THE NEWS WRAP: Google acquires restaurant web tech business and systems infrastructure startup

Google has bought Appetas, which is a website builder for restaurants.

In a blog post, the Appetas team announced they will be shutting down the service to work on “new endeavours, but will work with their customers to transition their websites to other platforms”.

Appetas didn’t elaborate on what exactly those “new endeavours” might be, but said “we now have an opportunity to help merchants on an even bigger scale”.

The company said they were excited to be joining Google, a company they believe shares their vision to bring “incredibly simply experiences to merchants that strengthen their business”.

Google also buys Stackdriver

Adding to its Appetas acquisition the tech superpower has bought Boston-based startup Stackdriver – a company creating intelligent monitoring infrastructure for systems and apps.

Google announced the move in a blog post from product manager Tom Kershaw.

“Stackdriver has built a leading service to help developers intelligently monitor the apps and services they’re building and running in the cloud,’’ he says.

“This allows customers to have more visibility into errors, performance, behaviour, and operations.

“The teams are going to be working to integrate Stackdriver’s great functionality so that Google Cloud Platform customers can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”

Long-time Apple communications VP retires

Katie Cotton, who has spent almost 20 years as Apple’s VP of worldwide corporate communications, is leaving the company.

Cotton oversaw the announcements of some of the world’s most influential products.

Overnight

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 117.52 to 16,518.54. The Australian dollar is currently trading at US93 cents.