Apple buys Topsy for 200M

Apple buys Twitter analytics company Topsy for $200M

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David Paul Morris

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during a product announcement in Cupertino, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013.

Jon Xavier

Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Apple has purchased the social analytics firm Topsy for $200 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It's a surprising move. Apple, in many ways, is the least social of the big Silicon Valley tech firms. Unlike Google, Facebook and even Yahoo, it has yet to move into social networking in a big way (it's abortive efforts to make iTunes Ping happen notwithstanding).
Topsy, for those not familiar with it, is a company that uses Big Data analytics to glean information useful to marketers from raw social data. It primarily works with Twitter, and is one of a few companies with access to the company's "firehose", or the raw, unedited stream of tweets. Topsy's technology is currently used for things like finding out how often a term is tweeted, gauging the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns, and finding the most influential Twitter users on a given topic.
Not something that's likely to be built into the next-generation iPhone, in other words.
Apple, as usual, isn't commenting on the deal, so it is really anyone's guess what the company wants with Topsy. The obvious connection is to iTunes, because that seems to have been where most of the company's focus in social has been up to this point. The iTunes model is currently in the midst of an overhaul thanks to the introduction of iTunes Radio, so it's possible that Apple wants Topsy to help with that. Social data would be a very useful signal as the company tries to build the ultimate music recommendation engine and outfox rivals Google and Pandora. The first step to more closely integrating iTunes and social is understanding how music sharing is happening on social platforms, as well.

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Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.

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