Apple Inc. (AAPL) has acquired social-media search and analytics company Topsy Labs Inc. for more than $200 million, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
According to the WSJ report, the San Francisco-based startup's service is used by companies to analyze consumer sentiment on Twitter Inc.'s (TWTR) social network, as it has real-time access to messages on the microblogging service. Topsy is also said to be one of the few partners of Twitter that have access to the full stream of tweets since 2006, dubbed "fire hose".
Unlike traditional web search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.
The WSJ reported that Topsy's tools are able to decipher how often a term is tweeted, find an influential person on a specific subject, or measure the exposure of an event or campaign. The company analyzes the information and resells it to customers.
According to the WSJ report, Apple could use insights received from Topsy to recommend songs, movies and TV shows to users of iTunes. The company could also refine the search feature in the Siri voice assistant in the iPhone and iPad. Beyond Twitter's data, Topsy's engineers could help teach Apple how to extract similar insights from large data sets.
Topsy was founded in 2007 by Vipul Ved Prakash, a former engineer of Napster Inc. who also founded anti-spam software provider Cloudmark. Since its founding, Topsy has raised more than $32 million from investors, including BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund Management LLC and Ignition Partners. The company also reportedly arranged $3 million in debt from Western Technology Investment LLC.
In mid-November, Apple reportedly acquired PrimeSense, an Israel-based supplier of motion gaming devices, in a deal valued at about $345 million.
AAPL closed Monday's regular trading session at $551.23, down $4.84 or 0.87 percent on a volume of 16.88 million shares. In after-hours, the stock gained $0.49 or 0.09 percent to $551.72.
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