Hasta La Gadget!

About a year and a half after Google announced its acquisition of Motorola, it’s closed a deal to sell the Motorola Home half to Arris. Motorola Home covers the company’s cable TV and internet device, which combined with Arris’ existing businesses creates what it’s calling “the Premier Video Delivery and Broadband Technology Company.” Meanwhile, Google keeps the Motorola Mobility half that covers its cellphones, tablets and of course, the related patents. The move cost Arris $2.2 billion in cash along with 10.6 million shares of its stock issued to Google. That’s on top of 10.6 million shares for Comcast in return for its $150 million investment, making them equal part (7.7 percent) owners with the folks from Mountain View. What does all of this mean? Your next cable-provided box will probably say Arris on it, and any faint dream of Motorola-built Android TV set-top boxes becoming widely available is officially over.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Google

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Source: Arris

When Google comes to your door – or your digital door – and tells you they’d like you to join their collective, generally you say yes, let’s do it! That’s what Behavio has announced they’ve done this week. Behavio is a company that was Knight Foundation funded and aimed to develop apps that would accurately detect social and behavioral trends of you, your friends, and everyone around you.

While it’s not entirely clear where the funding bits Behavio has received thus far will be funneled, we do know that the team remains highly thankful to both the Knight Foundation and SXSW Accelerator. This group won the 2012 SXSW Accelerator competition and gained additional publicity because of it. The video below, found by TechCrunch, shows a speech made by Behavio’s Nadav Aharony for the Knight Foundation as they presented for the 2012 Knight News Challenge.

According to the Knight Foundation, the folks at Behavio had already begun bringing the heat back over a half a year ago – and they certainly didn’t start there.

“Behavio is an open-source platform that turns phones into smart sensors of people’s real world behavior – from how they use their phones to how they communicate with others. Funding will be used to help programmers build apps with smarter sensors, create tools for journalists that uncover trends in community data and launch a mobile application that allows individuals to explore data about their lives.”

The Behavio Team has been clear in their announcement of their integration with Google that they’re going to continue to maintain their Funf open source project as they work their way into the heart of the Google complex. As they aimed to make “smartphone apps [that] are actually smart”, so too did they call upon their Funf buddies to do the same – Open Sensing Framework is what it was and is all about at Funf.

“We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.” – The Behavio Team

Above you’ll see the beginning of a touching letter posted today by the Behavio Team announcing their jumping in with Google. What we’re to understand is that Google will, as always, be using the team to create wonderful new projects as they continue to strengthen those they’re already pushing solidly.

We can’t wait to see what the developers and forward-thinking minds at Behavio will bring to the Googleplex! Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner, and Cody Sumter are names you’re going to hear again in the future – keep them in mind!

Google acquires Behavio: social prediction connects with the big G is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Word has had it for a while now that Twitter acquired music service We Are Hunted, which it is using as part of its rumored music app that we’d like to see an official announcement about some time soon. That acquisition was just made public by We Are Hunted, which announced it on its website while dropping precious few (and we do mean few) details.

We Are Hunted is now in the process of shutting down its website, according to the announcement, with the company publishing a public proclamation of gratitude for its users, its investors, and its board members. The service, which launched in 2007 and grew steadily over the years, is now part of the Twitter team, but it is being tight-lipped about what that involves.

Says We Are Hunted about the acquisition, “There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter.” But, unfortunately, it says that it is not ready to discuss about what it is working on with the microblogging network yet.

Such an announcement lends credence to the rumors that surfaced last month claiming Twitter is working on its own standalone music app that will use the We Are Hunted system and team. Thus far, word has it the app will allow users to stream music via SoundCloud and some other services, displaying Popular and Emerging music, as well as what other users are currently listening to.

[via We Are Hunted]

Twitter’s acquisition of We Are Hunted officially announced is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

LinkedIn has been pretty clearly repositioning itself as a source for news as of late, and it’s now made that shift even clearer with a fairly major acquisition. The company announced today that it has acquired Pulse, maker of news reader apps for mobile devices (in addition to a web-based offering) at a cost of some $90 million. In its own blog post announcing the news, Pulse says that its apps will remain as they are for now, although they will now offer a “LinkedIn Influencer” feed featuring the company’s hand-picked contributors. According to Pulse, its apps currently have over 30 million users around the globe, with approximately 40 percent of those outside the US; for its part, LinkedIn recently topped 200 million users.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: LinkedIn, Pulse

It’s just a billion bucks, why not purchase one of the quickest growing multi-platform message ecosystems in the mobile universe: WhatsApp? That’s what Google has been rumored to be chatting about this week, as an inside source speaking with Digital Trends tells it. This is a story that feeds quite well into the idea that Google is creating their own every-device messaging app system the likes of which would transform their multi-tiered systems into a singular hero.

Both Facebook and Google have been tipped to have approached the folks behind WhatsApp before today, and as they’ve continued to explode in popularity over the past few months, it would appear that they may have reached prime-time for sales. Included in this purchase would be their next-level pricing scheme which has users paying a cool $0.99 a year for a complete tossing of advertisements in-app. If Google were to pick the team up, it could be that WhatsApp itself is kicked in the pants while the technology is folded into Google – no more dollars for you!

Also if this does turn out to be true, Google’s next-generation service might be ready for Google I/O 2013. That is the rumored “Babble” or “Babel.” One way or another, a Google message service that folds all others into itself will be big.

So right here at the dawn of the Facebook Phone and the next wave of Android devices and their messager apps, could it be time for Google to take another swipe? Seems so! Have a peek at the WhatsApp timeline below and get pumped up about the future of the Google-run app universe!

Google tipped to pick up WhatsApp for $1 Billion is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.