Alphabet’s Google has acquired pointy a startup that helps online retailers get physical products in their stories listed online instantly.
founded by Mark Cummins and Charles Bibby, the startup has been with Google for some years with a mandate to help people discover local stores and products, and with a nod to Google’s resources and ownership of search, the deal will move it to a larger scale. Google paid $163 million for the company.
According to the press release from pointy, they said
Over the past several years we’ve developed a very close partnership with Google. It became clear that we shared the same vision of how technology can improve local retail businesses. So today is a natural next step in our journey. By joining forces, we will be able to help people discover local stores and products on a much larger scale. We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do – to bring the world’s retailers online and give them the tools they need to thrive.
When we started Pointy, our mission was to make things better for local retailers. That remains our mission today. All of our services continue to operate as usual. We look forward to building even better services in the future, with the backing of Google’s resources and reach.
Today is a big step forward for Pointy, but there is still a very long way to go. We’re as excited about the future as when we first started.
We believe that this new acquisition by google will also help boost search results for products and also google merchant center.
Google has also acquired Appsheet, The no-code platform startup, lets users build mobile apps without coding, with just over 20 staffs they have been in operation now for five years, and will continue to run its service but now under google.
Google is integrating the Appsheet team into the Google Cloud team. so they can develop applications using services like Google Sheets, Forms, Analytics, and Maps. Customers also can integrate with data sources like AWS, Dropbox, and Salesforce.
Google continues to grow its service base by buying user-friendly startups, but its acquisition of Pointy early in the year might be that the tech giant might be focusing on e-commerce and positioning itself to begin to compete with other giants in the e-commerce industry,
Remember you can now directly search and other for products directly from google search, fingers crossed let’s see how this turns out knowing the strength of Google.