Apple Competes with Google Now by Purchasing Cue

Cue, formally known as Greplin, is a website and app that pulls information from online accounts to present an overview of a user's day. Cue is designed to work by linking various user accounts belonging to a registered individual and running a query search for keywords within those applications or accounts.

For example, someone may want to use a single search feature to check their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts without signing in and checking each one individually. Last year in a statement the company said, “In the last year, we’ve received so much feedback from our users. We’ve learned that you’re busy and you need your technology to work for you, instead of the other way around.”

What began as a Greplin app that was available as a standalone Web product, the change to Cue brought a second change as well. Last year the product became an app that was only available for the iPhone.

If you were to check out the Cue website today, you would see “Cue is Shutting Down.” This is because Apple has acquired Cue, the personal assistant app. There is some question as to the actual selling price.

When TechCrunch originally mentioned the possible acquisition, the price was quoted as over $35 million. This has turned into a price tag so somewhere between $40 and $60 million, possibly $50, but most likely closer to the $60 million mark.

I guess that from watching the Apple Siri and Google Now commercials you can see that personal assistants seem to be quite popular right now. However, it seems that Siri and iOS 7′s new Today section of the Notification Center don’t really compare to Google Now when it comes to overall power.

Apple introduced Today with the release of iOS 7. It is designed to show you upcoming appointments, and basic directions to home or to work, among other features. The problem for Apple is that Google Now already offers all of these features and more.

Apple has been investing a lot of time and energy to enhance and upgrade the capabilities of Siri. So is this the reason for Apple’s latest acquisition? It’s not sure yet if Apple will use Cue as an iPhone app or if it will incorporate it capabilities.

Apple has been on a buying spree lately. Among some of it other purchases are Swedish mobile data startup AlgoTrim, Matcha.tv and Embark. When TechCrunch asked Apple about its acquisition of Cue its standard response was, “Hi Ingrid, thank you for your interest in Apple. Here is our statement on this: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

I wonder if they get tired of saying that. It is about the fourth or fifth time that I’ve seen that exact statement. Wait, how many companies did I say Apple recently purchased?