Apple Buys Tech Company Co-Founded By Two Indo- Americans For $200 Million

NEW YORK – A social mediaanalytics firm, co-foundedby two Indo-American entrepreneurs,has been acquired by Applefor over $200 million.A San Francisco-basedstartup, Topsy Labs was cofoundedby Vipul Ved Prakashand Rishab Aiyer Ghosh.The company tracks trendingtopics on microblogging siteTwitter and other social medianetworks.Topsy has analysed alltweets since 2006 and recentlyannounced a free search enginefor tweets.While neither company gavedetails of the deal’s cost, theWall Street Journal reported thatApple dished out over $200 millionfor Topsy.Among the features thatmade Topsy attractive to Appleis that it tracks what users aresaying on Twitter as it happens,it also tracks how often termsare being tweeted.While Apple confirmedto WSJ the acquisition, it didnot say why it was interested inTopsy.“Apple buys smaller technologycompanies from time totime, and we generally do notdiscuss our purpose or plans,”said Apple spokesperson KristinHuguet.She did not disclose financialdetails of the deal.According to Topsy’s website,chief technology officerPrakash is a pioneer in the fieldof collaborative filtering.In 2001, Prakash cofoundedCloudmark to createan internet scale version of hisopen-source spam filter, Vipul’sRazor. Cloudmark crossed onebillion subscribers in 2009 andis the leading worldwide platformfor messaging security.Prior to Cloudmark,Prakash was an engineer atNapster and was named one ofthe Top 100 Young Innovatorsin the world by MIT TechnologyReview.Ghosh, chief scientist atTopsy, started “First Monday”,the most widely read peer-reviewedjournal of the Internet,in 1995.For its part, Topsy calls itself“the only full-scale indexof the public social web,” notingthat it has analysed all tweetssince 2006, and says it can “instantlyanalyse any topic, termor hashtag across years of conversationson millions of websites“.That includes identifying“key influencers with the mostsocial influence for your product,brand, competitor or anyother topic”, as well as providingexact counts on any term onsocial media.Ross Rubin, an independentanalyst for Reticle Research, saidin a New York Times report thatApple could use Topsy’s dataanalysis to better understandpopular trends on social mediaand make smarter recommendationsfor things like findingapps, music and movies to buy,or finding content to watch witha future TV service.