Global search corporation Google, Inc. added to its already hefty empire when it announced its planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility the morning of August 15. The purchase marked Google’s most expensive acquisition to-date at a staggering $12.5 billion.

Google has acquired more than 100 companies over the past ten years. Curious about its most expensive acquisitions thus far? Flip through the gallery below to discover how Google has integrated its top ten priciest purchases:

1. dMarc Broadcasting

In January 2006, Google acquired advertising company dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million. Google integrated dMarc into its AdSense app.

2. On2 Technologies

After negotiations between the two companies, Google acquired video compression company On2 in February 2010 for $133 million in Google stock. On2 designed video codec technology which Google used to optimize its WebM video format.

3. Slide.com

Google bought web 2.0 company Slide.com in August 2010 for $182 million. Originally founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin Slide.com was known as the largest third-party developer of Facebook applications until Google purchased it to “make Google services socially aware.”

4. Admeld

Google purchased Admeld. in June 2011 for $400 million. The company specialized in optimizing online ad yield by simplifying ad display. Google integrated Admeld with its additional DoubleClick and Invite Media acquisitions.

5. Postini

In July 2007 Google acquired web security and archiving company Postini for $625 million. It provides the cloud computing services and spam filters that Google soon integrated into Gmail.

6. ITA Software

Google purchaed travel industry software company ITA Software for $700 million in July 2010. Google uses ITA’s software to optimize its travel and flight search.

7. AdMob

In November 2009 Google acquired mobile ad company AdMob for $750 million. The company helped Google improve its mobile advertising solutions.

8. YouTube

Long ago in October 2006 Google bought YouTube for a shocking $1.65 billion. Although the company wasn’t absorbed by Google Video, YouTube continues to function as a Google subsidiary.

9. DoubleClick

Google purchased DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in April 2007. The Google subsidiary provides ad service and support to AdSense.

10. Motorola Mobility

Google’s most recent and expensive acquisition to date occurred August 15, 2011 with its purchase of Motorola Mobility. Motorola is one of 39 manufacturers of Android handsets. By purchasing the mobile hardware manufacturer, Google hopes “to supercharge the Android ecosystem.”

Google has just acquired facial recognition software company PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition), according to an announcement on the startup’s site.

PittPatt, a project spawned from Carnegie Mellon University, develops a facial recognition technology that can match people across photos, videos, and more. The company has created a number of algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition. PittPatt’s face detection and tracking SDK locates human faces in photographs and tracks the motion of human faces in video.

Here’s the notice PittPatt has up on its site: Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.

Google has reportedly been exploring adding facial recognition to its products (i.e. Google Goggles) more seriously but has held back because of privacy concerns. As the company told Search Engine Land in March, Google wouldn’t put out facial recognition in a mobile app unless there were very strict privacy controls in place.

But in May, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company is “unlikely to employ facial recognition programs.”

Google issued this statement confirming the acquisition:

“The Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition team has developed innovative technology in the area of pattern recognition and computer vision. We think their research and technology can benefit our users in many ways, and we look forward to working with them.”

Barnes & Noble’s new Nook Simple Touch Reader is selling for $139, the same suggested retail price as Amazon’s Kindle. But the Nook has some incremental improvements that could win over customers.

Perhaps the biggest innovation, on the software side, can be seen while turning pages. On the Kindle, when you flip a page, the screen goes dark before the new page appears, sometimes with a lingering image of the last page — an effect known as “ghosting.” Barnes & Noble executives say the new Nook improves upon that experience with 80% less flashing.

The other big innovation can be seen in battery life. The Simple Touch Reader (pictured with Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch) will run for two months on a single charge, compared to less than a month for the Kindle. Otherwise, the new device runs on Android 2.1 and uses the E-Ink Pearl display.

Finally, there is a social media layer to the Nook. In April, Barnes & Noble introduced an app called Nook Friends that lets you trade recommendations with your friends on Facebook and off. Jamie Iannone, Barnes & Noble’s president of digital products, says he believes the company’s recommendation algorithm, which combines reviews from friends and experts, is a big differentiator. “It helps you figure out what you’re going to read next,” Iannone says.

Image courtesy of Business Wire

Cisco this morning announced its intent to acquire newScale, a global provider of self-service and lifecycle management software for enterprise IT and private/hybrid cloud computing.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but newScale is a company that’s raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from a wide range of investors, according to CrunchBase.

Based in San Mateo, California, newScale develops products and solutions that enable companies to select and deploy cloud services within their businesses, allowing them to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.

