Google just bought its first Israeli startup, LabPixies. The company was an early developer of widgets (web gadgets) like games (Flood-It), calendars and to-do lists for iGoogle personalized home pages. The little widget boxes are also made for mobile phones. There are LabPixies widgets for Android, iPhone, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook and MyYahoo.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz gives estimates of the sale at $25 million and says that while the company employs only 10 people, it has 50 million registered users for its applications.
LabPixies’ announcement addresses the expected question “will your current products continue?” or perhaps “will you remove Flood-It from the iPhone?” with the answer “There are no planned changes, but we will continue to evaluate this over time.”
The team will be based in our ever-growing Tel Aviv office and will anchor our iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall.
Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 8:29 pm