Google Apps getting a presentation Tonic

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 20 June 2007 06:51

Strategy

Google is set to add presentation tools to Docs & Spreadsheets following its acquisition of Tonic Systems.

Based in San Francisco and Melbourne (the one in Australia, not Florida), Tonic is a development and consultancy firm using Java to deliver business solutions for PowerPoint issues including presentation automation, text extraction and document conversion.

"We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets," said Google engineering director Sam Shillace. "It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you're almost always going to share them."

Presentation sharing and collaboration should become part of Docs & Spreadsheets this (northern) summer, and some commentators are bound to see it as another nail in Microsoft Office's coffin.

Existing Tonic customers will have ongoing access to their accounts and any maintenance agreements will be fulfilled.

As usual, no financial details of the transaction were disclosed.