Last week the NY Times reported
that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the
company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective,
they also provide an example:
For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza,
which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year.
Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with
running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder,
said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans
to begin widely running ads until 2010.
Twitter previously raised $55 million and has said it still has $25
million of that in the bank. So the question is, what will it do with
these $100 million? Or, as I see it, who will it acquire now?
As part of it efforts to find a business model, Twitter will most
likely acquire companies that’ll help it form that model.I’m
thinking\betting on two major trends for such a business model:
Manage Companies’ Presence on Twitter
Twitter’s most obvious business model is by helping companies manage
their presence on Twitter and monitor how their brands are being
discussed.
This makes companies who provide all sort of analytics information,
CRM integration and even url-shorteners as potential acquisitions for a
future Twitter business package…
Local Markets, Local Social Network
The minute I read about Twitter’s $100 million round I thought of companies like Foursquare. I wasn’t really surprised when I read today’s Techmeme and noticed Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Foursquare.
Also, the twitter team has been working very hard lately to make Twitter location aware, allowing users to share their location via their tweets and browse stuff that is happening around them.
Twitter is great in forming local communities (just checkout the local tweetups
everywhere), gather news and provide all sort of local information.
Fouresquare as well as other location based social networks doing can
really help twitter tap into the long-tail local businesses market and
take on companies such as Yelp.
So, what do you think of Twitter’s latest valuation? What will it do with its newly raised $100mil?
(Cross-posted @ Developer Zen)
I agree that they will probably partner up with a local social network like foursquare, think it’s a great idea, or maybe they will align with a larger company. It seems all of the social networks are buying or forging together with other social sites or mainly search engines Google/Youtube, etc.