I’m getting a new 27-inch iMac and want to transfer all the e-mail, calendars, and documents over to it from my MacBook Pro. However, I’m afraid to move everything because my laptop has crashed a couple of times and I’m concerned that some of its files are corrupt. Am I paranoid?

I’m not licensed to make such determinations of your psyche, I’m afraid. So we’ll call you cautious. Let’s try to bring some perspective to that caution.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. When you fire up your new iMac you’ll be offered the option to transfer the data from your old Mac to your new one. Should you agree to this you can transfer—over a network or Firewire—some or all of the contents of your user account, your applications, network and computers settings, and files stored outside your Home folder.

Specifically, within your user folder, you can choose to copy the contents of your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public, and Sites folders. (You may see other folders that are also currently stored in your Home folder.) Nothing in these folders should cause your Mac to crash (though a corrupt library or file could cause an application to misbehave). The contents of the Library and System folders at the root level of your old Mac won’t be transferred to the new one as the new Mac will have its own fresh copies.

However, regardless of whether you choose a selection of these folders or all of them, the contents of the Library folder within that user folder will also be transferred. And this Library folder is where I’d focus my attention.

It’s possible that there’s something in it that’s mucking up your MacBook Pro. One easy way to find out is to create a new user account on your laptop, switch to that account, and see if your MacBook Pro crashes in the way it has previously. If not and you can predictably make it crash in your regular account, the ~/Library folder is suspect.

More often than not, however, application crashes are due to a problem with a specific application and kernel panics (the big crashes that bring a Mac to its knees) are hardware related. Given that, you might not wish to migrate your applications but instead install fresh copies. And before jacking in a dozen peripherals, try running the new Mac with just its mouse and keyboard. If it fares well, feel free to use your peripherals. If it then crashes, look for updated drivers and, failing that, unplug the peripherals, plug in one at a time, test each one, and try to determine which is doing The Bad Thing.

Or, do as I do. Run Software Update on the MacBook Pro to be sure it’s completely up to date and then migrate everything on it to the new Mac. Afterwards, if it doesn’t work as you’d like it to, whip out the iMac’s installation disc and take it back to like-new condition. At that point you can use some of these hints for a more selective migration.

It looks like December 31, 2010 will not mark the end of Google Wave after all. The Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for supporting Apache open source projects, has accepted Google Wave into its incubator program.

Google announced in August that it was ending development of the real-time communication and collaboration project due to low user adoption. Since then, it has been working to prepare Wave in a Box, a standalone version that would give developers the functionality of Waves and the ability to run them on their own server.

As many of Wave’s components are open source, others can and do continue to work on the project. According to Google, at November’s Wave Protocol Summit it was “quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box.” By being part of the Apache Incubator, that community will be able to continue to grow.

Alongside community development, one of the initial goals of Apache Wave is to migrate the codebase from code.google.com to the Apache Software Foundation’s infrastructure.

Aro Mobile, a mobile communications startup backed by Microsoft’s Paul Allen, made waves back in October when it emerged after three years in stealth as a suite of interconnected applications for Android smartphones. Installed as a single download from the Android Market, Aro places icons on user’s homescreens: Phone, Email, Browser, Calendar, Contacts and Messaging. These are the core “PIM” (personal information manager) applications on mobile devices.

Because of Android’s relative openness, Aro is able to completely integrate its PIM solution onto the Android mobile platform. But now, as the company prepares to launch its iPhone version, compromises had to be made. This begs the question: can innovation around core apps even work on iPhone?

Get to Know Aro, the Semantic Email, Contact, Messaging and Calendar Suite

Aro Mobile, to catch you up, is a semantic technology software company led by CEO John Lazarus, a former Microsoft employee, now senior advisor to Allen’s Vulcan Capital and board member at Evri, another notable semantic tech company, which recently went mobile too. Simply put, Aro’s goal is to make our so-called “smartphones” much, much smarter by using machine intelligence to interconnect the apps we use the most, the core apps used in communications.

Semantic technology is a difficult concept to explain to mainstream users, but Aro demonstrates its potential by innovating on top of the PIM, the core communications applications that mobile users access daily. The software understands the language of mobile devices, including the way you chat via SMS, the way you email, even the way you Tweet. It can identify people, places and dates referenced in your emails, messages and calendar appointments and the importance of those items to you. Within Aro’s graph of your social connections, it understands that there’s a stronger connection between someone that you’ve emailed multiple times and someone who’s only listed as an address book entry. That’s the power of semantics, actually: the ability to understand.

