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Google Acquires Wildfire Along with Zuckerberg's Sister

By Leo Boon Yeow - on 3 Aug 2012, 2:15pm

Google Acquires Wildfire Along with Zuckerberg's Sister

Image Source: Screenshot from Wildfire website

Google has announced that it has acquired Wildfire Interactive, a New Zealand-based social media management platform company. Originally created to be an adventure travel company, it went on to become a social media technology company. The transition began when the founders, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, wanted to run promotions on Facebook. However in order to do that, they'd first have to create an application to do so, and it led to Wildfire creating social media software solutions.

Today, the company's software manages social media marketing for 16,000 companies, 30 of which are top global brands. Mashable also pointed to social media company acquisitions by Oracle and Salesforce, as a start in a string of B2B social media firm acquisitions. According to a Google blog post, Jason Miller, Google's Product Management Director, said that Wildfire will be integrated into Google's suite of website and ad management tools.

Mashable gave deeper insight into the acquisition, and speculated that it could be Google's way of being more relevant in today's display advertising environment. With a full and powerful suite of tools, it means that advertisers will approach Google, even if they want to advertise on other platforms, like Facebook, for example. Interestingly, this acquisition also means that Arielle Zuckerberg, a junior product manager at Wildfire, now works for Google. Yes, that same Zuckerberg whose company Facebook was rumored to be interested in buying Wildfire, and whose younger sister now works for one of his biggest rivals.

Source: Mashable

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