Google buys Remail

GMAIL PROPRIETOR Google has bought the mobile email outfit Remail and many have been left wondering what it was smoking.

Remail was formed by an ex-Google employee, Gabor Cselle. It aimed to create an efficient email search service for the Iphone and it did come up with some pretty natty search technology.

Cselle said that he will be rejoining Google in Mountain View as a product manager on the Gmail team. He said that Google was "the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information."

However this is where it all gets a bit darker. Google is going to discontinue Remail's Iphone application, and it has already been removed from Apple's App Store.

It will still work and will be supported until the end of March. "We re-enabled all paid Remail features," Cselle said. But in fact it looks like Google has bought the technology and will shut it down.

But why bother? Well the first thing would be to suggest that this sends a message to Steve Jobs in the rivalry between Google and Apple.

Remail was better than the native Iphone email application and this means that the Iphone is going to be just that little more crap without it.

However losing an Iphone app company is hardly going to make Steve Jobs cry in his green tea. Jobs didn't get to where he is today by having software that his users wanted, he got where he is today by telling users what to buy.

It is possible that Google is interested in Cselle rather than Remail itself and it wants him back on board to create new mobile applications for its products. It probably can use Remail technology in there somewhere but this could have just been a way of buying him off.

Either way no one knows why Google would want Remail any more than Microsoft would want to own the Mozilla Foundation. µ