Real time search was one of last year&#8217;s most-discussed tech trends and one of the leaders of that conversation was real-time social media search engine Collecta.  Collecta worked directly with publishers to build an index of trusted multi-media content that it streamed live on its website and through its Application Programming Interface (API) on other sites.  Twitter, WordPress and Flickr were three of its biggest sources.

Today Collecta.com gave up the ghost and is now a parked domain

The Lights Go Out at Collecta Real Time Search

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2011-01-19 18:25:17 UTC
Collecta , a real-time search engine that launched in June 2009, has quietly shuttered its main product; the team is returning "back into the woodshed," in the words of CEO Gerry Campbell, to work on new ideas and new directions. Currently, Collecta.com is just a placeholder and mailing-list signup form field. The site shows a constantly refreshing mosaic of images gathered in real time from TwitPic and Flickr â an homage to the company's roots. With the majority of a carefully spent $4.7 million Series B still sitting in the bank, the startup has plenty of runway to work with; a large part of the company's talent is staying onboard, as well. (One of the co-founders, Jack Moffitt , will be engaged in other pursuits, which gives us a grand total of two entities to watch closely following this announcement. )
Campbell said running a real-time search engine, while it is not to become the company's end goal, was an educational experience for the team. In a conversation today, he noted that the company learned three main lessons from its two-and-a-half-year stint as a real-time search engine. "First, there is a huge need for real-time information," he said. "Second, a destination site is not the correct vehicle for reaching people. Third, new behaviors, specifically with Facebook and mobile, are growing. "Beyond that, we're in a new market since 2009. " Campbell's right about that much; in 2009, real-time technology was almost a means and an end in itself. Today, real-time technology is only one component for an ever-growing range of applications. Whatever comes next, though, will likely have strong ties to Collecta's excellent real-time technology. "This company's DNA is definitely real-time," Campbell concluded. While we're surprised at this pivot, we're glad it comes at a financially convenient time for this startup, and we can't wait to find out what's going on in that metaphorical woodshed of theirs. It's interesting to note that Collecta's major rival in the real-time search space, OneRiot , also completely changed product directions this year, dumping its search engine and moving into the online ad game.


Startup Collecta Shuts Down Its Product, Starts Working on a New One

For the past two years we&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on real-time search engine Collecta, watching as it&#8217;s inked some big deals, widgetized its real-time feeds and raised some funding. Today, however, it looks like the company has decided to change directions. Collecta announced to developers today that "Collecta is changing over the coming months" and that the API will be unavailable as of February 11. 

The home page, once the home of a series of trending topics, now features a real-

Collecta Ends its API, Says "We&#8217;re Changing"

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Startup Collecta Shuts Down Its Product, Starts Working on a New One (Jolie O&apos;Dell/Mashable)

Riak delivers highly available, scalable distributed systems that are easy to operate at enterprise scale for empowering applications to store and retrieve unstructured data and easily manage active data workloads. The Riak Data Platform forms the foundation for reducing the complexity of integrating and deploying active workloads for Big Data, IoT and hybrid cloud applications with flexible and available NoSQL database, Riak KV, Riak's large object storage software, Riak S2, Riak's time series optimized database, Riak TS, and add-ons for Apache Spark, Redis and Apache Solr.

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CAMBRIDGE , MA -- Dec. 15 -- Basho Technologies , Inc. , a provider of commercial and open source distributed , highly scalable data store software and analytics tools , today announced Collecta has selected Basho 's Riak Search as it continues to build its real-time search engine for the entire Web , not just social media .

Collecta Collaborates with Basho to develop Basho’s Riak Search Product.
Collecta Selects Basho’s Riak EnterpriseDS to Scale Real Time Search Business – Basho

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Collecta represents a new way to experience search, in real time. Collecta is the Web's most powerful real-time search engine, posting matching stories, blogs, photos, and comments from sites such as Twitter, WordPress, Flickr and more -- as they happen. By aggregating content in real time, Collecta offers a new and more comprehensive view of what's going on in the world right now.

