Google Buys Angstro As It Furthers Social Strategy

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Google has just bought TechCrunch50 startup Angstro according to a post on the company’s site. The company’s founder, entrepreneur Rohit Khare, has joined Google to work on the company’s social networking product Google Me, according to an L.A. Times report.

Angstro launched in 2008 as a newspaper for people in your professional network. The site skimmed through content across blogs, news sites, and a number of other sources to look for material that is related to the people you know and work with.

Last year, Angstro launched Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile. It’s unclear if Knx.to was part of the acquisition.

Google has been ramping up its team for its Facebook competitor GoogleMe, most recently ‘acq-hiring’ Slide and the company’s founder Max Levchin. Google’s decision to hire Khare isn’t surprising. With Angtsro and Knx.to, Khare has developed an expertise in developing products that tap into your social graph.

Company: Angstro
Website: angstro.com
Launch Date: April 27, 2007
Funding: $225k

Angstro delivers critical business news about people and companies across professional networks. By leveraging existing services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, Angstro helps users to easily discover and share news about colleagues and clients. Unlike clipping services that confuse different people with the same name, Angstro both disambiguates names and analyzes social graphs to prioritize those relationships that matter most. Founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs with decades of experience developing real-time notification solutions, Angstro is located in...

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