Google On The Final Lap On Acquiring Skybox At $1 Billion Price Tag
Again the tech-streets are abuzz with talks of Google acquiring yet another company. This time Google is on the hot pursuit; or rather it is on the final stages of acquiring Skybox Imaging. Skybox Imaging is a company that provides high-resolution satellite images and videos in near real-time. Apparently, Google and Skybox have been doing a lot of talks lately and is believed that from these talks, Google is well on its way to acquiring Skybox at a price tag of $1 Billion.
Although, representatives from both the two companies, failed to answers questions from reporters about this said acquisition. But going by the report published last month about Google being in early talks on acquiring Skybox, it would be safe to assume that after the rounds of talks Google has been having with Skybox the deal is going through. Although in that report, there was no official quoting of a sale price, but the report noted that Skybox was looking to raise funds running into “hundreds of millions.”
You might want to know that both Google and Facebook have been in a hot race against each other to get into the satellite business. A race that saw Google beat Facebook at buying Titan Aerospace last month. The purchase of Titan Aerospace by Google was intended to expand internet access to new regions and ‘word’ has it Google intended to use Titan Aerospace to boost its Google Maps service delivery.
The purchase of Skybox could also help Google take Google Maps a step higher in the ladder. Skybox started back in 2009, has the capability of providing near real-time high resolution videos and images to businesses thus helping them make better informed decisions. For instance, a business could use Skybox to get a sense of consumer demand by viewing satellite images of cars parked at a certain parking lot or a farmer could use Skybox to view crops out in the field.
Users of Skybox have in the past been quoted describing Skybox akin Google for Earth. To get a feel at just how good Skybox are at giving almost real-time images and videos, take a look at the following video of a high-resolution video that was captured by Skybox.
From the video above, it would be understandable just why Google, yet again is spending $1 Billion to purchase yet another company.
