Apple has decided to buy the Social Media Analytics Firm Topsy Labs.
Topsy Labs is a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California. The company is a certified Twitter partner and maintains a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in hundreds of billions, starting from launching of Twitter in 2006 .
Topsy makes products to search, analyze and draw insights from conversations and trends on the public social websites including Twitter and Google+.
Topsy includes every public tweet ever published on Twitter for search and analysis.
Topsy competes with firms like DataSift and Gnip to figure out who is influential on Twitter, what terms are trending, and the impact of specific Twitter campaigns.
Wall Street Journal says Apple is paying more than $200 million for getting Topsy.
An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the deal but wouldn’t comment further. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” she said.
The Technology company Apple is mainly focusing on Hardware business. Apple’s earlier effort at social networking was the Ping music sharing service. But it was not successful.
Apple’s goals for buying the Social Media firm “Topsy” are unclear. Analysts said Topsy’s insights could be useful in several Apple services, including the iTunes media store, Siri voice assistant or iAd advertising platform.
And, it could help Apple recommend songs, movies and TV shows to iTunes users. Topsy engineers could help Apple learn how to extract similar insights from other large data sets.
It is Apple’s second acquisition in recent weeks. Last month, Apple announced it had bought Israeli firm PrimeSense, which specialises in making 3-D motion detection technology.
