Google has bought Tatter and Company (TNC), a Korean blogging software firm. The move will likely increase the search giant’s market share and presence in Asia. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We are excited to welcome Tatter and Co.’s engineering team to Google Korea,” a spokesperson for Google wrote in an e-mail to DMNews. “Acquiring Tatter and Company will allow us to enhance our online publishing tools in Korea, benefiting the large number of users who already depend on and enjoy Google and Tatter and Company’s products.”
Fittingly, the announcement was made in a blog entry by Chan-Won Kim, co-CEO of TNC, on September 12. “To my knowledge, we are one of the first major acquisitions done by Google in Asia, let alone Korea, if we don’t count Australia and also exclude share-taking activities in China for licensing purposes,” he wrote.
This move comes after Google bought the Blogger Web service from Pyra Labs in 2003.
Kim likened TNC to open-source blogger project Automattic when citing reasons for its appeal to Google. “[We’re] a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favored by [Korea’s] A-list bloggers, and also works closely with the open source community.”
