Will Google Buy Israeli Media Start-Up?

Google is considering buying Israeli software to keep up with rival Apple’s move towards new computing infrastructure. The Los Angeles based company, Catch Media, has developed software in its Israeli research facility to diversify the platforms on which media content is made available, such as computers, TVs and mobile phone. “In today’s world people have difficulty moving around media formats,” Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer Boaz Ben-Yaacov told The Media Line. “They don’t understand why they can’t buy a song on iTunes and listen to it on their Android phone without having to transfer it through ten different places.” Examples given by Ben-Yaacov include having an iTunes music playlist available in rental cars when traveling or having access to favorite TV programs while being in a hotel room halfway across the planet. According to some media reports, Google’s interest in Catch Media was sparked in November 2009 when it lost out to Apple in a deal reportedly worth $80 million on the acquisition of Lala, a service which offers users the ability to store personal music on online servers thus giving users global online access to their collection.
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=28108