Co-owned by desis, Topsy’s usefulness to Apple is vague.
By Deepak Chitnis
Technology giant Apple has purchased a small social media firm called Topsy, which is co-owned and co-founded by two Indian Americans.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and Vipul Ved Prakash co-founded Topsy in 2007, along with Justin Foutts and Gary Iwatani. The company offers Twitter analytics to clients by going through the millions of tweets entered every day and determining what topics and people are being talked about the most, and it’s able to do this better than the competition via an index of every tweet ever posted since 2006.
Ghosh, a computer scientist and journalist, is an Open Source Initiative board member. He is also a founder and managing editor of First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal featuring articles about computer sciences and Internet trends.
Prakash is the entrepreneur behind Vipul’s Razor, a 2001-started anti-spam software system, as well as Cloudmark, an email security system that was founded in the same year. He was also an engineer for the infamous music sharing company Napster. Originally from New Delhi, he attended St. Stephens College to pursue an undergraduate degree in mathematics, physics, and computer sciences, but dropped out to chase his own pursuits.
Since it was founded six years ago, Ghosh and Prakash’s Silicon Valley-based startup has raised over $32 million from investors and venture capitalists.
Apple, as usual, is remaining tight-lipped about its reasons behind the acquisition, only confirming that it has purchased Topsy for an undisclosed sum. But according to The New York Times, Apple may be interested in the company because its analytics could help the company better study trends in music, movies, television shows, and apps. Such a tool would be invaluable to Apple’s numerous media partners.
Topsy may also prove beneficial from an advertising standpoint. Apple collects revenue from companies who create ads that are placed within apps that Apple sells to users; Topsy’s technology could potentially aid in figuring out which ads would be most effective in which apps, helping boost ad effectiveness and allowing Apple to charge a higher fee for ad placement.
Apple may also use Topsy’s search technology in its own devices, such as the iPad and iPhone, which already include search functions. The upgrades to Apple’s search functions would also impact Siri, the popular voice-controlled search function that Apple debuted in 2010.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com