Twitter Now Valued at $1 Billion
By Jason Ankeny
Microblogging juggernaut Twitter is poised to raise about $100 billion in new funding, bringing the firm's total valuation to around $1 billion despite the absence of a discernible revenue model. Citing sources briefed on Twitter's plans, The New York Times reports the new investors include Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price and current backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
The Times notes that for context, Twitter's $1 billion valuation is almost double the market capitalization of the Domino's Pizza chain, which boasts 10,500 employees and $1.4 billion in sales--Twitter has about 60 employees, and while the startup is experimenting with running advertisements on its website, co-founder Biz Stone said this week that it has no plans to launch widespread ad efforts until 2010.
Twitter has not yet commented on the new investment, but analysts note the company does not appear to need the capital--it previously raised $55 million, and said about $25 million remains in the bank. Most speculation suggests Twitter will earmark the new investment to expand its technology infrastructure in advance of future growth, or acquire one or more of the myriad startups developing desktop and mobile software applications based on the Twitter service.
Twitter presently boasts about 54 million users worldwide. Earlier this month, its chief rival Facebook said its worldwide users topped the 300 million mark--in addition, the social networking giant reported it is now cash-flow positive. Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya marked the occasion by telling VentureBeat that Twitter was now "in the rearview mirror." [FierceMobileContent]
Twitter Adding Geolocation Awareness Features
By Jason Ankeny
Twitter announced its plans to introduce geolocation awareness to users' tweets, launching a new API enabling developers to add latitude and longitude to any post. According to the microblogging giant, location sharing promises to add new context to each tweet--for example, Twitter users could switch from reading the tweets of accounts they already follow to reading tweets from accountholders in their neighborhood or city, expanding the platform's relevance as users look to share information on local events ranging from concerts to natural disasters.
"There will likely be many use cases we haven't even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the Twitter Blog. Stone notes that the location feature will be disabled by default, and even after users activate the service, location data will be stored for only a limited period of time.
Twitter will initially release the new geolocation API to its developer partners: "Most of the mobile applications people use and love are built by Twitter platform developers," Stone writes. "Developers will have access to this new geolocation feature early which means it will most likely be available on your app of choice before it's available on Twitter's website. Later, we'll add it to our mobile web site and Twitter.com as well."
In an interview with DigitalBeat, Stone said Twitter is presently in the early stages of introducing commercial accounts promising business users premium services like detailed analytics. From there, the company might move into developing business-centric APIs, creating a "commercial layer" over the social network. "Twitter will still be free for everybody and we'll still tell them to go crazy with it," Stone said. "But we've identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit." [FierceMobileContent]
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