twitter « Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

September 24, 2009

Twitter valued at $1B

Filed under: Business, Internet — Tags: funding, twitter, vc — Raja @ 10:34 am

Twitter is raising $100M funding at $1B valuation.

Twitter, the fashionable microblogging service, is set to close a round of financing of around $100 million that values the three-and-a-half-year-old start-up at $1 billion, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans.

The investors include Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company, and the current Twitter backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Twitter does not necessarily need the capital. It previously raised $55 million and says it has only spent $25 million of that cash. But the company has big plans to expand the service from its roughly 50 million current users and to ultimately catch up to Facebook — which recently reached 300 million members. Both of these companies believe they can one day reach a billion users around the world — nearly the entire current population of the Internet. The extra cash, this person said, will help the company keep up with demand and build out the service.

It is a good move for twitter to take the money while the frenzy lasts. It is a testament to their popularity that they are able to get such an insane valuation in this tough funding climate. I think they are way overvalued at $1B. The same goes for Facebook. Time will prove this right.

The only caveat to this funding is that they just bacame too expensive for anyone to acquire them. So their only exit hope now is an IPO. Good luck with that.

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August 22, 2009

Should Twitter share its tweet stream with Google?

Filed under: Internet — Tags: google, twitter — Raja @ 10:18 pm

It appears that twitter is seriously thinking about opening us its tweet stream (internally called firehose) to others including google. Why would they do that? They plan to charge money for that access of course. Should twitter do that?

Edo Segal wrote a guest post on techcrunch calling such move a suicide.

In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. We all have a vested interest in its success. Facebook is soon to monopolize the social stream to the same extent that Google has done with search. That is not good for anyone, including Facebook. I have had many discussions with people in recent weeks about the face-off between twitter and Facebook and also about the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google. When I was asked by Erick Schonfeld at the Real Tiime Stream Crunchup (Video) event about my opinion on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed, I responded that they could do that if they don’t plan to sell their company in the future. In other words, it is my humble opinion that if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced and for good reason.

It is a long article but has some good insights. I also agrree with him that it would be a strategic mistake for twitter should to share its tweet stream with google or anyone else for that matter. Tweet stream is twitter’s crown jewels that they should leverage for building up their value. Would google license their relevance algorithms to other companies? See what I mean? Google’s competitive advanatage stems from the fact that they have the most data on seaches which they leverage in their relevance algorithms. That is why they own search. Imagine what would have happened if they licensed it to Yahoo when google was figuring out how to make money. Google would be just another technolgy supplier as Yahoo saw them those days. If twitter licenses their firehose to others it would marginilalize their value to the internet.

Why would twitter think of doing it? It would be easy way to make money. Twitter probably thinks google can make their streams more valuable (which probably is true) thereby increasing twitter’s value. There may be one more reason. Twitter thinks it may make them more attractive target for Google to pay big bucks and buy them.

I think in the end it all boils down to how confident twitter is aout their own potential and their self worth. If they are truly confident they wouldn’t provide access to their crown jewels to others. They shouldn’t do that now. Not yet anyways.

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April 20, 2009

The Twitter Revolution

Filed under: Internet — Tags: twitter — Raja @ 9:18 am

WSJ wrote a profile on the twitter phenomenon.

“Twitter is the side project that took,” says company co-founder Biz Stone, 35. “Now it’s our chance to do something transformative.”

Ismael Roldan

Biz Stone (left) and Evan Williams.

When I arrive at Twitter’s headquarters on a recent morning, Jerry Brown is waiting in the lobby — just another day at the world’s hottest high-tech company. “It’s pretty bizarre,” says co-founder Evan Williams, 37. “At least once per day we look at each other and say, ‘What the hell?’ It’s like we’re living out the script of the ultimate start-up company story.”

But other than the familiar face of California’s attorney general standing near the steel front door, you would hardly know that this little company of about 30 employees is the epicenter of the Web, used by an estimated 20 million Americans on a daily — even minute-by-minute — basis. Just how fast Twitter is growing is a company secret, but its traffic appears to be more than doubling every month.

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April 17, 2009

Google sees twitter synergies

Filed under: Internet — Tags: google, twitter — Raja @ 10:44 am

From SEI:

During yesterday’s earnings call, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt talked up the benefits of a search deal with Twitter:

“Without commenting specifically about Twitter … you could imagine that … it could be a channel for product information, marketing information, real-time information for which you can hang advertising products, whether it’s a text ad or a video ad or so forth off of it … It strikes me that’s a logical strategy for them to pursue and something that we would be very happy to pursue with them and all other players in that space.”