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Developer-focused Product Management Leader Who Launched Salesforce Einstein Platform and Microsoft Search Engine Joins Skyflow to Shape Data Privacy Architecture
Skyflow announced Amruta Moktali, an experienced product leader with successful stints at Cleo, Salesforce, Topsy Labs, and Microsoft, has joined Skyflow as Chief Product Officer. Moktali will lead all product and design of Skyflow’s data privacy vault for enterprise, fintech and healthcare companies. Moktali’s appointment is in response to the company’s rapid growth in demand since emerging from stealth last summer and raising Series A funding in December. She joins an experienced executive team that includes founder and CEO  Anshu Sharma , a former executive at Salesforce and Oracle, co-founder at ClearedIn and Suki, and investor at many companies including Workato; and recent hire CMO Paul Kopacki, former Heroku CMO. Skyflow’s approach to PII, payments, and healthcare data radically simplifies how companies manage, access, and govern their sensitive data. The zero-trust data vault with an elegant API allows developers to focus on rapidly building applications and workflows, while Skyflow takes care of data security, privacy, and compliance with data regulations. Skyflow data privacy vaults support most industry use cases out of the box. Each vault is fully compliant with standards like PCI, PHI and HIPAA. Skyflow helps developers ship products in weeks rather than months or years. Related Posts
Prior to Skyflow, Moktali held executive product leader roles at a number of software companies including CPO at Cleo, the family benefits platform; vice president of product management for Salesforce’s Einstein AI analytics platform; and Topsy Labs, a company that pioneered search and analytics on social data. She also served as senior product manager at Microsoft, where she led a key part of the Bing search engine team. “Ensuring data privacy is a real pain point when building products,” said Amruta Moktali. “Security and compliance requirements can bring everything to a grinding halt and delay delivery for months, if not years. Skyflow’s data privacy vault solves the privacy problem at the core, so that developers can bring innovative products to market faster.”
“Data functionality and security go together. Yet, developers rarely have had the tools to get security right,” said Anshu Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Skyflow. “Amruta’s extensive knowledge of modern software development will help us continue to seamlessly integrate privacy in product development and drive new efficiencies in data security policy and governance to benefit enterprise, fintech and healthcare customers.”

Former Salesforce Product Executive Amruta Moktali Joins Skyflow As Chief Product Officer

Developer-focused Product Management Leader Who Launched Salesforce Einstein Platform and Microsoft Search Engine Joins Skyflow to Shape Data Privacy Architecture
PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– #API –Today, Skyflow announced Amruta Moktali, an experienced product leader with successful stints at Cleo, Salesforce, Topsy Labs, and Microsoft, has joined Skyflow as Chief Product Officer. Moktali will lead all product and design of Skyflow’s data privacy vault for enterprise, fintech and healthcare companies. Moktali’s appointment is in response to the company’s rapid growth in demand since emerging from stealth last summer and raising Series A funding in December. She joins an experienced executive team that includes founder and CEO Anshu Sharma , a former executive at Salesforce and Oracle, co-founder at ClearedIn and Suki, and investor at many companies including Workato; and recent hire CMO Paul Kopacki , former Heroku CMO. Skyflow’s approach to PII, payments, and healthcare data radically simplifies how companies manage, access, and govern their sensitive data. The zero-trust data vault with an elegant API allows developers to focus on rapidly building applications and workflows, while Skyflow takes care of data security, privacy, and compliance with data regulations. Skyflow data privacy vaults support most industry use cases out of the box. Each vault is fully compliant with standards like PCI, PHI and HIPAA. Skyflow helps developers ship products in weeks rather than months or years. Prior to Skyflow, Moktali held executive product leader roles at a number of software companies including CPO at Cleo, the family benefits platform; vice president of product management for Salesforce’s Einstein AI analytics platform; and Topsy Labs, a company that pioneered search and analytics on social data. She also served as senior product manager at Microsoft, where she led a key part of the Bing search engine team. “Ensuring data privacy is a real pain point when building products,” said Amruta Moktali. “Security and compliance requirements can bring everything to a grinding halt and delay delivery for months, if not years. Skyflow’s data privacy vault solves the privacy problem at the core, so that developers can bring innovative products to market faster.”
“Data functionality and security go together. Yet, developers rarely have had the tools to get security right,” said Anshu Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Skyflow. “Amruta’s extensive knowledge of modern software development will help us continue to seamlessly integrate privacy in product development and drive new efficiencies in data security policy and governance to benefit enterprise, fintech and healthcare customers.”
For additional information, see Amruta’s perspective on the Skyflow blog . About Skyflow
Founded in 2019, Skyflow is a data privacy vault for sensitive data. The company was founded by former Salesforce executives Anshu Sharma and Prakash Khot to radically transform how businesses handle users’ financial, healthcare, and other personal data that powers the digital economy. Skyflow is based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit http://www.skyflow.com or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn . Contacts

Former Salesforce Product Executive Amruta Moktali Joins Skyflow as Chief Product Officer

