There has been some postings in various Scottish education blogs about the acquisition of Marratech by Google. See Neil’ Blog or Tess’s Blog There has been a little confusion around what the actual “acquisition” of Marratech by Google means. The interest is understandable given that Marratech is a component of GLOW The Marratech web site has a very bare statement that is not very helpful A much more informative press report is available from PC World Magazine.
For now, Google plans to use the software internally, as a tool for its employees, the spokesman said, declining to speculate whether Google might later try to market the technology or integrate it into one of its commercial products.
Should Google decide to market or integrate the technology into its products, the move would be seen as another in a string of recent steps taking Google into the sphere of collaborative work tools.
Marratech will continue to operate independently, supporting its customers and resellers following the software’s acquisition, it said on Thursday. However, the software now belongs to Google, so Marratech will not be able to market it anymore, the Google spokesman said.
Marratech’s engineers, who now are Google employees, will remain in Sweden and continue to develop the desktop conferencing software. Terms of the software acquisition were not disclosed.
So from this article it appears Google now own Marratech.
Ian Fieldhouse one of the web developers at SITC said in an email to me about this.
“Interesting times ahead for Marratech. Not sure how this will affect authorities using this in the future. Could lead to gTalk on steroids and would certainly add an attractive option to Google’s Google Applications for your Domain for business customers.”
Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0
