Salto Partners

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Promoted Tweets

On Tuesday, Twitter launched a new advertising initiative that aims to boost revenues and add to its more than 284 million members. The initiative aims to expand the reach of “Promoted Tweets” on Twitter. Promoted Tweets are ads that Twitter inserts into its members timelines. Currently, promoted Tweets are only seen on Twitter, but the company wants them to be seen elsewhere, too. Here is what I said in an interview with E-Commerce Times, “The concept of running Promoted Tweets on other people’s apps and sites makes a lot of sense. It essentially gives Twitter the opportunity to grow its reach and generate revenue well past beyond its own user base. This announcement might be calming down some investors who are worried about Twitter’s ability to organically grow its user base. Now, the company is still reporting net losses on a quarterly basis. Very soon, these kinds of business ideas have to shed some real profits for Twitter to continue to command a premium on its share price.”

You can read the whole article here.

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Litigation issue for Apple

Apple this week clomped into court to continue fighting a nearly 10-year-old class-action suit stemming from its use of digital rights management technology in iPods. The suit originally was brought in 2005. Here is what I said in an interview with E-Commerce Times.

“Apple and its new management have to decide: Is it worth their while to fight the class-action lawsuit tooth and nail? The company could settle out of court. That “won’t break the bank, affect Apple’s stock prices, or affect in any way the direction of Apple’s investment strategy going forward.

You can read the entire article here.

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Twitter rolls out searchable tweets database

This week Twitter began indexing every public tweet posted since it began operating in 2006. “Our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every tweet ever published,” said Yi Zhuang, who led the team working on the project. Here is what I told Tech News World about the situation, “Twitter’s rollout is an enormous achievement in computer science. Making hundreds of billions of tweets searchable with a latency of under 100 ms is like combining the capacity of CNN providing the latest news with the thoroughness and completeness of the Library of Congress in real-time.”

You can read the whole article here.

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Investor worried re Twitter

Twitter shares closed Tuesday at US$43.78, down almost 10 percent, even though the company’s Q3 earnings report, released Monday, showed monthly active users grew 23 percent. Here is what I said about this in an interview with E-Commerce Times, “Twitter and Facebook need to engage their audiences differently and be used by marketers differently. While Facebook needs to keep its audience on the site, Twitter “can engage users via desktop and mobile. It also can extend its reach by giving marketers the ability to embed Twitter and Twitter ads into their respective apps. However, Twitter has not figured out how to do all of that, and that’s the nature of being on the cusp of innovation. “

You can read the whole article here.

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Facebook’s Q2

Facebook produced US$2.68 billion in ad revenue in Q2, up 67 percent year over year, and mobile ads accounted for about 62 percent of that haul, totaling $1.66 billion. I was quoted in E-Commerce times about this. Here is what I said, “The ability of Facebook to move into the mobile ad space and to monetize it successfully was heavily questioned last year. The company answered in the best possible way — by simply beating market expectations.” You can read the full article here.