Apple purchased Inductiv, a Canadian company that focused on using artificial intelligence to clean up data. They created HoloClean, which was designed to get useful predictions from “noisy, incomplete, and erroneous data.”
The employees of Inductiv joined the team developing Siri, Apple’s voice-driven AI assistant, according to Bloomberg.
Apple acquired a startup that provides virtual-reality experiences for watching live events. The purchase of NextVR could lead to Apple building more VR capabilities into its products.
Everything on Apple TV+ today was released in the past few months. But Apple is reportedly in talks to buy MGM, which would bring a catalogue of classic and modern movies to the iPhone maker’s streaming video service.
Apple purchased Xnor.ai, a company that creates artificial intelligence software for mobile devices. The acquisition will apparently lead to AI applications running directly on iPhones, iPads, etc., not outsourced to the cloud. This should make these tasks more private and quicker.
The $1 billion Apple spent on Intel’s modem business is the second-largest acquisition in the company’s 42-year history.
Still, while a huge amount of money by most normal standards, rival tech giants regularly dwarf Apple’s big spend on Intel. For a variety of reasons, Apple just doesn’t roll that way.
Apple bought a small startup that created an app that used machine learning to auotomically find news articles users would be interested in.
The acquisition of Laserlike is expected to bolster Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts.
The best way for Apple’s upcoming streaming video service to compete against already established competitors like Netflix is to buy a movie studio, according to an industry analyst.
Apple is reportedly going to introduce its video service in the first half of this year, and the analyst recommends buying Sony Pictures, Lionsgate or another studio to increase its offerings.
A merger between Sprint and T-Mobile could be back on the table, according to a new report that claims informal talks between the two carriers sparked up again this week.
Sprint attempted to acquire T-Mobile back in 2014 but the deal fell apart because of regulatory concerns. Now the heads of both companies have expressed to investors that they’re willing to consider consolidating again.
With the tech world still buzzing over Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition, business insurance provider Simply Business has put together a fascinating infographic.
Showing 15 years of acquisitions by Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, the chart lays out in visual terms when tech giants were at their purchasing busiest, as well as how much they typically spend on deals — with the size of individual dots representing the price paid for each startup.
Having recently purchased both Nest and AI startup DeepMind, Google is currently on a high tech spending spree. Even Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson has claimed that the search giant’s recent acquisitions have helped it take the lead over Apple when it comes to innovation in 2014.
But Apple is also putting its $159 billion worth of cash and investments to good use by carrying out its fair share of acquisitions.
