Google's Buying Binge

By Damian Thompson Google (GOOG) has bought UK price comparison site BeatThatQuote, acquiring the web property for £37.7 million earlier this week. The company helps users search, compare and apply for lower rates and better prices on an array of financial, insurance, and legal services and products. Google is set to utilize BeatThatQuote's technology to better deliver deals and financial comparisons. Managing director of the newly acquired company John Paleomylites took to the company's website to announce the deal, posting:

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BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings. We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com's expertise in UK financial products with Google's technology, we'll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.

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This is an interesting move and will have to be watched closely -- it's widely speculated that this service could be integrated into Google's new deals service to be their "Groupon killer". Google's video business group has added new team members as YouTube purchased Next New Networks for an undisclosed sum. Based in New York and backed by former television executives from Nickelodeon and MTV, Next New Networks has built a network of videos created both in house and by independent filmmakers. YouTube has millions of people uploading videos, but in recent years it's focused on attracting and working with those whose content has large fan bases. It shares advertising revenue with independent content creators, many of whom work out of their homes. Last year, YouTube announced plans to give away $5 million to its top "vloggers" and began hosting meetings to give tips on creating online videos.

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The strategy has been working, if too slowly for Director of Global Content Operations Tom Pickett.

In fact, the number of partners making over $1,000 a month is up 300% since the beginning of 2010 and we now have hundreds of partners making six figures a year. But frankly, “hundreds” making a living on YouTube isn't enough and in 2011 we know we can and should do more to help our partners grow.

The YouTube Next initiative, as it's being called, sounds great in theory. But the biggest challenge will be the scalability of the program to handle more than “hundreds” of partners. Western Digital (WDC), the largest maker of hard drives in the world, has signed a deal to pay $4.3 billion for its competitor business unit at Hitachi (HIT), currently the third largest. The resulting company will keep the Western Digital name and will appoint Steve Milligan, currently president and CEO of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, as president of the new business. Hitachi GST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi. “This brings together two industry leaders with consistent track records of strong execution and industry outperformance,” Milligan said in a statement, adding that the combined company's products and services will range from “innovative personal storage to solid state drives for the enterprise.” The deal is interesting for two main reasons. Firstly, traditional spinning hard drives are seeing serious competition from solid-state flash memory. Almost all new cutting edge technologies from tablets to smart phones are using flash memory, while declining technologies such as PC have long relied on hard drives.

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