By Gary Ng on February 23rd, 2012 0
It was first reported by TechCrunch that Apple has acquired Chomp, a three year old startup:
I haven't been able to learn the exact terms of the deal, but I hear that all the investors should be very pleased with the outcome. This is not a cheap "acqui-hire", Apple has bought the Chomp team and technology and plans to use both to completely revamp App Store search and recommendations, I hear. And they clearly have the money to do it: Apple has nearly $100 billion in cash (and cash equivalents) in the bank now coming off their monster quarter.
Chomp has 20 employees and raised just over $2.5 million worth of funding. Their specialty is in the area of app discovery, which we all know is hard to do with the current setup of the App Store. According to 9to5Mac, their sources had earlier noted an iTunes/App Store overhaul was in the pipeline, but today they go on to mention senior Chomp staff are already working for Apple:
Our sources say that Chomp CEO Ben Keighran and CTO Cathy Edwards are already at work at Apple. Keighran has joined the iTunes Marketing team and Edwards is now a Senior iTunes Engineer.
Just now, Apple confirmed the acquisition of Chomp to AllThingsD, but didn't say much of course:
Apple on Thursday confirmed it has acquired San Francisco-based start-up Chomp, which operates a search engine for apps, for an undisclosed amount. Apple declined to elaborate on how it plans to integrate Chomp, other than to say Apple sometimes acquires technology companies and generally doesn't discuss its plans
It'll be interesting to see when and if we'll see any major changes to the way we find apps in the App Store. One easy way currently to find some popular apps is to use the app Kinetik. The App Store is set to cross 25 billion app downloads.
[via TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, AllThingsD]
No comments:
Post a Comment