We’ve seen semantic technology cropping up here and there lately, but mostly on Android devices. Keyboard replacement apps like SwiftKey and Siine, for example, are using machine intelligence to help you type more quickly with word suggestions – but not just suggestions based on a database of words in a given language, but those delivered through an understanding of how you – you personally - communicate. If you start typing “cy” on your phone, SwiftKey or Siine might suggest “cya!!!!,” if that’s the way you normally complete a text message conversation. Siine plans to take things a step further, with support for translation between languages and integration with other mobile applications, too.

Aro, along these same lines, wants to function as a conduit between the phone and the “cloud.” Although it focuses on email for now, it will soon integrate with Facebook and Twitter to add another layer of data and understanding to your communications.

That’s an explanation of Aro at a very high level, however. In practice, the app, or rather, the suite of apps installed function as your phone book, contact lists, calendar and email client. Even in its raw, early format, the app is smart. Very smart. It can identify a person, place or date, and then, when you tap on the item (identified objects are circled), a list of actions appear. If you tap a name, Aro may suggest that you edit the contact, add to your contacts, send an email, place a call, etc. And if you were to proceed, it knows what information to use – it knows the phone number to call or it could automatically fill in the contact details. The exchange of data between the apps is seamless – you don’t have to copy and paste information from one app to another and you don’t have to constantly toggle between apps, either. Everything talks to everything else.

For now, Aro serves as a useful personal assistant of sorts – in addition to its interoperable apps, you can use Aro search against your entire archive of data, the results custom-tailored to you. In a later version of the app, a location service will be added, allowing you to further personalize your search results. For example, a search for a “coffee” in a given city could return recommendations based on where you had been recently, as opposed to the sort of default list that appears in Google.

Design Challenges

As innovative as the technology is, the interface still feels too technical, as if built by engineers not designers. The objects Aro recognizes are circled so as to highlight them, like a teacher correcting a student’s homework. Aro is training wheels for learning semantic technology. Here’s a person, here’s a date, it tells you. Tap this here. See what happens.

The text is circled because we, as Web users, can quite grasp the concept of actionable data that’s not highlighted in some way. We expect hyperlinks, colored and underlined, to direct our clicks. But links are going away, says Andrew Hickl, Aro’s CTO. Semantic technology will eventually lead to their demise. In a decade or so, any object, any piece of data, anything that you can touch will be able to do anything and no one will need training to know that’s the case – it will just be the way it is.

On iPhone, Limitations

Android was the perfect place for new, experimental technology like this to launch. Because Android isn’t as tightly locked down as iPhone, there’s room for software like this to take hold. There, Aro can behave more like individual applications and can more deeply integrate into various Android menus and functions.

As Aro prepares to launch on the iPhone, however, there are limitations. The iPhone Aro app when launched opens up the Aro suite of apps, the icons appearing as if in a folder. While the “apps” can still talk to each other, on iPhone they aren’t really individual apps. The email “app” can’t become the default mail app on the iPhone and the calendar “app” can’t become the default calendar. This limits how deeply Aro’s integration can be. You can’t, for example, email a picture using Aro’s email app – you still have to use the Apple-provided mail client.

For iPhone users, the level of control and consistency Apple provides is one of the key selling points of the device. Everything works as it should. But it’s all Steve Jobs’ vision – and while that’s nothing to sniff at, not by any means – there’s a reason why many early adopters are going to Android. The platform allows others outside of Apple to fully develop ideas of their own, too. And we get to watch them as they do, we get to test the apps in early alpha and beta formats, and we get to participate in the innovation that occurs.

Comparatively to iPhone’s own core apps, Aro may not be as pretty, but its underlying technology needs a place to flourish and develop. Like other semantic apps, there needs to be a real-world playground where people can try these new things. For now, that playground is Android.

Aro is only one example of this. Siine and SwiftKey (mentioned above) are another. ON, a new company with an innovative take on the address book is yet a third. ON lets you maintain different profiles for different groups of users – one status message for friends, another for colleagues; one voicemail message for the boss, another for the spouse, and so forth. Like Aro, ON launched on Android, then dumbed itself down for iPhone. SwiftkKey hasn’t even bothered with iPhone app. It’s unclear how Siine will manage.

iPhone users wishing to get a taste of what’s possible on Android can try Aro, when the app becomes available in Q1 2011. A lot of the functionality will still be present. But for iPhone users, trying Aro may feel like toying around with a demo. For full-speed immersion, try the Android version instead.

