While Apple iPhone sales in India continue to rise and fall, globally the tech giant has faced quite a slump in the market with increasing competition from Google. It’s in this light that Apple’s series of acquiring firms with expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence has given rise to major speculations regarding the company’s next big step. Most recent has been a low-key acquisition of a Hyderabad-based startup called Tuplejump.
A machine learning company working with artificial intelligence (AI), little is known about Tuplejump with the website being taken down after the company’s acquisition by Apple, but in an archived image of their website posted by Tech Crunch the founders, Deepak Alur, Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu explain: “A few years ago people realised that the volume of data that businesses generate was becoming unwieldy. A new set of technologies to handle this huge amounts of data cropped up. We were one of the early adopters of these ‘big-data’ technologies. Having helped Fortune 500 companies adopt these technologies we quickly realised how complicated they were and how much simpler they could get. Thus started our quest to simplify data management technologies and make them extremely simple to use. We are building technology that is simple to use, scalable and will allow people to ask difficult questions on huge datasets.” According to multiple reports, Tuplejump is the first company in India to be acquired by Apple.
No explanations as such have been given by Apple regarding their start up shopping spree, all a spokesperson said to Tech Crunch was, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Observers and analysts of Apple’s latest trend — beginning with AI company Perceptio in 2015, Machine Learning company Turi and Emotient earlier this year — suspect that Tuplejump’s existing technological developments could be used to develop Apple’s Cloud services further as well as improve functioning of Siri, iTunes, Applications and and App Store.
“We’re hearing that Apple was particularly interested in ‘FiloDB’, an open-source project that Tuplejump was building to efficiently apply machine learning concepts and analytics to massive amounts of complex data right as it streamed in,” writes Greg Kumparak for Tech Crunch.
Would it be small scale technical improvements of pre-existing Apple technologies? Could there be something huge coming our way with the accumulation of AI analysts and developers? As Apple continues to stay tight-lipped regarding their endeavours, as off now, nobody’s certain what to expect next from the company.
Click here to read the full report by Tech Crunch.