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: gaming sites
The video game developer Atari has filed suit against two Dutch gaming sites that have published unfavorable pre-release reviews of the upcoming game “Alone in the Dark.” In the suit, the developer claims the reviews were written based on pirated copies of the game.
The sites, 4Players and Gamer.nl gave negative reviews of the game, 68/100 and 5/10 respectively, and posted the reviews two days before the official European street date. Because the reviews were based on “pirated” copies, Atari is seeking an undisclosed monetary settlement.
“Within an hour [after posting], Atari called to have the review pulled off, claiming there was an embargo till Friday,” Gamer.nl commented. “Our review copy was sent directly to us by Atari and [was] not a pirated copy. They explicitly told [Gamer.nl] that they only let high scoring reviews break the post-release embargo date.”
Although a pirated copy has been on file sharing networks for over a week, 4Players proclaimed that their copy was also retail. They said through the same “retail connection” they were able to have other games in the past.
The Norwegian gaming site Gamer.no also alleges that after they posted a 3/10 review, Atari contacted them to remove it immediately.
“Atari contacted us just minutes after it was published, claiming that our review is probably based on a preview or pirated copy, and requested it to be removed,” said Gamer.no’s Tor-Steinar Nastad Tangedal. “We never removed it, of course.”
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