Spindle
Information and updates on public events and places shared in facebook and twitter.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | $1.2m | Debt | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Spindle was a Boston-based social discovery startup co-founded by a team of ex-Microsoft search engineers, with Pat Kinsel serving as CEO from December 2010. Kinsel's background at Microsoft involved incubating new concepts, including leading the development of Docs.com in collaboration with Facebook and contributing to the launch of Bing Social Search. This experience in social search and integrating major platforms directly informed Spindle's mission to organize and surface relevant local information from the vast streams of social media.
The company operated in the local discovery and social search market, aiming to answer the question, "What's happening nearby right now?". Spindle's mobile application functioned as a 'tacit' search tool that sifted through real-time data from platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It would then present users with timely and useful updates about local points of interest, such as restaurants or shops, based on their location, the time of day, and keywords found in business status updates. The core of its product was a patented search technology designed to generate topical, algorithmic timelines from social content, distinguishing it from simple check-in services by focusing on what was actively happening at a location.
After approximately two and a half years of operation, Spindle was acquired by Twitter on June 19, 2013, for an undisclosed sum. Following the acquisition, the Spindle application was shut down, and the team was relocated from Boston to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco. The acquisition was seen as a move by Twitter to leverage Spindle's engineering talent and location-based discovery technology to enhance its own platform's capabilities in providing locally relevant content. Keywords: local discovery, social search, Spindle app, Pat Kinsel, Twitter acquisition, location-based service, mobile search, content discovery, social data filtering, algorithmic timelines, Boston startup, ex-Microsoft engineers, social media aggregation, real-time information, check-in space, local points of interest, tacit search
