New Apple acquisition… All’s Swell that ends Swell?

Apple is on the verge of acquiring talk radio curation Swell, for a rumoured US$30 million.

That’s according to Recode, which claims the team is already making plans to join forces with the tech giant.

According to its official website, Swell is powered by an advanced algorithm that delivers content in a “lean back format designed with a simple goal: serve content that you want to listen to right now.”

The algorithm evaluates content with a formula that combines many factors:

• Expert rating: Rating and metadata assigned to the program by an expert human curator

• User rating: Your judgment of the program inferred from how long you spend listening to episodes of the program

• Content rating: A measure of how closely the content and topic matches your interests

• Community rating: The Swell user community’s overall judgment of the content

• Peer rating: Judgment of the content by other users similar to the you

As part of the rumoured acquisition, Swell will apparently shut down its iOS app this week, with CEO Ram Ramkumar already making plans to join the Apple work force.

Media speculation claims Cupertino will no doubt use the technology to improve its own Podcasts app, in what will prove to be Apple’s 30th acquisition since the start of 2013 - including Beats Electronics in May this year.