Michal Marek Although most acquisitions carried out by large companies surface almost immediately, it still happens that the media learns about the purchase of a smaller company with a delay of several months or even years. The latest example of such a scenario is the acquisition of Ottocat by Apple, according to the server TechCrunch bought already in 2013. Moreover, it was definitely not an insignificant acquisition. The small start-up Ottocat is said to be behind the "Explore" function that we know from the App Store.
Ottocat is a small company focused on search technology, and while there is no official information that its employees, along with their know-how, have moved to Apple, TechCrunch has found some pretty significant clues that it has happened. Ottocat co-founder Edwin Cooper is the author patent entitled "System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFDIF", which is credited to Apple.
In addition to the fact that the patent form itself suggests that Apple is Edwin Cooper's employer, speculation about the acquisition of Ottocat is also supported by the content of the patent. Indeed, it could easily be based on the "Explore" function, which allows users to discover applications from different categories depending on their current location.
This assumption is also supported by the available information about the Ottocat company. She was working on a solution that would enable just such a thing. Edwin Cooper and his company were said to be creating technology that would search for apps by category and based on location without the user having to directly know what app they were looking for. And that's exactly what the "Explore" feature in the App Store offers.
Ottocat's website went down in October 2013, which TechCrunch speculates is when the acquisition may have taken place. The original error message on this site said "Ottocat is no longer available". But now the page is no longer functional and "deaf" completely. The "Explore" feature was introduced by Apple as an enhancement to the App Store in June 2014.
