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Wireless - Thursday, September 27, 2007

Google Buys Mobile Apps' Zingku & Its Ripple9 Site

Boston-based Zingku is the brainchild of MIT-educated Sami Shalabi who launched the startup in May 2006. Before that he was with IBM for half a decade. His co-CEOs are Mussie Shore, who was CTO at McKinsey, and Marty Fahey, who was CEO of publicly traded Webhire.

Zingku is a tool to supercharge txt messaging. Zingku also powers another site owned by Shalabi called Ripple9, which is really just a vertical application of Zingku, where musicians are encouraged to promote themselves. Ripple9 explains that "Ultimately we'll be offering the service to anyone who makes creative works, but initially we are focusing purely on musicians."

Ripple9 enables musicians and bands to use the web and mobile phones to send mobile fliers, text messages, ring tones, wallpapers, gig alerts, etc. to their fan base.

Today, Google announced that it had bought Zingku assets. No price was released. Flagship Ventures invested in Zingku in May 2006. Accounts on Zingku and Ripple9 are both frozen to new users. This is another case of Google buying a relatively obscure software company and likely not paying much for it. We know Google like to hire and buy highly educated folks and Zingku has that but it doesn't seem to have what other companies want - millions of users.

Read - Google Operating System