Nicholas Quah reported in his Hot Pod Newsletter on Nieman Lab earlier this month that Apple has acquired Pop Up Archive. It was the parent company of Audiosear.ch. Both of them shut down on November 29, 2017.

Pop Up Archive focused on building tools to transcribe, organize, and search audio files. Audiosear.ch was among Pop Up Archive’s suite of tools. Audiosear.ch was its podcast search engine. Nicholas Quah shared the following insight:

That said, I’m pretty sure you can put two and two together with what’s on paper: Apple, long the dominant hands-off steward of the podcast universe, has acquired a technology dedicated to increasing the knowability and sortability of the hundreds of thousands of shows distributed through its Apple Podcast platform. This, as you can imagine, has widespread implications for the ecosystem.

Exactly how Apple will use its newly acquired tools is unclear, or if they are already using them in some “behind-the-scenes” way. I searched for a press release from Apple about this acquisition, but was unable to locate one.