Apple Reportedly Acquired Ottocat to Power the App Store 'Explore' Tab

Apple acquired a company called Ottocat to power the 'Explore' tab in the App Store, reports TechCrunch.

There is precious little evidence of the connection between Ottocat and Apple — no LinkedIn employment changes, no announcements to Ottocat users — save for one thing. One of Ottocat’s co-founders, Edwin Cooper, authored a patent that was granted to Apple as the original assignee. It looks like that patent was filed by Cooper as an employee of Apple. That patent, for a “System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFIDF,” pertains to the kind of technology used both by Ottocat and Apple’s explore feature.

TechCrunch believes the acquisition happened some time in 2013. In October 2013 the company's site went down with a message that read: "Ottocat is no longer available." Ottocat had only been in public beta for a couple months.


Basically, Ottocat was trying to do away with keywords by categorizing apps into increasingly more specific subcategories that worked on a “drill-down” principle. This would eliminating the guesswork and potential inaccuracy of keywords altogether, notes TechCrunch.

More details at the link below...

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