These are interesting comments as just recently Eric Shmidt made some comments trivializing twitter. I suspect there may be some posturing involved in those comments. I certainly think there are tremendous synergies between google and twitter and a partnership would be mutually beneficial. However I do not want google to buy twitter at this juncture. I would like to see twitter evolve and innovate as an independent company.

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April 14, 2009

Twitter Founders Interview Video

Filed under: Entrepreneurship — Tags: twitter — Raja @ 8:56 am

Kara Swisher interviews twitter co founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone in this video:

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April 3, 2009

Show me the money

Filed under: Entertainment, Internet, Media — Tags: twitter, youtube — Raja @ 8:37 am

It is ’show me the money time’ for online video and social networking companies. Things are not looking promising yet.

NewTeeVee reports that analysts estimate youtube to lose $470M this year.

A new report by Credit Suisse projects that video-sharing giant YouTube is on track to lose $470 million this year, writes Multichannel News.

Credit Suisse says YouTube will generate $240 million in revenue, but those revenues will be dwarfed by the $711 million in licensing, hardware, marketing and other expenses the site will incur. About half of that expense will go towards bandwidth, which Credit Suisse pegs at $360 million.

Meanwhile twitter says they will start working on revenues this year.

Biz Stone must’ve been a bit overwhelmed to be invited onto The Colbert Report, but it was never going to be an easy ride. But his comments don’t sound like a Google takeover is imminent.

When he got a word in, the Twitter co-founder said the company will experiment with money-making streams this year.

“As we grow that network it becomes more valuable, as we add new features, make it more robust… when we get to the point where we feel we have gotten there we will experimenting with revenue models. This is not unlike the way Google approached their revenue.”

“We’re going to start experimenting this year.”

Colbert started tweeting during one of Stone’s answers, just to prove a point.

“So the ‘Biz’ in Biz Stone doesn’t stand for ‘business model’, I assume?” quipped Colbert,

Here is the video of Biz stone on Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Biz Stone

comedycentral.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

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April 2, 2009

Twitter Discovery Engine

Filed under: Internet — Tags: twitter — Raja @ 10:52 am

Twitter is changing its search to be more of a discovery tool.

A few weeks ago we started testing Twitter Search in the web interface for a subset of folks. We had the search box way up near the top of the page and the results on a separate page. It turns out that’s not the awesome way to do it. The best way to experience Twitter Search is when it’s a natural part of your normal Twitter experience.

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April 1, 2009

Yahoo launches twitter desktop app

Filed under: Internet, Technology, Uncategorized — Tags: sideline, twitter, yahoo — Raja @ 8:14 am

Yahoo has launched a desktop twitter app called sideline.

Yahoo has launched an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application called Sideline yesterday, once again validating the power of Twitter for real-time search. After taking it for a spin, I have to say it looks and feels really nice, but other than that there’s no real incentive for me to keep using it on a regular basis.

Sideline is a straight-forward Twitter monitoring tool, giving you the opportunity to stay on top of the latest trends on the microsharing service and/or keywords you feed into the application. It has an auto-refresh feature (which you can tweak to have the search results reload between 1 minute and 1 hour), a notification system that alerts you of new keyword mentions in an overlay that appears whatever you’re doing and the ability to only look for favorited tweets containing the keywords you’re tracking.

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March 30, 2009

Twitter breaking events: Tinker

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: glam media, tinker, twitter — Raja @ 10:14 pm

Glam media is launching a new service called tinker that lets users create customized events feeds from twitter.

Over a year ago Fred Wilson wrote about the need for a Twitter events firehose - a place where users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an ‘event’, which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time. Tomorrow morning, he’ll get his wish when Glam Media launches a new service called Tinker to the public.

At a high level, each Tinker event can be described as a persistent search for multiple keywords on Twitter. Each Event is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and presents in a single stream. For example, a Tinker Event for March Madness might present tweets that included the terms ‘NCAA’, ‘Basketball’, and ‘Final Four’.

At launch Tinker is going to allow normal users to create their own ‘Events’, but they’ll only be able to search for one key word, hashtag, or phrase at a time (they can also choose terms that they’d like to exclude). Trusted partners, such as those that are running an event, will be able to access a more robust interface, where they can include multiple queries in a stream (normal users will eventually be able to use the same functionality). And while these queries are currently limited to Twitter and FriendFeed for now, it wouldn’t be surprising if we saw Tinker open up to monitoring other services in the future.

While a service like this looks interesting on the face of it, it doesn’t really fall into glam’s core focus of fashion. So I am note sure why glam would get into this area.

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