Topsy Labs

Topsy Labs, Inc. operated as a social search and analytics company, providing real-time analysis of public conversations from social media platforms. Founded in 2007 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Gary Iwatani, and Justin Foutts, the company was headquartered in San Francisco, California. The founding team brought together significant experience in technology and entrepreneurship; Prakash was a software engineer with a background at Napster and founder of the anti-spam company Cloudmark, while Ghosh was a noted open-source advocate and founder of the internet journal 'First Monday'.

The company's core business centered on maintaining a comprehensive, searchable index of the public social web, most notably every public tweet since Twitter's inception in 2006. This allowed Topsy to offer sophisticated analytics products. Its business model involved selling subscriptions to its web-based dashboard, Topsy Pro Analytics, to large organizations in marketing, news, entertainment, and finance. There was also a version tailored for government agencies to monitor events, manage disaster response, and track political issues. Clients utilized the platform to gauge public sentiment, track campaign performance, identify market trends, and discover key influencers. Revenue was generated from these subscription services, with pricing on a pay-per-account basis.

Topsy's product suite included a free public search engine and the commercial Topsy Pro Analytics dashboard. The Pro service allowed users to perform detailed analysis on keywords, authors, and topics, filtering by parameters like activity, influence, sentiment, geography, and language over extended historical periods. A key feature was its proprietary algorithm that measured influence to rank search results. The platform also enabled Boolean searches to identify users with specific purchase intent, allowing brands to target consumers with relevant ads or content. A significant milestone was Apple's acquisition of Topsy in December 2013 for a reported sum of over $200 million. Following the acquisition, the Topsy service was officially discontinued on December 16, 2015.

Keywords: social analytics, Twitter data, sentiment analysis, trend tracking, influencer identification, social search, real-time data, data indexing, brand monitoring, social listening