Google today announced that it has acquired Polar, the highly graphical opinion poll service, for an undisclosed sum.
Polar’s service includes both a mobile app that allows users to create and participate in polls, as well as services for web publishers (we’ve occasionally run Polar polls here on TechCrunch, for example). The company says it has served over one billion polls over the last eight months and that it had 1.1 million active voters in September.
The Polar team will join Google+ and the service will continue to operate until the end of 2014. Existing users will be able to download and save an archive of their existing polls before the service shuts down for good.
Polar was co-founded by Luke Wroblewski, who previously co-founded Bagcheck, which was later acquired by Twitter, and Jeff Cole. Wroblewski also spent time as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital and as the Chief Design Architect at Yahoo.
The company had raised $1.7 million in total funding before the acquisition.
It’s unclear how much of this acquisition is about Polar’s technology and how much of it is a talent acquisition (Wroblewski is a well-known expert when it comes to design, after all). Chances are Google will incorporate at least some aspects of Polar into Google+, but Google VP of Engineering Dave Besbris — who now heads the Google+ project — today only said that the Polar team will be “working with our designers and engineers to help us make G+ as beautiful and simple to use as possible, especially on mobile devices. Stay tuned!”
