Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently purchased news summary application Wavii, then shut it down almost immediately. Reports of the search engine giant’s purchase of the app for over $30 million first surfaced on April 24th. On Friday, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) confirmed the purchase on the app’s website and they also announced the service would be shut down immediately.
Adrian Aoun, CEO of Wavii, shared the following message on his site, “You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won’t continue to offer this particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world. To all of our loyal Wavii users, we owe you a big thanks for all of your feedback and involvement throughout this journey. We look forward to taking our technology to the next level and delighting you with what we come up with next!”
Last year, Google shut down their once popular Google Reader service, so it’s a likely possibility that Google has something new planned. Pehaps they want to use Wavii’s technology to improve Google News. Unfortunately, we don’t have more details on the buy-up nor do we know of Google’s future plans for their acquisition.
Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new app with Summly integration. Earlier this month, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s rival purchased the Summly application for $30 million, which is close to the same that Google paid for Wavii.
The representative for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) gave the following comment, “We’re impressed by the Wavii team’s progress in understanding natural language and we look forward to working with them at Google.”
Thanks to mobile technology, it’s apparent that sophisticated news apps are the latest trend. With popular magazine-style news apps like Pulse and Flipboard, it’s easy to see why search engines are trying to make a splash in the news app market.
