• TechCrunch, Thursday, February 9, 2012 11:57 AM

European design firm Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes -- a sentiment analytics dashboard that helps Fortune 500 companies track their social media presence throughout the real-time Web. Not your typical buyer of social analytics startups, Dassault is a “3D experience” design company -- which lets designers “virtualize” how products will work in the real world, according to TechCrunch’s Alexis Tsotsis.

The acquisition actually seems jarring at first, but Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini says the buy makes sense in terms of "connecting what people say about a product to its design process through the Netvibes dashboard.” In a statement, Dassault President and CEO Bernard Charlès explained further: “With the birth of the real-time Web, companies need to adapt to everything and everyone inside and outside their borders. To accomplish this, we need a way to connect and combine different products and uses, internal and external data sources, personal and professional apps, and human curation and algorithms -- across all devices and departments, in real-time and in context.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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