Saturday, 26 September 2009

Twitter raises funding "significant" without disclosing the amount

The site management of micro-blogging Twitter, which has never earned a profit, said Friday it has raised funding "significant" but declined to comment on press reports which assess the amount to 100 million dollars .
"We have achieved a significant fundraiser with a group of investors," says Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, the blog site.
"The Epic of Twitter is just beginning and we intend to offer the best product, best technology and the best company possible," says Williams.
This financial lifeline from investors Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital.
Evan Williams has not advanced the amount of the envelope. But the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, it amounted to nearly 100 million dollars.
This funding enhances Twitter to one billion dollars, according to the Thursday edition of The Wall Street Journal, against 225 million earlier this year.
This investment of 100 million dollars - if the amount proved correct - was three times larger than expected from Twitter this financing transaction, the third time and the most important.
Twitter enjoys great popularity among Internet users. It allows them to send real time messages of 140 characters.
But analyst Robert Enderle of Enderle Group, whose headquarters are in Silicon Valley (California, West), that Twitter is one billion dollars amounts to "wishful realities. In fact, the company has never earned a profit since its inception in August 2006.
"Twitter has to learn to make money", insists Mr. Enderle.
But, and here comes in the Achilles heel of the site, Twitter, claiming more than 50 million members worldwide, may well have peaked in terms of users.
According to the company Hitwise, which analyzes the popularity of websites, the number of visits to Twitter and Twitter with the research object has suffered a serious setback after the meteoric rise of infancy.
"Twitter has reached its climax in April 2009, Hitwise has noted in a statement Friday.
Another factor of concern for analysts: the serious competition from Facebook Twitter is before which is the eternal outsider.
Facebook and its 300 million registered self-appointed has already built the function that makes the purpose of Twitter: it allows to leave short comments in real time on his personal page.
Twitter or Facebook, if one was required to eliminate unnecessary because "this is Twitter, not Facebook," J. Rob Enderle.
Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, had told AFP earlier this year that he was not eager to see the company make money.
In early September, the company had changed its statutes to be open to advertising. "We leave the door open to advertising, had then said Mr Stone.