NASDAQ-listed Russian search engine giant Yandex announced last Friday it fully acquired The Tweeted Times, a website offering social news services, for an undisclosed amount. Yandex aims to use the technologies developed by The Tweeted Times to enhance its search and content services with information from social networks.
“We’re interested in services and technologies that can aggregate, process, and rank data from social networks.” Yandex PR Manager Tatyana Komarova explained to East-West Digital News. “We’re also interested in people with the relevant experience and willingness to develop such technologies.”
The Tweeted Times was founded in 2009 by five researchers from Russia, Switzerland, and the USA. The service allows its users to build personalized newspapers based on the particular Twitter feeds they follow. The Tweeted Times has helped over eighty thousand users create their own online newspapers. But the company does not monetize its service currently, Komarova said.
Yandex intends to continue developing The Tweeted Times but declined to comment on its plans beyond that.
The recent acquisition marks the fourth investment announced by Yandex in a foreign startup. In September 2010, the Russian company acquired minority stakes in Face.com, a Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup, and Vizi Labs, another Israeli startup focused on research and development of image processing technologies. In July, Refine.io, a US startup offering to create and easily share prototypes of mobile apps, received seed funding from Yandex.Factory. Launched earlier this year, Yandex.Factory is the company’s seed funding program.
