Google on Thursday announced that it has acquired social polling startup Polar, in an effort to boost up its social networking offering Google+.
Announcing the deal in a Google+ post, Dave Besbris, Google’s VP of engineering for Google+ said that he is thrilled to welcome Luke Wroblewski and the talented Polar team to Google. He added that the Polar team will be working with Google’s designers and engineers to help make the search giant’s social network Google+ as beautiful and simple to use as possible, especially on mobile devices.
Launched almost 2 years ago, Polar allows users to create and participate in polls as well as services for web publishers. The social polling startup has served more than half a billion polls in the past eight months and had 1.1 million unique voters in September, Founder Luke Wroblewski said in a blog post, announcing the Google deal. The startup had raised $1.7 million in total funding before the acquisition.
Post acquisition Polar will stop taking new customers and will spend the next few months closing down the business to focus on new Google Plus initiatives. The iOS Polar app has currently been removed from the App Store; however, the service will continue to operate until the end of this year. Existing users can request for an archive of their existing polls before the service shuts down.
Financial terms of the deal have not yet been made public.
