Twitter acquires team at analytics firm Hotspots.io

IDG News Service - Twitter has acquired the team at Hotspots.io, a social media analytics company, according to a notice on the Hotspots.io website.

Starting Monday, the team at Hotspots.io joined Twitter's revenue engineering team to focus on developing analytics tools for the company's advertising and publishing partners, the notice said.

The acquisition by Twitter of Hotspots.io is in line with a number of acquisitions by tech companies which appear to be designed to mainly hire the teams working at small startups.

Facebook for example acquired last month the team at webcam eye-tracking startup GazeHawk, but not its product and technology. It also acquired the team behind file-transfer startup Caffeinated Mind, which offered an on-demand peer-to-peer file sharing system, and planned to wind down the service. Facebook said the staff from Caffeinated Mind would work on tools that will help its employees share files internally.

"We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximize their social media ROI (return on investment) through actionable and accessible analytics, and we're thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter," the notice on the Hotspots.io website said.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Twitter and Hotspots.io did not immediately respond to requests for information on whether the entire company had been acquired as part of the deal.