Apple has certainly been using those coffers filled with cash lately. They have made a number of acquisitions in the last year, including the Kinect co-creators. They aren‘t done yet, though. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has purchased Topsy, a search engine and analytics firm for tweets that have been one of Twitter’s biggest partners. Though there’s no clear implication for what Apple might do with Topsy, the Journal suggests that it could begin using Topsy’s data to better target ads, to inform users of its products about popular subjects, or to generally tap into of-the-moment interests.
The acquisition has reportedly cost Apple $200 million. The timing might be relevant here, as Topsy recently announced a new search engine for tweets that is capable of searching through the over 400 billion sent since Twitter first launched. Interestingly, Twitter don‘t even have the capacity themselves to do this kind of search and analysis on their own data. That close relationship has allowed Topsy to be one of the few companies given access to Twitter’s full stream of data.
Companies often use Topsy to look for how often a particular keyword is tweeted, be it a person, a subject or a certain event, to see what’s popular with the public at any given moment. Whether or not this is a market Apple wants to tap into remains to be seen, but we should receive some more concrete announcements from Cupertino soon, so stay tuned.
