Google's Picture Perfect Acquisition
Earlier this week, Google acquired Germany-based Nik Software in a move that puts it in direct competition with Facebook and its recently purchased and wildly popular Instagram. Nik Software is mostly known for a little award-winning photo-editing app named Snapseed, purchasable for $4.99 from Apple’s app store ("iPad App of The Year” in 2011). Now, call me an Internet novice, but I haven’t heard of them or their app. Perhaps it is because I defy the laws whispered amongst the graphic designers of the world, but I don’t use an iPhone or iPad. Calm down, calm down. (I have an iPod Touch and a Nano for running, so chillax kiddos.) After watching the video seen here, I’m deeply intrigued as a photographer to see how well this software really works when it eventually lands in the Android app market. (Seriously, calm down.)
While I'm not entirely huge on smart phone photography, I'll admit I'm in a minority. Camera tech on phones has evolved at a flabbergasting level and Snapseed is only helping to further push the envelope. No doubt it'll find itself among good company at the entrepreneurial Google.
Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, writes in a blog post that Google wants “to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone.” He continues, “This week we also hit an important milestone--over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+. It was only a year ago that we opened public sign-up, and we couldn’t have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months. While Google+ is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a destination. And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+”
More about Snapseed from its website:
Snapseed, a Nik Software business, was born out of one simple idea: What if we could take the digital innovations pioneered for photography professionals and bring them to everyone – all the millions of people around the world snapping photos with their phones and digital cameras? The Snapseed experience was born. We launched Snapseed Mobile on the Apple iPad in June 2011, quickly followed by the Apple iPhone in August 2011. In January 2012, we moved our software onto the Mac OS and shortly after, in February, we made Snapseed available on Windows. We will continue to make Snapseed ubiquitous – available on virtually all major desktop and mobile platforms and more. Our vision is to deliver a photo editing experience so fun, so easy, and so powerful that Snapseed will be the only photo-editing, tweaking, sharing app you’ll want to use everywhere, every day.
Will this acquisition help Google build up its Google+ user-base and encourage all of the world’s avid mobile photographers to switch over? The journey is anything but downhill, but there’s always a possibility. What do you think? 