Cue Acquired For Over $40M, Likely By Apple To Compete With Google Now | Hacker News Reader

Cue Acquired For Over $40M, Likely By Apple To Compete With Google Now

techcrunch.com

83 pointssatjot29 comments

Clearly naming your startup after an Apple SVP is a good idea. I'd like to introduce my next startup - Schiller

I kid - congrats to the Cue folks

Damn, I'm actually working on a side-project named Ive.

When Google acquires a company, the company usually is open about it "Yay we were acquired by Google". When Apple acquires they announce they are shutting down. Interesting difference.

"The company will not be shut down post-acquisition, though it did recently shut down its app."

Check out their website, sure looks like they're shutting down. http://cueup.com

I think the OP was referring to "shutting down" in the sense of stopping development on their consumer-facing app. The article likely meant that they weren't "shutting down" in the sense that the employees will still be working together in more-or-less the same organizational structure as pre-acquisition.

Interestingly, Google usually shuts down the acquired companies anyway...

There are plenty of counter examples to your claim: YouTube, Google Maps, Picasa, various companies focused on voice recognition and Google Glass, etc...

Android, Google Analytics, etc etc etc

I’m not sure whether those are good examples. Android Inc wasn’t much of a company when they were bought by Google and the initial Google Analytics offering was very different from the service they bought (Urchin). Meanwhile, Google has killed over a hundred services in the last couple of years.

Apple has bought several companies that had shipping products and just like Google, Apple didn’t cancel those. Examples are FileMaker, Logic, and Final Cut Pro. After it bought PowerSchools, Shake and Astarte, it kept their products on for many years. Furthermore, it is often said that Apple’s acquisition of NeXT was a reverse takeover.

I can assure you any company anyone acquires will look very different 5 years from acquisition if its still alive.

Also, any startup not acquired should look very different 5 years from conception.

Google Glass? As far as I know, Google Glass is originally a Google X project ... they did not acquire a company if I know correctly. They hired some people from the wearable computing field.

Apple is a better run and more profitable company than Google. Even though the optics may not look great to some Open Source nutjobs all in all Apple seem to absorb their acquisitions effectively.

Even though they pivoted to calendar app, I still loved their search functionality. It was the fastest, most relevant search I'd ever used and was genuinely useful. Cheers to Apple on the great acquisition.

It's interesting that most of the comments in response to this are about how great Greplin was. What was it about Greplin search that appealed to people so much? If it was so popular, why did the company pivot away from it? I have my own theories, but would be great to hear from folks directly.

Greplin was useful, worked and helped several times.

Did you use it on a regular basis and had it set as your home page or was it useful only when you couldn't find something any other way?

Not the parent, but I found it incredibly useful as well. The thing is, I would always forget it existed, and so its utility was kind of low for me. I was blown away when I first hooked everything up to it, then barely touched it until they pivoted, at which point I lost interest and disconnected all my accounts from them.

A shame, but not sure how to solve that problem.

Reason I'm curious about how everyone was using Greplin is because we are working on something that addresses the same problem at https://starthq.com and I think we cracked the "forgetting it's there" problem.

Would love to chat more. I followed you on Twitter, so please follow back so I can DM.

That announcement yesterday looked a little sad and morose, but a company like that doesn't just go out of business, given all the interest in analysis of real-world user behaviour. Congrats all!

And yesterday we were all talking about how it was such a shame that they did the whole Greplin to Cue jump. At least they're doing good for themselves now. I can definitely see how this would fit in with apples calendar, email, tasks and all that other stuff to aggregate your schedule.

Figured as much. Cue's abrupt and terse announcement had a very Appley vibe to it.

This makes much more sense than just shutting down. Congrats to the Cue guys (if this rumor is correct).

Great tech that had yet to find a market. Now they have access to one of the biggest markets around.

Daniel Gross is 21 years old. DAMN

congrats Daniel, Robby, and team!

This is great news.

Congrats to CUE!

Acquisition amount makes little sense. If I'd to venture a guess I'd say the actual amount is closer to 2x money raised with the rest in performance based incentives that no one expects to meet.

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