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Saturday 25 February 2012

Apple Is Said to Pay About $50 Million for Chomp and their wonder app



The US apps discovery startup Chomp has been obtained by Apple for a rumoured $50m (£32m), as it looks to make it easier and simpler for iOS users to find the best iPhone and iPad apps.

The news was first proclaimed by TechCrunch which claims "Apple has bought the Chomp team and technology and plans to use both to completely revamp App Store search and recommendations".

TechCrunch's story gave no price tag for the deal, however since then Bloomberg has claimed that Apple paid around $50m (£32) for Chomp.

Apple has confirmed it's 'addition but not the price. spokeswoman Amy Bessette told Bloomberg: "We buy smaller technology companies from time to time and generally don't comment on our purposes or plans."

9 to 5 Mac has also joined this 'discussion', claiming that Ben Keighram, Chomp chief executive now works for Apple's iTunes marketing team, whilst also Cathy Edwards is a senior iTunes engineer. At this time neither of them had updated their LinkedIn profile however this does not really make much of a significant point to say that they had not changed jobs as any difficulty could have popped up.

Chomp iPhone app was launched in January 2010 as a way for iPhone users to write short reviews on their favourite iPhone apps, and then browse a feed of other peoples recommendations.

By August in that same year it had 400,000 active users, and had a great focus on search. At that time Ben Keighram described it as the most personalised way to search and browse for apps, also adding that: "Apple is insanely excited about this."

This great addition should help Apple with one of its key challenges which it does not cater for: helping iOS users discover apps at a time when there are more than 550,000 available in its App Store.

Purchasing Chomp can also be seen as proclamation of no confidence or belief in Apple's existing Genius technology, at least in the searching of apps.

Genius, was originally developed and created to provide iTunes music recommendations based on people's existing collection of music, in September 2009 Genius for apps was introduced, suggesting new apps for a person based on previous individual purchases and downloads.

It is expected  of course Chomp to get rid of it's non-iOS services quickly. Such as an Android version of this app which was launched in March 2011, whilst it started to work with US mobile operator Verizon Wireless on recommendations for its Android app store in September later that year.

It is quite unknown about what will happen to Chomp's standalone iPhone app, although it is probably most likely to be pulled from the App Store and reappear as an Apple app.

1 comments:

sell used cell phones said...

That's quite a news.

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