Google acquires opinion poll creater Polar

Polar will be shutting down, and its team will be coming to work on Google+

Another day, another acquisition for Google. I actually mean that literally; they really did buy a companyyesterday and now they have bought another one today.

The latest startup to get scooped up by Google, the 28th so far this year, is opinion poll provider Polar, which announced the acquisition on its homepage on Thursday.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but this was an acqui-hire for Google, and, as such, Polar will be shutting down.  he Polar team, led by CEO Luke Wreblowski, will be joining Google+; though it is not clear what they will be working on, but, considering Wreblowski's work and writings as a mobile designer, it might have something to do with mobile.

The Toronto-based Polar allows publishers to create and distribute polls, in order to increase engagement and audiences on their sites and apps. Part of what made Polar stand out was its focus on graphics, as well as polls that automatically fit to any site, or screen size. 

Polls created by Polar have been used by one in every 449 Internet users, Wreblowski revealed in agoodbye blog post. In just the last eight months, it served more than half a billion polls and had 1.1 million active voters in September. 

"We started with the simple idea that everyone has an opinion worth hearing. But the tools that existed online to meet this need weren’t up to the task: think Web forms, radio buttons, and worse. Ugh. We felt we could do much better by making opinions easy and fun for everyone," he wrote. 

" I can’t imagine a better gift than knowledge, so I’m grateful to all of you."

The company says it will only be keeping its publisher toold available until the end of this year, and will be allowing customers to download and archive their polls and data.

Founded in 2007, Polar had raised $2.9 million in funding, from investors that included Battery Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners Israel, Webb Investment Network and Morado Venture Partners.

Google's 2014 acquisitions

Remember how it seemed like every week there was another acquisition made by Yahoo last year? They approached 30 by the end of 2013.

Well, at this rate, Google will far surpass that total, since it has already made 28 acquisitions, and there's another three and a half months left to this year. In addition to Polar, here they all are, in order:

Bitspin, the Zurich-based maker of the Timely clock app. That was followed by: cyber security Impermium; artificial intelligence company Deepmind; soundauthentication firm SlickLogin; ad fraud detector Spider.io; Android gamedeveloper Green Throttle Games; drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace; back-end online retail solution Rangespan; ad attribution company Adometry; restaurant website builder Appetas; cloud monitoring service Stackdriver; Quest Visual, the company behind translation service WordLens; mobile device manager Divide; satellite maker Skybox;  video advertising company mDialog; wireless-communications startup Alpental Technologies; performance optimization platform Appurify; playlist generator Songza; smart messaging assistant Emu; video marketing company Directr; Jetpac, a company dedicated to analyzing andorganizing digital pictures; and mechanical engineering and product-design company Gecko Design; Zync Render, a cloud-based visual effects storageand rendering platform; and Lift Labs, the creators of an electronic device that improves the quality of life for those with Parkinson’s and essential tremor.

And, of course, the company bought smart thermostat company Nest Labs for $3.2 billion, the most the company has ever spent on a startup acquisition. Nest has since bought two startups of its own to add to the Google family: energy monitoring platform MyEnergy and video-monitoring and security startup Dropcam.

(Image source: