A social media analytics firm, co-founded by two Indian-American entrepreneurs, has been acquired by Apple for over $200 million.
A San Francisco-based start-up, Topsy Labs, was co-founded by Vipul Ved Prakash and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh.
The company tracks trending topics on micro-blogging site Twitter and other social media networks.
Topsy has analysed all tweets since 2006, and recently announced a free search engine for tweets.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Apple dished out over $200 million for Topsy.
Among the features that made Topsy attractive to Apple is that it tracks what users are saying on Twitter as it happens, it also tracks how often terms are being tweeted.
While Apple confirmed to WSJ the acquisition, it did not say why it was interested in Topsy.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time-to-time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said Apple spokesperson Kristin Huguet.
She did not disclose financial details of the deal. According to Topsy’s website, Chief Technology Officer Mr. Prakash is a pioneer in the field of collaborative filtering.
In 2001, Prakash co-founded Cloudmark to create an internet-scale version of his open-source spam filter, Vipul’s Razor. Cloudmark crossed one billion subscribers in 2009, and is the leading worldwide platform for messaging security.
Mr. Ghosh, chief scientist at Topsy, started ‘First Monday’, the most widely read peer-reviewed journal of the Internet, in 1995.
