By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Apple recently purchased Topsy Labs Inc. for $200 million. Topsy analyzes and tracks Twitter trends. The big question is how can Apple capitalize on its new acquisition.
Apple’s early attempt at going social, through their music network iTunes Ping, was a huge disappointment. That service, which allowed iTunes users to broadcast their musical likes and follow musicians on the network gained one million users shortly after it launched in 2010. Ping failed to gain traction and was eventually shut down in 2012. Since then, Apple’s been happy to open its OS, both mobile and desktop, to existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Topsy Inc. is an interesting acquisition for Apple, Topsy is a certified Twitter partner and maintains a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter’s inception in 2006. It is one of the few companies that has carte blanche access to Twitter’s database and recently shared that 400 billion Tweets have been sent since 2006. Topsy has the means to track and target what is trending on Twitter. The company also developed Topsy Pro Analytics product for government agencies. This facilitate disaster response, quantify political issues, detect disease outbreak and monitor global anomalies all in real time.
The Topsy acquisition can figure into various aspects of Apple’s business. It’s fledgling iTunes Radio music streaming service (not yet available in Canada) might be looking into analytics to track usage and possibly enable better advertising on that medium.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose,” an Apple spokesperson said. Another recent Apple acquisition that raised some eyebrows was the $350 million purchase of PrimeSense, a 3D sensing company which created the first generation hardware for Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller. It is fair to say that Apple could buy these companies for their technologies and innovations but it could very well be looking at the personnel, patents or processes.
Aside from its iPhone and iPad products, Apple maintains manifold Stores like iTunes, App Store and Mac App Store plus it also has its own browser in Safari and it also owns its own iAd advertising platform. All of these could benefit from deep usage and success analytics, so Topsy’s technology will definitely be put to good use wherever it lands.
