Google making its mark on the L.A. technology scene.Google Inc. marked the one-year anniversary of the opening of its Santa Monica Santa Monica (săn`tə mŏn`ĭkə), city (1990 pop. 86,905), Los Angeles co., S Calif., on Santa Monica Bay; inc. 1886. Tourism and retailing are important, and the city has motion-picture, biotechnology, and software industries. office last week with a decidedly L.A.-style event: a party and a filmmakers' panel. The search engine giant might seem to be reaching out to Hollywood and its content producers with events like that, but since it arrived on the Southland south·land or South·land n. A region in the south of a country or an area. south  land·er n.Noun 1. scene it has aggressively bought out and partnered with L.A. firms across a broad range of sectors. "Google has consistently been interested in any company which has great engineers already within it," said Google's Engineering Director Thomas Williams Thomas Williams may refer to:
Google established its L.A. presence in 2003, when it bought Santa Monica's Applied Semantics semantics [Gr.,=significant] in general, the study of the relationship between words and meanings. The empirical study of word meanings and sentence meanings in existing languages is a branch of linguistics; the abstract study of meaning in relation to language or for roughly $40 million and 2.3 million shares of Google stock. It moved into the former ASI ASI, n See Anxiety Sensitivity Index. offices and established a product development office, which helped turn Applied Semantics' Ad Sense into Google AdSense A targeted advertising program that allows Web sites to monetize their content via Google ads. Google delivers text, image and video ads to the site pages based on the keywords embedded in the site's pages, which have been modified with JavaScript code to accept the ads. . In July of 2004, one month before its initial public offering, Google bought Pasadena photo management software firm Picasa. In March of 2005, Google bought San Diego's Urchin urchin - munchkin Software, a provider of Web analytic software, which Google has since incorporated into its advertising and publishing products. In January 2006, Google acquired Newport Beach's dMarc Broadcasting for $1.1 million and contingent payments. Google integrated dMarc's technology into its AdWords platform, significantly upping the value of the deal for dMarc. The dMarc deal typified the Google approach in L.A. County, in which it has acquired a firm with a particular technology, along with its staff, and adapted it to a broader use. "What we're doing now is a continuation of start-ups that have been acquired by us," said Williams, "but what has sort of evolved out of that is much different." At about the same time, Google moved into its current location at the corner of Fifth and Arizona streets in Santa Monica. Today, about 200 of the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm's 10,000 employees are based there. Its most recent purchase came last August, when it scooped up Santa Monica-based Neven Vision, an image recognition software firm. Ken Ong is the other engineering director at the Santa Monica office and the operations manager See datacenter manager. is Michael Todd. By DAN COX Staff Reporter |
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