Data marketplace Infochimps is announcing the acquisition of Tweet bookmarking service Keepstream this morning, in a deal that was primarily a talent acquisition and stock. The three Austin, Texas-based Keepstream co-founders, Huston Hoburg, Jim England and Tim Gasper will be joining the 14 person-strong Infochimps team, which is also based out of Austin.
Before closing the deal with Infochimps, Keepstream was talking acquisition with a few other realtime players, and rumor has it that list included Twitter itself.
When asked why he chose API and data set specialists Infochimps over the other contenders, Keepstream co-founder Jim England told me, “We’ve been in the Austin tech community for a year and just getting to know them as people was a big component. It was the greatest opportunity cost of the offers we were given and we really felt that we could guide a lot of the front end development.”
Infochimps co-founder Dhruv Bansal tells me that this front-end talent value add was a huge part of why the company looked into Keepstream, which allows users to collect and widgetize their Tweets, “We got really advanced at processing data at scale but really didn’t focus on interacting with that data,” Bansal said. “We’re really trusting them to drive forward what our [front-end] product will look like.”
Prior to the acquisition Keepstream had raised $20K in funding from Capital Factory. The main Keepstream product will be shutting down as a result of the acquisition but a stealth product that Keepstream had been working on this summer, Keepstream Reports, will continue to live on within Infochimps.
Infochimps also bought Y Combinator startup Data Marketplace late last year.