“According to The Wall Street Journal, the maker of the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod just paid more than $200 million for Topsy — a startup offering a rather impressive search engine for Twitter and other social sites — and that makes two social search buys in two months,” Ryan Tate reports for Wired. “In early October, Apple reportedly paid somewhere between $40 million to $60 million for app maker Cue.”
“Apple’s big bets on two properties well outside its core business are just the latest evidence that the personal technology sector is consolidating into the hands of a few enormous corporations — tech giants that integrate a wide range of online services, software, and physical devices,” Tate reports. “Google began as a search engine, but now the company offers a social network, its own mobile environment, and even its own phones. Facebook was originally just a social network, but now it does search, and yes, it too offers its own mobile operating system, running on [a] phone tagged with its own brand.”
MacDailyNews Take: That flopped in Kin-esque fashion – and that’s an insult to Kin.
“Apple is building a similar empire — just from the other direction,” Tate reports. “Nowadays, Apple is moving into all sorts of online services, including everything from iTunes to its new mobile mapping tool, Apple Maps. It’s not clear why the company is suddenly interested in social search, but there are so many ways the company could use Topsy and Cue, in part because both offer not only search engines but also tools for analyzing the use of social networks.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote on August 8, 2011:
Google will rue the day they decided to get greedy by working against Apple instead of with them.
Related articles:
With Topsy Labs acquisition, Apple gets rich Twitter data – December 3, 2013
Apple buys Twitter analytics startup Topsy Labs for $200 million – December 2, 2013
RUMOR: Apple acquires ‘Cue’ personal assistant app for $35-$45 million – October 3, 2013