Palantir Acquires Social Analytics Specialist Poptip - Digits - WSJ

A sign of the social surveillance times; tangentially, see To keep growth going, Twitter wants to be everywhere — and a little more intimate (BetaBoston)

"Poptip, a two-year-old company that analyzes data from Twitter, is being acquired by Palantir Technologies Inc., one of the most valuable and secretive privately-held startups in Silicon Valley, Poptip announced in a company blog post Tuesday afternoon. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

The acquisition by Palantir, which specializes in large-scale data mining for the FBI, the CIA, and Wall Street firms, reflects the growing value of Twitter’s data as an indicator of social trends. Palantir is known sniffing out money trails, but the acquisition suggests that it’s seeking better ways to understand unstructured data (such as the language in a Twitter post) and to boost its profile among a more mainstream sort of potential clients."

Palantir Acquires Social Analytics Specialist Poptip - Digits - WSJ