Apple pays $200m for Twitter analytics firm - reports

Tech giant Apple has bought social media analytics firm Topsy Labs, according to reports.

The Wall Street Journal reports Apple paid $200m for the business, citing sources close to the deal. Topsy specialises in analysing the global conversation on Twitter. Its tools can decipher how often a term is tweeted, find an influential person on a specific subject, or measure the exposure of an event or campaign. The company is one of a handful of Twitter Inc. partners with access to the so-called "fire hose"—the full stream of tweets since 2006, which now average roughly 500 million a day. Topsy then analyses this information and resells it to customers, according to the WSJ. ...