Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category
Another $100 million for Twitter?
September 24th, 2009 | 
Author: That business plan had better be close on the horizon, because according to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has some new investors on board: Mutual fund T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, and a handful of others have reportedly pumped $100 million into the microblogging phenomenon.
TechCrunch reported last week that Twitter was putting together a round of funding at around a $1 billion valuation. But that report suggested that the company would do so by raising about $50 million–half of what it actually has, per the WSJ, in a deal expected to close Thursday.
Twitter still doesn’t make significant revenue. But its founders have said that paid corporate accounts, in the form of a sort of “analytics dashboard,” are imminent. Advertising isn’t out of the question either, despite what some of the company’s executives have said in the past.
The company’s initial round of Series B funding last year valued it at about $80 million, but soon added to the round in a deal that upped the valuation well into the hundreds of millions.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10360818-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Twitter phishing scam spreads via direct messages
A new phishing scam is spreading through Twitter via direct messages, according to several reports.
Itamar Kestenbaum writes on his JewNews.net blog that he received a direct message on his Twitter account from someone he didn’t know that said “rofl this you on here?” followed by a link to what appeared to be a video-related Twitter page.
The page looks like a legitimate Twitter log-in page but nabs your credentials if you type in your password, he warns.
Meanwhile, a posting on the Mashable blog said the site had received multiple reports of the new phishing scam and that someone there had even received one of the phishing-related direct messages themselves.
No word on this yet on Twitter’s official blog or from a Twitter spokesperson. We’ll keep you posted as we hear more.
In the meantime, if you clicked on the phishing link and typed in your credentials, you should change your password immediately.
JewNews.net captured this screenshot of the phishing-related direct message Twitter users are receiving and the fake log in page the link directs to.
Trendsmap maps Twitter trends in real-time
Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn’t been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter’s API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.
All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each city. Clicking on any of them pops up a small info box that aggregates the latest tweets, local and global seven-day histories of that trend’s popularity, as well as some top-related news links that change depending on what’s trending.
Trendsmap gives you a birds-eye view of trending topics on Twitter, per city, region, or worldwide.
(Credit: CNET)
Where the site shines though, is in letting you dig even deeper by giving each city its own trends page. Here you can cruise through info boxes without first having to find each tag, as well as see all of the trending charts stacked up against one another–something I think makes for a better experience. It also collects all of the related media like photos and videos in one single section (try giving it a spin for Las Vegas).
One thing the service doesn’t do very well though, is serve smaller towns. This wasn’t a big deal killer for me since I’m based in San Francisco, but if you want to use it for somewhere that’s outside a major city, you’re out of luck. This may simply be a limitation of how deep the data set is, but it keeps you from seeing trends starting up in smaller towns, which can be more interesting than in major cities.
See also Palm’s Trendtracker, which lets you see trending topics not only geography but by time of day as well. We checked it out last week.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10357898-248.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Phone calling coming to Twitter
Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.
A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period–after which the call will end–as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”
According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts. The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.
One important element of the service is that users can keep their phone numbers private, yet be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. To be sure, since the calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online, or may choose to ignore the call if they don’t want to talk.
There are currently several applications that allow users to create voice-to-text Twitter posts–known as tweets–but it does not appear that anyone has yet made it possible to initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users.
Coming on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Facebook users will now be able to communicate with each other via voice–using a third-party application from Vivox–it’s clear that there is a strong interest, among service providers, at least, in taking leading social networks beyond strictly text communications. Whether large numbers of users choose to get on board is unknown at this point, of course. And given that neither the Facebook nor the Twitter voice services are being provided by the social networks themselves means that some users will choose not to get involved for fear of privacy, stability or other concerns.
Still, if these third-party services end up being successful, it would be natural to expect that Facebook and Twitter may decide they need to step up and directly embed such technologies into their offerings. And there is a precedent for such a move. After Vivox began offering Second Life users a third-party voice solution, the virtual world’s publisher, Linden Lab, decided it needed to take advantage of the technology. Today, thanks to a formal partnership, Vivox’s voice service is formally integrated into Second Life.
And while it may be some time before such a thing happens with either Facebook or Twitter, or any other major social network, one would have to think that it’s only a matter of time.
Source :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10355319-52.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Twitter to raise funding at $1 billion valuation?
Twitter is attempting to raise funding at a $1 billion valuation, according to a TechCrunch post Wednesday.
The blog cited unnamed sources claiming that Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced the valuation in a recent meeting. According to TechCrunch’s sources, Twitter plans to raise about $50 million during the financing round. The company has already raised about $55 million in funding.
Twitter hasn’t immediately responded to requests for comment.
In February, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced in a blog post that his company raised approximately $35 million in a Series C round of funding led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. At the time, it was reported that Twitter’s valuation for the round was about $250 million. Assuming that both reports are true, Twitter is contending that it’s now worth four times as much as it was just seven months ago.
Of course, determining the real value of a company is a subjective practice. And most times, those figures change rapidly as economic factors impact the company’s operation.
Twitter, which has yet to turn a profit, still hasn’t implemented a profit-making business model. That could have a major impact on its valuation, regardless of the figure.
That said, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in an interview with VentureBeat last month that his company will implement a revenue model by the end of the year. He wouldn’t dig too deep into details, but he did say it would incorporate paid accounts for businesses that want to use the platform for marketing and customer relations.
But just how those paid accounts will impact Twitter’s growing user base is up for debate. Will companies go elsewhere to promote their brands? Will they pay Twitter’s fees? All that can impact the company’s real value.
So as Twitter possibly heads into another round of funding, it’s important to remember that valuations are fluid numbers that are easily changed. It’s also important to note that so far, Twitter hasn’t confirmed that $1 billion valuation. So maintain some skepticism, as we do, until we hear from Twitter.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10355207-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, Internet, Twitter | 
Tags: $1 billion, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, fund raiser, Twitter | 
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