Twitter Acquires Hotspots.io To Beef Up Its “Revenue Engineering Team”

Hotspots.io, small startup founded by Matt Huang, Alexander Spicer and Ashutosh Singhal aims to deliver “social media intelligence that you’ll actually use”. The company announced today via its homepage that it has been acquired by Twitter:

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.io team!

Starting today, we’ll be joining up with Twitter’s revenue engineering team where our focus will be on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners.

We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximize their social media ROI through actionable and accessible analytics, and we’re thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter.

The company has been in private beta, so product details are few and far between. The only publicly-available demonstration of their analytics platform is the data they released after the Super Bowl which shows the relative impact of different TV ads on Twitter as compared to the amount of money spent on the ad.

Alexander and Ashutosh have, as of 3:45 today, changed their About Me sections on their Twitter feeds to “Revenue Engineering @ Twitter”. This leads us to believe Twitter’s move could be a so-called “acqui-hire” so popular amongst growing Silicon Valley firms.

We’ll be sure to update you with more information as it becomes available.

Updates

  • Spokespeople from Twitter have confirmed with other news outlets that the microblogging company has indeed acquired Hotspots.io. They say: “We’re excited that the team at Hotspots.io is joining Twitter to work on the revenue engineering team.”
Jason Rowley: Jason D. Rowley does not like being wrong. He is a writer, startup founder, sometimes landscaper and gardner, and his library’s best customer. Jason is heavily involved with the entrepreneurship scene at the University of Chicago, where he studied political science before “taking a break” (e.g. dropping out, noncommittally) to work with his classmates on his current project, which will debut shortly. He’s written voluminous, ripsnorting articles for Flyover Geeks (now Tech.li) for over six months and publishes on Tuesdays. Edward Domain and others have described him as “obstreperous”, a label he wears with not inconsiderable pride. Jason, in spite of these claims, is a pretty nice guy.