Google Acquiring Frommer's In Big Travel Data Play 40
Nerval's Lobster writes with the widely-reported news that Google plans to acquire from publisher John Wiley & Sons the Frommer's travel guides,
along with Wiley's other travel-related publishing assets. "This marks Google's second purchase of a popular guide in less than a year. In September 2011, the search engine giant acquired Zagat, with the intention of mining the company's enormous trove of data on restaurants and local points of interest. Zagat scores and summaries now appear in the Google+ Local tab (present on the left rail of the Google+ profile page). Google's acquisition streak reveals a particular conundrum facing tech companies that offer travel and location services: you can assign thousands of the world's best software engineers the task of creating a simple, intuitive interface for ferreting out the best airline fares or restaurants—but sooner or later, you'll need to fill that system with reliable content."
Re:Anti-trust? (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, this has got to be getting into anti-trust issues.
Sorry, but the anti trust laws went the way of the Constitution. Both are completely ignored now. That's why we have companies that are too big to fail. Anti trust laws should have limited banks like Chase buying up all the competition. That's why we no longer have nice honest small town banks anymore.