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Alphabet (GOOGL) Stock Jumps 1.49% as Google Acquires North to Live Up Its AR Ambitions

Alphabet‘s subsidiary and a Big Four tech giant Google acquires North, a trail breaker in human-computer interfaces and smart glasses maker backed by Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN). Not many details on the deal have been revealed, but internal sources said the sum of the acquisition totaled around $180 million. Following the news, the stock of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) went up.

According to Google, the acquisition will help it “build helpful devices and services”.

Google said in its announcement:

“North’s technical expertise will help as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts and ambient computing future. They’ll join the Google team based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada—North’s hometown and an area with impressive tech talent. We’re excited to welcome our new colleagues, and committed to the growing global tech community of Kitchener-Waterloo.”

Google and North: Focus on ‘Helpful Devices’

By the way, Google has already made an attempt to popularize its AR product. In 2013, it introduced AR glasses with an optical head-mounted display and a glass frame. However, the glasses did not saw mass acceptance. Over the years, Google was refining the glasses, with the latest version released in 2019.

With North, Google hopes to make a more prominent contribution to an AR space. Besides, it will make AR competition to giants like Amazon, Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) that are building out their AR products to keep up with the times as well. As the company has stated, the North team will continue to work on “ambient computing” technologies under Google.

More about North

Founded back in 2012, North gained fame for its holographic smart glasses Focals. Lately, North has been working on Focals 2.0, the second version of its AR glasses that look like regular glasses. But to develop the Focals 2.0, North pooled all of its resources and stopped selling the original Focals. As a result, its revenues dried up and North started to look for a buyer.

As North has said, Google that acquires it can “significantly advance” its shared vision. The company’s location will stay in Kitchener-Waterloo, but its Focals 2.0 will be shelved as part of Google’s acquisition. The Focals app and account backend will stop functioning after July 31st, 2020, though customer support for the product will continue until the end of 2020.

North stated:

“We’re proud to have grown our company in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and are thankful for the tremendous support we’ve received from the community. We are looking forward to remaining in the region with Google.”

Alphabet Stock Up

Following the acquisition announcement, the stock of Google’s parent company Alphabet went up. On Tuesday, GOOGL stock closed 1.49% up at $1418.05 per share. In the after-hours trade, it slightly dropped by 0.22% to $1,415.

Over the past seven days, Alphabet stock has traded at $1,475.3700 at its highest and $1,351.7300 at its lowest.

Alphabet (GOOGL) Stock Jumps 1.49% as Google Acquires North to Live Up Its AR Ambitions