“When Twitter spends $90 million to buy a social analytics company, nobody bats an eye, because of course Twitter has an interest in understanding its own users’ behavior,” Jeff Bercovici reports for Forbes. “When Apple does something similar, dropping a reported $200 million on Topsy Labs – well, it’s a very different matter.”
“Apple, as usual, is adding to the intrigue by declining to explain itself,” Bercovici reports. “What’s the explanation here? In the view of social analytics executives and analysts, there are a number of possibilities, none of them necessarily exclusive of the others.”
• Using social data to improve services, particularly Siri
• Enhancing content discovery
• Fixing app search and discovery
• Strengthening the overall app ecosystem
• Real-time marketing and relationship management
• Juicing iAd
Read more in the full article here.
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Apple buys Twitter analytics startup Topsy Labs for $200 million – December 2, 2013
“Apple, as usual, is adding to the intrigue by declining to explain itself…”
I love that quote. As if Apple owes these guys any kind of explanation for strategic acquisitions. Kind of along the lines of “Mr. X failed to immediately respond to our request for information.”
That description is pretty vague but I’m all for anything that improves Siri. Most of the time it just says, “I’m sorry I can’t take any requests right now.”
Sounds like you don’t use it enough, or you have crappy cell coverage and Siri can’t reach out to the data center.
Cell coverage is a bigger contributor to phone issues than most people realize.
I’m looking at YOU, Sprint!
Whatever they do, its got to be better than offering $3Bn for a photo messaging app.
Or $B for Motorola Mobility or Skype or AOL or…the list goes on.
Apple tends to make relatively small, strategic acquisitions (small relative to Apple’s size and resources) and then take the necessary time to carefully weave those technologies into its products and ecosystem. That is why I trust Apple to take care of its large cash hoard. Apple seldom wastes money.
Other companies desperately jump into large acquisitions hoping that they will somehow magically transform their company into something better. Instead, the transformation usually takes the form of a multi-$B write-off and a decline towards irrelevance. The lesson? That magic has to come from within…you cannot buy it.
I thought Thomas Edison killed Topsy over 100 years ago?
By harvesting opinions, Apple will “improve services”?
Hardly. Apple will simply bombard you with more iAds more quickly. Thanks a lot, Big Brother.