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Google Buys Slide for $182 Million

RSS by Evan Elden Eller on 06 August 2010, 4465 views
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Remember last week when Google was negotiating with EA and Disney's social gaming teams (Playfish and Playdom, respectively) and they invested $100 million in Zynga, the team behind the Farmville epidemic?  Well that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Google has now bought Slide, Inc., owners of Slide.com, for a whopping $182 million.  And to top it off, they threw in an extra $46 million in employee retention bonuses to ensure they keep most of the same team, bringing the total cost of the purchase up to $228 million.  That's a lot of scratch, but hey, Slide does have "the CUTEST virtual pet on the web."

This is all part of Google's strategy for world-domination opening some sort of "Google Games" service to compete with Facebook, and with the money they're throwing around, it looks like they mean business.  Slide in particular is known not only for making social games such as SuperPoke! and Rock Riot, but many plug-in applications for social networks, such as photo-sharing widgets for Facebook, MySpace, and yes, even Friendster.

An official announcement about the purchase is expected later today, although we still have no official announcement about what this "Google Games" is exactly, or when it will descend upon us.

Source: TechCrunch

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11 Comments

Jalocin
Jalocin (on 08 August 2010)

@Silver-Tiger

They automatically gathered information from non-secured wireless networks when collecting data for their new program. They do not have the rights to do that and they couldn't guarantee all the information was deleted. I think that was the main problem.

That said, I don't really care about such a mistake.

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Bullet100000
Bullet100000 (on 07 August 2010)

"World Domination" LOL!!!

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Silver-Tiger
Silver-Tiger (on 07 August 2010)

I have to say Google is the only company I've never heard bad news about. Their services are always top-notch, they treat their workers correctly, and they're not greedy. Hell, they couldn charge for many services they're offering, just look at the huge server costs, Google Earth for example.
The only "bad" news I've heard are from some paranoid people saying that they'reare collecting too much data. Yeah, sure tehy collect data from you, how are supposed to offer their services like Google Search without information?

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Teo
Teo (on 07 August 2010)

Google for president.

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siavm
siavm (on 06 August 2010)

World domination sounds about right. Those droid commercials are almost getting me to get a new phone.

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famousringo
famousringo (on 06 August 2010)

As all these big tech companies throw hundreds of millions of dollars at this online casual game gold rush, I find myself wondering if there really is any gold left in those hills.

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coolbeans
coolbeans (on 06 August 2010)

I'm remember the creator of Slide being one of the founders for Google as well.

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naznatips
naznatips (on 06 August 2010)

I for one welcome our new Google overlords.

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Toastrules
Toastrules (on 06 August 2010)

Lmao, loved the world domination bit

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kitler53
kitler53 (on 06 August 2010)

oh friendster, i didn't even know you were still alive.

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llewdebkram
llewdebkram (on 06 August 2010)

That's a lot of money for a slide, Argos in the UK have one for £29.99

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/3671948/Trail/searchtext%3ESLIDE.htm

They could have saved themselves $181,999, 953.41

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