Google acquires FeedBurner, Peakstream

Mountain View (CA) - Google has confirmed that it has acquired Peakstream, a developer of application interfaces for massively parallel processing as well as FeedBurner, a provider of feed distribution and management tools for bloggers and podcasters.

The purchase of Peakstream marks Google’s entry into the developer space for multi-core CPUs and general purpose graphics processors (GPGPUs). An official announcement with background information about the purchase has not been made, but an early report published by The Register this morning already has been confirmed by a Google spokesperson, who was quoted in an article by the Wall Street Journal.

Given Google’s enormous hunger for processing power and the prospect of GPGPUs being able to multiply the floating point performance of today’s supercomputers, the acquisition appears to be a natural fit for the company. However, rumor has it that Google was able to purchase Peakstream for very little money - as the company reportedly could have gone out of business soon. 

Peakstream was one of the first companies to realize the potential of a graphics processor for commercial applications. The company offers a software platform, based on a C and C++ application interface and virtual machine, which handles work scheduling and memory management and a way for programmers to easily access a combined system of processors, such as x86 or Cell chips, and graphics cards. Simply by adding the horsepower of graphics cards to an existing computer, the company claims that the original system can be accelerated by a factor of 20x.

FeedBurner has been connected to Google’s Blogger for some time and now becomes an integral part of the blogging platform. FeedBurner creates web feeds that allows bloggers and podcasters to distribute and monetize their content to what the company claims are "millions of users around the world". The company also offers a feed advertising platform, which publishes in-feed ads as well as RSS-driven ads.