The official Google Blog announced today that Google had acquired Zenter, Inc., manufacturer of software which provides online presentation tools.
The circumstances around the development of the presentation software is described in My Innoview with Wayne Crosby.
The company appears to have started out under the name Click ‘N Slide, Inc., and may have changed names after Evan Williams spoke at a presentation held by Zenter funder Y Combinator and offered them use of the domain name – see: Zenter -> Goog
There appear to be at least two provisional patent applications applied for by the company, including one on WebFonts which allows presentation authors to create, edit, and rotate text in an intuitive manner. A search through the US Patent and Trademark office doesn’t reveal these patents, which probably aren’t published yet.
Zenter, Inc., was founded by Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker.
Wayne Crosby worked on Go Daddy’s Quick Shopping Cart and Amazon’s Web Store, and was a software engineer at Insight. He also created the very popular Count to Nine sudoku page.
Robby Walker, a Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University, is the founder of Point Writer, and created Majigs and QuickRef.org
Some additional links on Zenter and Y Combinator:
It seems that Google is very interested in the presentation format used to make information accessible to users. I believe that by implementing these Google tools in any web site, will improve both user experience and rankings.
Hi Stefanos,
I don’t know if using Google Tools on a web site will work to increase the rankings of those pages. But I do think that Google’s acquisition was aimed at providing a broader range of offerings from the search engine to organizations that might consider using office type tools from Google, cloud computing storage, and enterprise type search tools from the search engine.