As the Internet of Things slowly becomes a commercial reality, led by industries such as food and logistics, the underlying technologies (RFID, sensors, QR codes and more) become less important than what is done with the data. As Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC, put it to me recently: "the algorithms are more interesting now than the sensors."

Begole's group at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox) puts more emphasis nowadays on technologies such as predictive analytics, context engines and "Behavioral Ware". It's much more about the software, than the sensors.

According to Begole, "the early Ubicomp [in the late 80's and 90's] was all about making machines aware of the environment." However this was "really hard because the sensors didn't exist – or they weren't cheap enough – and we didn't know exactly how to use sensors to detect the environment."

But the world of sensors is "not hard anymore," Begole claimed. He pointed to accelerometers and gyros on the iPhone and Android, which "any developer can access."

Begole explained that PARC is trying to take sensor technology to the next level, by adding a layer of meaning atop the sensor data. "It's not just the state of the world," he told me, "but what does that state mean to the user? What's important, what's significant about the situation? That's what we're trying to focus on."

He noted that new types of sensors are being developed too. For example, his Ubicomp group at PARC have been experimenting with biochemical sensors. "We haven't done much with biochemical sensors," he added, "although we do some chemical sensing in one of the hardware labs here."

He also mentioned disposable sensors, using print, that can be put on your body like a band aid.

Here is a presentation by Bo Begole that explains PARC’s Ubicomp software developments further:

The software side of the Internet of Things is where much of the innovation is happening. PARC, HP, IBM, Cisco and others are all working hard to develop algorithms that will process and make sense of the explosion of data coming from sensors.

So, you’re not content with just using the social web; you want to be part of building it, too.

As a budding or beginning web app developer, you’ve got a difficult but rewarding path ahead of you. You have to master (or at least attempt to master) the intricacies of OOP and scripting languages, learn to build web apps the hard way (practice, practice, practice), and network your way into a few job opportunities. You must also decide whether you’d like to work as a solo/consultant/freelancer, a startup employee or founder, or a rank-and-file developer at an established company.

Here are a few tips and words of advice that might make your individual path a bit easier and hopefully a bit shorter. We’ve also compiled a gallery of 140-character tips from veterans at the end of this post.

If you’ve already found success as a front-end web dev, we welcome your suggestions in the comments, as well.

1. Go Open Source

By far the most oft-repeated words of advice we heard from masters of the web dev trade were these: Put in some time on open-source projects. The hands-on experience will challenge you, educate you and help you build your body of work.

Aside from code for code’s sake, open source projects are a good way to meet other devs and do some networking. You’ll have the opportunity to work with people who are much more skilled and experienced than you are yet; take full advantage of this situation and be a sponge.

SourceForge and GitHub and good places to start looking for open source projects that appeal to you; also, as you follow various blogs around the web and see what projects might need a few extra hands. Sites like Code for America and organizations such as the Mozilla Foundation are always looking for good developers with free time.

Finally, when working on open source apps, not only will you get great practice and be able to learn from some really excellent engineers; you’ll also be giving back to the community. As some would say, creating and sharing free and open-source software is one of the best things you can do to help your neighbors as a developer.

2. Expand Your Web-Browsing Repertoire

“Fish where the fish are” is an old advertising axiom. Its meaning is fairly obvious: If you’re aiming to meet, influence or otherwise “catch” a particular group of people, you have to be seen and heard in the places (real or digital) where they congregate.

If you’re “fishing” for other developers — the people who will teach you, help you, and with any luck, hire you — you’ll need to add a new set of websites to your browsing and bookmarking repertoire.

Hacker News, while it occasionally deviates toward social media/Silicon Valley in-jokes and gossip, can be a wonderful resource for meeting other developers, getting advice and learning about the ecosystem, particularly where startups are concerned. The site is an offshoot of Y Combinator, the well-known startup incubator.

GitHub’s Gist, Forrst, UseTheSource and CodeSnipp.it are four places on the web where you can go to see and post brief code examples. Be open to critique, and don’t be a show off. For UseTheSource, we recommend lurking until you’re ready to post your most stellar hacks, as the site is intended to be a repository for beautiful code.

Other sites to check out include SourceForge, Stack Overflow, Google Code and Google Groups. There are literally hundreds of solid online resources for web app developers; which sites you follow and which communities you join really depends on your desired areas of expertise and spheres of professional interest.

