I’m sure the dream of most of the founders of Web 2.0 companies today is being bought by Google; famously Google acquired YouTube late last year for $1.65bn. From the other perspective, the acquisition of startups can allow Google to move into new areas and develop current activities. I thought it would be interesting to write a post with a couple of my acquisition targets, if I were entrusted with the Goog’s billions.

FeedBurner
If I were Google, FeedBurner would be pretty high on my list of priorities. FeedBurner is a free feed analytics tool, which GizBuzz and most other ’serious’ blogs use to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and reading their content. FeedBurner works by reprocessing your feed, and if it has enough subscribers, it gives you the option to sell adverts in your feed, through the FeedBurner Advertising Network (FAN). So, whilst initially FeedBurner appears that it is a tool for publishers, in reality it is an advertising company. What does that remind you of? Google.

Google looks like a search company, but is actually an advertising company. As such, it is always looking for more places to stick its adverts, and more ways to help advertisers measure how those ads are performing. FeedBurner is a perfect fit, as it has access to far more inventory in RSS feeds than Google has. Google could simply incorporate FAN into their Adsense programme, and keep FeedBurner as a tool for blog publishers to manage and measure their feeds. I recently wrote why I think negotiations may be happening already between FB and Google.

Pluggd
Pluggd is a podcast directory. However, that’s not what the exciting part of their technology is. They recently released a search technology for podcasts called HearHere (demo and information), which allows you to select a podcast episode and enter a search term. It will then produce a heatmap showing where that term is being spoken about on the podcast, which enables you to go straight to the relevant part of a podcast, finding the relevant information quickly.

An increasing trend around at the moment is that of podcasting, and a vast amount of information is being published in audio files to the internet. Google prides itself on indexing and searching information on the internet. At the moment, however, Google can’t see inside those audio files. This will become more important going forward, and it is a problem that must be solved. Pluggd’s technology goes a long way towards solving it, and does it in an innovative and useful way. It would be a great fit as Google currently has no (published) technology in this area. I also guess that Pluggd would be fairly cheap, as it hasn’t got much of a network effect going and isn’t even funded yet.