Google acquires Nik Software

With Facebook owning Instagram, Google now also has its own digital photo editing and sharing service in Snapseed, following its acquisition of Nik Software. No details surrounding the financial terms of this deal were revealed.

The web search giant is expected to utilise Snapseed to strengthen its own social network Google+. Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering at Google revealed in a Google+ post this week that the social network now has surpassed the 400 million user milestone, with 100 million of these using Google+ actively on a monthly basis.  

Snapseed is a Nik Software business, with Snapseed Mobile launching on Apple’s iPad in June 2011, followed by the iPhone app the month thereafter. In January of this year Nik Software also brought the application to the desktop via its Mac OS X software and Snapseed for Windows in February 2012. The company is also working on an Android version of Snapseed for Nvidia Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 powered mobile devices operating on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and up.
 
“For nearly 17 years, we’ve been guided by our motto, ‘photography first’, as we worked to build world class digital image editing tools. We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures,” a post by The Nik Software Team read.

In related news, Google also recently acquired VirusTotal, a free web-based service that analyses suspicious files and URLs, and in addition facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, as well as all other types of malware.