Google Buying XML Conversion Firm Olive Software?
Aaron Wall posts a rumor on Threadwatch that Google may be purchasing Olive Software, a firm which specializes in Print to XML conversion. Google may be paying $75 million for the company and its core business model of converting PDF’s and Microfilm (among other print files) over to XML.
Aaron adds :
Many traditional publishing companies are too lazy or shortsighted to see the value of the web. They are also afraid of losing their ad dollars. Many web advertisers are too cheap / thrifty to do much magazine advertising. The average page of web content is likely of far lower quality than the average newspaper or magazine article.
What if Google found a way to bridge the gap? What if they had almost all published information in a large XML database?
And more from SiliconBeat:
Olive, which is backed with about $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Pitango, makes a company’s data files accessible from the Web. So you can see why Google might want to promote this technology: By crawling even more data, it can provide better search results.
Olive converts PDF documents, microfilm and any other files to XML, a format which can be used with any database, Web browser, or application that supports it. At the same time, Olive preserves the document’s content, structure and layout.