Developer-focused Product Management Leader Who Launched Salesforce Einstein Platform and Microsoft Search Engine Joins Skyflow to Shape Data Privacy Architecture
Skyflow announced Amruta Moktali, an experienced product leader with successful stints at Cleo, Salesforce, Topsy Labs, and Microsoft, has joined Skyflow as Chief Product Officer. Moktali will lead all product and design of Skyflow’s data privacy vault for enterprise, fintech and healthcare companies. “Ensuring data privacy is a real pain point when building products”
Moktali’s appointment is in response to the company’s rapid growth in demand since emerging from stealth last summer and raising Series A funding in December. She joins an experienced executive team that includes founder and CEO Anshu Sharma, a former executive at Salesforce and Oracle, co-founder at ClearedIn and Suki, and investor at many companies including Workato; and recent hire CMO  Paul Kopacki , former Heroku CMO. Skyflow’s approach to PII, payments, and healthcare data radically simplifies how companies manage, access, and govern their sensitive data. The zero-trust data vault with an elegant API allows developers to focus on rapidly building applications and workflows, while Skyflow takes care of data security, privacy, and compliance with data regulations. Skyflow data privacy vaults support most industry use cases out of the box. Each vault is fully compliant with standards like PCI, PHI and HIPAA. Skyflow helps developers ship products in weeks rather than months or years. Prior to Skyflow, Moktali held executive product leader roles at a number of software companies including CPO at Cleo, the family benefits platform; vice president of product management for Salesforce’s Einstein AI analytics platform; and Topsy Labs, a company that pioneered search and analytics on social data. She also served as senior product manager at Microsoft, where she led a key part of the Bing search engine team. “Ensuring data privacy is a real pain point when building products,” said Amruta Moktali. “Security and compliance requirements can bring everything to a grinding halt and delay delivery for months, if not years. Skyflow’s data privacy vault solves the privacy problem at the core, so that developers can bring innovative products to market faster.”
“Data functionality and security go together. Yet, developers rarely have had the tools to get security right,” said Anshu Sharma , CEO and co-founder of Skyflow. “Amruta’s extensive knowledge of modern software development will help us continue to seamlessly integrate privacy in product development and drive new efficiencies in data security policy and governance to benefit enterprise, fintech and healthcare customers.”

Aaron Hayes-Roth is the vice president of strategic alliances at social media monitoring company Brandwatch . Prior to that, he was director of business development at Topsy. Two years ago, Apple bought the company I worked for at the time, Topsy Labs. With a real-time search engine covering the full archive of Twitter back to 2006, Topsy had the fastest and most complete coverage of the data on that social network. But how was Twitter data relevant to Apple? Many speculated . On December 16, Apple finally shut down the Topsy product, after having discontinued its enterprise solution one year ago. Many of us, both from inside and outside the social marketing ecosystem, will miss its existence - the free tool was simple and elegant, and had a blisteringly fast speed to insight. So, two years later and now with the final nail in the publicly-facing Topsy coffin, what did Apple get for its >$200 million? Disclaimer: what follows has not been influenced or informed by either former Topsy employees, or anyone else from inside of Apple. They are purely my thoughts based on my experience pre-acquisition and insights gleaned from the social marketing ecosystem. Topsy made a name for itself as the fastest, most complete compendium of Twitter data available to both individual users and to enterprise social marketers. It could deliver insights from conversations on Twitter that happened anytime in that company's history, dating back to the first tweet in 2006. The focus was narrow, but deep. And in its depth, impressive. But Apple has little engagement with Twitter. The company joined Twitter in 2011, and has yet to Tweet a single time . What many people both inside the industry (and almost everyone outside of it) didn't understand in 2013, is that Apple didn't buy Topsy for its Twitter data; what it bought was an architecture and framework for extremely fast, eminently scalable search and indexing functionality. While Topsy had only at the time succeeded in devouring and then serving up Twitter data on demand, Twitter itself was simply one demonstrable data set on top of which the Topsy system ran. While I have deep conviction in the insights and analysis to be gleaned from social media (I am after all still in the industry two years later), Apple was not interested in joining the social media intelligence game. It was, however, interested in disrupting the way people search. One need only look at two trends to complete the equation:
The usage trends on the iPhone and iPad indicated apps were dominating user time spent (85%)  on devices, rather than browser usage / searching, and the amount has been consistently increasing over the history of iOS. Apple wants to eat Google's Search Ad lunch . Now take out your iOS device. Swipe left. Type in the first search term that comes into your head. And take a look at the spotlight results delivered instantly from the web, from Wikipedia, your phone's stored content, and from data within all of your apps. In 2013, the results were simply a list of App & Contact name matches. Apple & Topsy have just abstracted the Google search bar from your search process. The Topsy deal was never about Twitter, it was about Google all along. Don't believe me? Scroll down to the very bottom of your spotlight search... In case you simply must scratch your old-school, browser search bar itch, there's your option: "Show More in Bing. "
Aaron Hayes-Roth
So, on its two year anniversary, the mystery is laid to rest. What became of the $200 million acquisition? Head to www.topsy.com  to find closure.

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