Apple reportedly acquired startup 'Ottocat' in 2013 to power the App Store Explore tab

Apple reportedly acquired startup 'Ottocat' in 2013 to power the App Store Explore tab

<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p class="intro">A new report out of TechCrunch today claims that Apple acquired a startup called Ottocat in 2013 in order to use its technologies to power the "Explore" tab in the app store.</p> <p>Ottocat was a startup that launched a tool in May of 2013 aimed at making app discovery through the App Store easier by cataloging specific subcategories — that is until Ottocat's website abruptly went down in October of 2013.  As TechCrunch reports, there was no evidence of an acquisition by Apple until a patent application was discovered linking an Ottocat co-founder to Apple:</p>

<p>There is precious little evidence of the connection between Ottocat and Apple — no LinkedIn employment changes, no announcements to Ottocat users — save for one thing. One of Ottocat's co-founders, Edwin Cooper, authored a patent that was granted to Apple as the original assignee. It looks like that patent was filed by Cooper as an employee of Apple. That patent, for a "System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFIDF" pertains to the kind of technology used both by Ottocat and Apple's explore feature.</p>

<p>As TechCrunch notes, Apple later announced the Explore tab for the App Store in mid-2014, which operates much like Ottocat did by providing a way to whittle down a search by increasingly specific categories.</p> <p>Source: TechCrunch</p> </div></div></div><img width='1' height='1' src='