, while recruiting its founder Max Levchin to become a VP of engineering for social media efforts. Levchin was the co-founder of PayPal.
Google has also invested $150 million in social gaming market leader Zynga.
The social networking service, dubbed “Google Me” internally is still in “stealth mode” and Google will not publicly discuss it.
Google versus Facebook has become a hot-topic in the tech world, with many believing Facebook will soon start its own advertising network to rival Google’s AdSense, while Google prepares its full assault on the social networking world.
Result for: advertising network
Microsoft has announced that it is hoping to build an advertising network into its Zune media players, giving advertisers a direct connection to consumers.
As explained by Yahoo, “the company demonstrated the concept using a phony Doritos mockup. In the example, a user could befriend a musician through the Zune social page on a Doritos’ sponsored concert to view news and updates on the artist’s profile.”
Once you are added to that list, users can email said profile to other friends and download select tracks from the website to play on the Zune. “When the recipient receives the email through Microsoft’s Hotmail service through their mobile phone, a brief ad will trigger, followed by a short game similar to Asteroids.”
If the user does well playing the game, then they earn a free bag of Doritos chips, and downloadable maps to nearby stores that sell them.
Although it is still in “planning” stages, Microsoft says the program is not “something that is far in the future” and just needs some solid back-end infrastructure.
