The recently announced acquisition of BumpTop by Google is just one of many industry moves to consolidate positions driven by players like Apple, Google, HP, and Microsoft. While HP’s acquisition of Palm brings HP an interesting alternative to their existing iPAQ mobile phone line, the basis for the acquisition is likely based more on the acquisition of the WebOS operating system and Palm’s patent portfolio relating to mobile device user interfaces, especially touch screens. An immediate casualty of the Palm acquisition may be HP’s Slate tablet PC based on Microsoft’s Windows 7 OS. Google, through its acquisition of BumpTop and several other recent acquisitions, is also working to strengthen its position. The video below illustrates the appealing nature of the BumpTop multitouch desktop interface and suggests why Google would snatch up the company to further build its position relative to Apple, HP, Microsoft and others.
This trend to acquire companies with interesting products and patents is of course not new. In the area of touch screen interfaces one good example is Apple’s 2005 acquisition of FingerWorks. FingerWorks founded in 1998 developed products and patents incorporating multitouch touch screen user interfaces. FingerWorks intellectual property acquired by Apple and additional patents by Apple after FingerWorks personnel joined the company have provided Apple with a strong base of innovation on which to launch products including the iPhone and iPad.
While the slowly recovering economy may be in part to credit for the recent up tick in acquisition activity, we expect that strong sales of mobile and tablet computing devices during the preceding economic slump points to the mobile device market as an area of continuing high performance.
