July 6th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »
Twitter search specialist TweetUp has acquired TwitDroid, one of the more popular Twitter clients on the Android platform. TwitDroid will be renamed to TwitDroyd.
The reason for renaming the app is all but for marketing reasons. Lucas Film owns the rights to the name ‘Droid’ and the new owner doesn’t want to risk going to court. Next to TwitDroid, TweetUp also bought PopUrls, a service that aggregates popular news items from big sources. TweetUp is expected to launch a service that mixes data from both.
“Acquiring Twidroyd provides TweetUp with a number of strategic advantages,” said Bill Gross, CEO of TweetUp. “Twidroyd (www.twidroyd.com) is widely considered the best Twitter client for Android phones and it leads in market share, so its growing base of users will be a valuable source of well-informed feedback on TweetUp search on mobile devices. In addition, the popurls website (www.popurls.com), which attracts users looking for a convenient guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a natural spot to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback. This combination should enable us to more rapidly refine our offerings, generating better user experiences for distribution partners and for users searching for the world’s best tweeters regardless of their choice of devices.”