Once you’re ready to move into the work force as a web dev, our readers have recommended Dice, ODesk, and even Craigslist as good spots for job-hunting, particularly for freelance work.

3. Network Your Socks Off

Of course, along with all this new web-browsing activity, you’ll be seeing a horde of new and friendly faces: The developers and designers that make up the web app-building community.

Blogger, entrepreneur and developer Jesse Stay says, “Network, network, network! Find your future boss on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter,” and his advice rings true. If you can locate and befriend a few like-minded, highly skilled professional web devs, they might be able to guide and help you in your career as you broaden and deepen your skill set.

We recommend joining a few Facebook groups and checking out developer-oriented Twitter lists from Twitter users you already follow and respect. Once you’ve located the people you’d like to emulate, go back to Tip 1 and see how you can offer your time and skills to any open source projects those people might be involved in.

The golden rules of networking still apply: Give as much as you’d like to receive, and be a good resource and connector for others, not just a parasite.

4. Show Your Code

Once you’re practicing, networking, reading, working and generating piles of beautifully functional code, you’re going to want to show it off to the world. After all, as one reader said, “GitHub is the new résumé.”

Use a robust, accessible code repository such as GitHub or SourceForge, release your code into the wild. And don’t stop there; be sure to blog about any clever hacks or efficient new ways of doing things that you may discover along the way. Make sure your code samples show good architecture, documentation and versatility.

Showing others your code is equal parts giving back (by open-sourcing it) and self-promotion (if the code is good, that is). If the code you’re posting is worthy, then sharing it is a win-win scenario.

5. Market Yourself

For some devs, bragging is second nature. For others, self-promotion is an uncomfortable stretch. No matter which camp you fit into (and even if you’re somewhere in between), you’ll need to learn how to gracefully and effectively promote yourself as a web applications developer.

It goes without saying that you’ll want to put the full force of your coding skills into building an elegant website. We don’t mean elegant in the general sense of the term; we mean “elegant” as in “the intersection of simplicity and functionality” in form and function. And it goes without saying that the source code for your site should be immaculate, as well.

Focus on creating a good portfolio that shows a breadth of work on a variety of projects. Your apps could be entirely open-source; you could also include client work, if you’ve had the opportunity to develop web apps for others. Make sure this experience is attractively highlighted on your résumé, along with any languages or frameworks you know and your proficiency in each.

Once you have a great website that showcases your skills, make sure you and others link to it frequently in your email signature and from your other online profiles, and don’t be afraid to show your Twitter and Facebook friends when you add a new item to your portfolio or update a section of your website. Whether you use physical or digital business cards, make sure your website is the most prominent link the receiver will see.

Bonus Round: Little Things Mean a Lot

• If you’re looking for full-time work, be a great developer and a well-rounded candidate with communication skills.
• Always thoroughly comment your code.
• Be as good at reading code as you are at writing it.
• If you’re a developer, learn something about design, UX/UI, business and web economics (especially if you’re going into a startup).
• Customize your personal growth: If you don’t get a job, ask why and what you can do to improve.
• Remember the big picture — make sure your code is built with scalability in mind.
• Commit to perpetual self-education.
• Don’t give up.

Finally, here are some tips gathered from our friends around the web:

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Tips for Aspiring Web Developers

Development Job Listings

Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the best development jobs from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Senior Application Engineer at Match.com in Dallas, TX.
• Web Application Developer at Ticketfly, Inc. in San Francisco, CA.
• Senior Lead Developer at Liquify Digital in Seattle, WA.
• Software Engineer in Test at Google Inc. in New York, NY.
• Software Engineer at AxialMarket in New York, NY.

More Job Search Resources from Mashable

– 6 Job Search Tips for Aspiring Programmers
– 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers
– 5 Tips for Aspiring Copywriters and Art Directors
– 5 Tips for Aspiring Social Media Marketers
– Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Music Bloggers

Image courtesy of Flickr, e2.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has just acquired Auctiva, a company that develops eBay auction management software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This deal comes off of Alibaba’s recent acquisition of U.S. e-commerce company Vendio. Auctiva provides a variety of listing, marketing and management tools as well as image hosting and storefronts to sell on online marketplaces like eBay.

Alibaba says that the acquisition will help provide tools and resources for U.S. small businesses looking to leverage e-commerce. Auctiva’s platform will be integrated with Alibaba’s online marketplace AliExpress, allowing users to list product in eBay as well. The company says the combination of both the Auctiva and Vendio acquisitions brings more than 250,000 new customers to the Alibaba.com family of products.