Meltwater Expands Social Media Offer with IceRocket Buy

Norwegian online media intelligence firm Meltwater has acquired US social search engine IceRocket, in a bid to extend its online conversation monitoring and analysis tools. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2001, Meltwater delivers online news and social media monitoring from 57 offices located across six continents.

Dallas, Texas-based IceRocket is a real-time search engine that claims to crawl more than 200 million blogs, and an array of tweets, news, and videos which it profiles, categorizes and ranks. The firm's blog search options are used to identify trends, influencers, shared links and popular topics.

As part of the deal, IceRocket will continue to operate as a standalone search engine while its technology will be integrated into the Meltwater Buzz social media intelligence product. All IceRocket's employees, including founder Blake Rhodes, will join Meltwater.

Jorn Lyseggen (pictured), Meltwater founder and CEO, comments: 'We arm our customers with sophisticated tools for mining social media for business insights, and this requires high quality sources. The acquisition of IceRocket will help us secure an enviable leadership position in the social media intelligence space.' He describes the buy as an 'important step' towards the goal of generating $100m in social media business within the next three years.

Meltwater has made other recent acquisitions - social CRM company JitterJam in March 2011, and BuzzGain last year - and says it plans to continue buying businesses and technologies to help further expand its product suite.

Web site: www.meltwater.com .