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Meltwater Buys UK's DataSift
San Francisco-based media intelligence specialist Meltwater has acquired London-based social media analyst DataSift, for an undisclosed sum.
 DataSift CEO Tim Barker (pictured) will continue to lead the team as it transfers to Meltwater, and the two companies' platforms will be integrated - the latter's analysis of companies' own data and that of media companies now enhanced by the former's social media listening. DataSift has stressed its emphasis on 'privacy by design' - it uses anonymised data to produce insights rather than profiling or targeting information. DataSift CTO Lorenzo Alberton also joins the new team, which an online teaser site suggests might be known as MeltSift.
Jorn Lyseggen, Norwegian CEO and founder of Meltwater said in a statement: 'DataSift has built a scalable platform that lets developers build data science-driven insights from social firehoses while protecting the privacy of an individual's data. When combined with the data Meltwater captures and our AI capabilities, developers can disrupt the Business Intelligence space by either building new applications or complementing existing ones with unique signal that can be only derived from external data'.
Meltwater bought real-time data analytics app Algo seven months ago. DataSift began life with a strong focus on filtering the Twitter firehose, but survived the microblogging firm's decision in 2015 to shut off access to third-party providers, a decision by which Datasift CEO and founder Nick Halstead said Twitter 'demonstrated that it doesn't understand the basic rules of this market'. DataSift, which had attracted substantial funding including a $42m Series C in 2014, endured difficult times but successfully shifted emphasis to other social media sources, including Facebook's topic data.
Web sites: www.datasift.com and www.meltwater.com .
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