Twitter Acquires Vancouver’s Summify

Pulling signal out of the noise is getting much more important. And the folks at Twitter are getting some help sorting through the flood of daily updates by buying Summify, a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that counts RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser among its investors.

Summify analyzes a user’s media feeds, including social media and news syndication, to deliver a digest of top stories. But unlike a straight-up news reader, Summify uses algorithms to determine which stories are being passed around and talked about by the people a user interacts with.

There’s no word of the price Twitter paid for the service, just as the seed round from last spring didn’t have a price tag—and I couldn’t find an SEC filing for the company, either. Summify does say that it will be shutting down the service and relocating to San Francisco.

The company was started by a pair of Romanian former interns for Google and Microsoft, and is a product of Vancouver startup incubator Bootup Labs (which is apparently “defunct,” according to TechVibes).

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.