Twitter Gets Analytical With Lucky Sort Acquisition

Max Smolaks,

The technology could help Twitter offer better advertising tools

Lucky Sort, a small text analytics start-up from Oregon, US, has just been acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed sum.

The company will be switching off its service and moving to San Francisco in the next few months. The exact terms of the deal are currently unknown.

Pulse of the nation

Founded in 2011, Lucky Sort has focused on turning tweets into useful visual intelligence. The start-up is responsible for TopicWatch – a text analysis engine that can break down the meaning of millions of tweets in real-time.

big-data (Custom)According to TechCrunch, the unique selling point of TopicWatch is in using natural language processing algorithms without first defining dictionaries or keywords.

Lucky Sort has been backed by venture capital, raising a total of $600,000 before the acquisition. However, it has remained relatively unknown until now.

Twitter will be switching off all current Lucky Sort services, but the company said it will help customers through the transition period over the next few months. Lucky Sort headquarters will be moving to San Francisco, Twitter’s revenue engineering department, to be exact, where the team is likely to help develop new advertising tools.

“In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour,” said Noah Pepper, CEO of Lucky Sort.

 

 

 
Just a few days ago, Twitter bought another small data-centric start-up, Ubalo. The four-person company has developed tools to simplify large-scale computing, and will be joining Twitter’s infrastructure team.

How well do you know Twitter? Take our quiz!