Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has acquired Polar, a mobile and desktop polling company in a bid to enhance the publishers’ and brands’ user engagement. The employees of the start-up will now work for Google and assist in increasing the user engagement on Google+, or help brands that use social network to market themselves.
Polar’s team to join Google
Without revealing the price of the deal, Polar’s co-founder Luke Wroblewski said that he along with the team will now work at Google and bring design sensibilities to California. Wroblewski is the author of various well known books on mobile and web design, and has worked with Yahoo as a Chief design architect.
The co-founder of Polar claims that the company has served more than half a billion polls in the past eight months, and have 1.1 million active user voters in September. Users are free to download the app on the iOS to create their own polls, and publishers can modify and include polls on their sites in apps.
Wroblewski said that the company is based on a simple idea that everyone has an opinion, which is worth hearing, and the tools and the apps available online failed to cater the specific needs. He added, “We felt we could do much better by making opinions easy and fun for everyone.”
Polar has withdrawn its app from iOS, but will maintain tools for the publishers available until the end of the year. Additionally, users can get the collection of their polls and data. Crunchbase reported that polar has raised funding of $3 million since 2013, including an investment from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang.
Acquisition aimed to improve Google+
Wroblewski along with his team will make efforts to enhance the usability of Google+ on mobile devices, David Besbris (head of Google+) told the Wall Street Journal.
Dave Besbris, Google’s vice president of engineering for Google+, posted on his own Google+ page that he is excited to welcome Luke Wroblewski and his talented team to Google. Besbris said that the team with its head will join Google team to make Google+ even better.
Google+ is not very popular among the users when compared to Facebook. However, it still holds a lot of importance to Google because this way the Google stands a better chance to get an insight into the users and sell more ads along with pushing more of its services.
