Apple buys analytics firm for $200m

Apple has acquired social media analytics firm Topsy for more than $200 million, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the deal, said it was unclear how Apple planned to use the firm but that it could be related to Apple's new streaming music service. Topsy, according to the report, is among a handful of Twitter partners which has access to the full range of data from the fast-growing messaging platform. Earlier this year, Topsy said it had created a searchable index of all the publicly available tweets ever made, to be available for marketers and others. Apple and Topsy did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Topsy describes itself as a company "with the only full-scale index of the public social web," to help its customers "instantly analyze any topic, term or hashtag across years of conversations on millions of web sites." The data can be used to analyze the effectiveness of a social media ad campaign, for example. Apple had a music-oriented social network called Ping, but shuttered that last year as it created sharing options through Facebook and Twitter.