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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Google-Facebook’s War Weapon: Indian-founded firms

Binu T Paul
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Binu T Paul
The year 2010 has cast a shopping spell on the tech biggies. However, is it only a shopping spree to raise their technology bar? A look at the internet giant Google and social networking leader Facebook pinpoints a different trend – to invade each other’s forte. This has turned to be a sweet moment for the Indian founded firms, who are the best of the corporate behemoths to fight each other.

Latest in the series of acquisition, Google has reportedly acquired the Indian-founded Jambool with its gaming product Social Gold. Jambool runs virtual currency systems for social games, including those played on Facebook. Commenting on the new development, the founders wrote on the website, "We are excited to announce that Jambool is becoming a part of the Google family today.”

On the other hand, Facebook has bought Chai Labs, founded by Gokul Rajaram a former Google Adsense executive. Its investors include Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder of Netscape Communications, as well as LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman and Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus. Chai Labs specializes in making platforms that allow for structured content extraction and semantic search. After this acquisition, rumors started hovering around the industry that Facebook may launch an advertising network across other sites rivaling Google's ad network AdSense, which is an integral source of income for the firm.

Facebook, with over 500 million users, has emerged as the leader in social networking and according to the web metrics firm Hitwise, it surpassed Google as the most visited Website in the U.S. in the month of March. Google’s not-so-secret social network in the making, dubbed ‘Google Me’ is seen as an effort to wrest a bit of control of social media from Facebook. Google has been in discussion with top developers like Walt Disney’s Playdom and Electronic Arts’ Playfish for its new social network initiative. Google also had bought Slide, a major developer of Facebook apps like Top Friends and SuperPoke. Zynga, which has a heavy take on the Facebook traffic and is a top buyer of Facebook ad space, has also been brought by the internet giant. More acquisitions of Indian firms are expected as the battle of social networking is heating up between the two.

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