Google Inc (GOOG): What’s So Interesting About Wavii?

Innovation, evolution and change are three of the major factors that drive the tech industry. In order to survive in the era of cutthroat competition, appease customers and keep the shareholders happy, every tech company has to constantly upgrade their line of products and quality of services. Innovation is what keeps giants like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the top. Right from their inception, these two companies have been innovating, each giving the world something more than they ever expected. Innovation has been in the culture of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) employees spend around 20% of their time at Googleplex, working on projects of their choice and interest.

But thriving on innovation alone is not possible. The behemoths of the tech industry like Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Apple also give a lot of importance to acquisitions. For instance, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) had been involved with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in a bidding war to buy a Seattle based start-up called Wavii, a natural language processing company. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) won the game and bagged the prize. TechCrunch cites a “legitimate source” as saying that Google has acquired Wavii for a price of more than $30 million.

Other companies like Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) are interested in similar acquisitions. Recently Yahoo! acquired Summly, a company providing natural language processing technology that reads news articles, attempts to understand it like humans do, and then summarize it. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) lost its charm in the tech industry long ago and is now making an attempt to get it back. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo! has many plans for the future. One of her strategies is to broaden and strengthen Yahoo!’s expertise in the smartphone market. With this in mind Yahoo! has launched a new mobile app based on Summly for the iPhone and Android phones. News aggregator apps are good at grabbing eyeballs, and that is exactly what Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) needs at the moment. This can also be considered to an attempt by Yahoo! to showcase that the company has not lost its coolness factor. It is too early to say how much this acquisition would benefit Yahoo! We would wait and watch to see if this is indeed a good deal.

So what is so interesting about Wavii?

Wavii, like Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), generates personalized News Feeds of what’s happening around the world. It uses natural language processing and provides its users with personalized contents. Initially Wavii would provide its users with a few topics from which the users can decide what to follow and what not to. Later on, with time, based on the users likes and feedback new topics would be suggested.