Twitter - II - Growth
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Twitter - II - Growth - Globalization
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Updated. Twitter has received a $300 million investment from Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud and his investment company, Kingdom Holding. The deal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was officially announced in a press statement released by Kingdom Holding on Sunday night. The statement reads in part: “This investment was the result of several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence and represents a strategic stake in Twitter.” With a reported net worth of $19.6 billion, Prince Alwaleed is the 26th-richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
Twitter sells $300M stake to Saudi Prince Alwaleed — Tech News and Analysis
You don’t see it quite as often nowdays, but Twitter’s Fail Whale, its personalised 404 error page, used to be quite a regular on the network. But how did such a creature come to be? Over on Quora , the creator of the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu (@YiyingLu) has revealed how the inspiration for her design was based on an original piece entitled Lifting A Dreamer , which Lu used for an e-greeting card for a friend. When Lu placed the image on iStockphoto, Twitter stumbled upon it and snapped it up, replacing their current 404 page, which believe it or not was an LOLcat.
Lifting A Dreamer – A Visual History Of Twitter’s Fail Whale
Being a kid can be a lot of fun, but eventually you have to grow up. It happens to all of us, and technology startups are no exception. Until recently, Twitter seemed more like a cool experiment thrown together by a few guys as a side project than an actual company — probably because that’s exactly what it was. But when you have 175 million users and over $150 million in venture financing (and a $1-billion market value), you have to start getting serious, and for better or worse, that’s exactly what Twitter has been doing. The latest signs of that maturation are the departure of Evan Williams as CEO and the company’s renewed interest in cracking down on things like who can use the word “tweet” and when.
From Gawky Teen to Responsible Adult
Mainly, the official version leaves out the role of a major cofounder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal. Twitter is now worth more than $5 billion – and climbing toward $10 billion on secondary markets – so it's worth setting the story straight. The official telling of Twitter's founding goes like this: Ex-Googler Evan Williams had a startup called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform.
How Twitter Was Founded
Investing in the earliest stage of startups is difficult. At the stage we see companies, it is often with incomplete ideas, incomplete teams and incomplete business models. While we try our best to predict the future, we are often wrong. Yesterday Business Insider published a story about "How Twitter Was Founded" that discussed the history of Odeo and Twitter. First Round Capital was an investor in Odeo -- and I blogged about it almost six years ago when I wrote:
Redeye VC: Woulda Coulda Shoulda - Twitter
Noah Glass is the Twitter cofounder you've never heard of. Along with Jack Dorsey and a developer named Florian Webber, Glass pitched something called Twitter . Glass came up with the name.
Twitter's Forgotten Cofounder, Noah Glass
This is the post I haven’t wanted to write for weeks. This is the post no one wants to write. No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best friend’s dog. But I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter is operationally in trouble, for a lot of the same reasons that Fortune’s Jessi Hempel outlines in her cover today, and other reasons I’ve been hearing about for months.
Twitter: Consider This Your Intervention.
Even as it fends off what are rumored to be multibillion-dollar acquisition offers from the likes of Google, Twitter seems to be in turmoil — not only on the product side, where it has brought in co-founder Jack Dorsey to try and right the ship, but on the management side as well. A recent Fortune magazine feature paints a portrait of a company being pulled in different directions by its board , by its founders and by its senior executives. So what is missing from this picture? A consistent and tangible vision for what Twitter is, and what it wants to become — and a single person who can stand for and champion that vision. Who does that sound like? It sounds a lot like Apple.
The Vision Thing: What Twitter Needs to Learn From Apple: Tech News and Analysis «
Twitter more robust than it may seem - CNN.com
An urban-design geek, Dorsey envisaged a city full of people buzzing short messages at each other the way taxi dispatchers and bike messengers do. Where are you? What's up? What's your status?
In the beginning was a word, sketched on a legal pad. And the word was Status. That was the working title used by programmer Jack Dorsey in 2000, when he designed the service that was to become Twitter six years later. An urban-design geek, Dorsey envisaged a city full of people buzzing short messages at each other the way taxi dispatchers and bike messengers do. Where are you? What’s up?
Twitter's Status: More Robust Than It May Seem
Could Twitter Get “MySpaced”? | Mark Evans Tech
As difficult as it might be to believe, it was not that long ago that MySpace dominated the social networking market, and made Facebook look like a pipsqueak. MySpace ruled the roost in such a major way that Rupert Murdoch spent nearly $600-million to make it part of his News Corp. empire. Now, MySpace is evaporating before our eyes while Facebook is battling Google for digital dominance.Twitter’s Biz Stone: ‘We’re Long Overdue To Be Knocked Down By The Press’
Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn MoreTrouble @Twitter - Fortune Tech
FORTUNE -- In March, shortly after Jack Dorsey went back to work for Twitter, the company he co-founded four years ago, he did a Q&A session with an entrepreneurship class at Columbia Business School. As students tapped away on their laptops (were they sending tweets?)Yesterday, the story on everyone’s mind in the tech world was the turmoil at Twitter. Led by the Fortune cover story written by Jessi Hempel, if you read it, you might think the sky is falling on Chicken Little. Not surprisingly, Twitter responded — sort of. Though it wasn’t an “official” response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone put up a post on his personal blog late last night directly addressing the Fortune article. He even invoked Rocky. Yes.
Twitter’s Phantom Punch
Twitter V2
Twitter - II - Growth - Statistics
Twitter - Future