Twitter appoints Jack Dorsey CEO, seeks new chairman

Twitter Inc. named Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO but said it would look elsewhere for a chairman, seeking to allay concerns about its co-founder's dual role as head of the mobile payments company Square.

Twitter's shares rose as much as 6 percent on Monday after the announcement, which ended months of speculation about who would take the top job at the microblogging service.

Dorsey has been running Twitter as interim CEO to much acclaim since his predecessor, Dick Costolo, stepped down on July 1.

"To further simplify the demands on his time as well as to make sure we bring a fresh voice and new leadership to the board, the board has decided to separate the chair and CEO roles," Peter Currie, Twitter's lead independent director, said on a call.

Twitter is working to rekindle growth after its latest quarterly results revealed the slowest rise in monthly average users since the company went public in 2013 - a performance that Dorsey at the time called "unacceptable."

Some investors had expressed concerns about whether Dorsey could run both Twitter and Square, which he also co-founded. Square is expected to go public this year and Dorsey may have to devote substantial time courting investors for the IPO.

But others say Dorsey, 38, is a more effective leader now than in 2008, when he was fired from his first stint as Twitter CEO.

Investors and analysts have lauded faster product rollouts since Dorsey took the helm in July, including a widely available "buy now" button that allows users to make purchases directly through Twitter.

Kevin Landis, portfolio manager at the Firsthand Technology Value fund, said Dorsey should focus on innovation and on finding ways to make Twitter as much as part of its user's daily lives as Facebook is to its users.

"The worst thing you can say about Twitter today is that it looks a lot like the Twitter of two years ago," said Landis, whose fund has owned shares of Twitter since before the company went public.

IN GOOD COMPANY

Dorsey is not the first person to run two major companies. Steve Jobs led Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and animated movie studio Pixar for several years. Elon Musk runs electric car pioneer Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O) and rocket maker SpaceX.

Dorsey sent Twitter's first tweet - "just setting up my twttr" - in March 2006. He had more than 3 million followers as of Monday, more than either Musk or the current Apple CEO, Tim Cook.

Shebly Seyrafi, analyst at FBN Securities, said Twitter might be seeking to limit Dorsey's already heavy workload. But that is only part of the rationale, he said: an outsider as chairman is also a way to keep "a check" on the chief executive.

It might also offer protection against any potential conflict of interest. Among other recent innovations driven by Dorsey is a partnership with Square that lets users make political donations through Twitter.

"You could potentially see conflicts of interest with Square," said James Cakmak, analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. "It hasn't happened yet, but at that time it would help him recuse himself from conversations that do involve Square."

Initially, Dorsey appeared to have been excluded from running Twitter after the company said its CEO job would be full-time.

"We assumed we would only consider a candidate who could make an undivided commitment to be our CEO," Currie said. "But over time it became apparent to us that Jack was not just meeting but surpassing the expectations we had of him as interim CEO, while also running Square."

Tech news website Re/code first reported Dorsey's permanent appointment last week. Dorsey will remain on Twitter's board. Costolo resigned from the board on Sept. 30.

Adam Bain, previously Twitter's president and head of revenue and once considered a favorite for the top job, was named chief operating officer.

Twitter's shares rose 5.8 percent to $27.84 on the New York Stock Exchange.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Twitter buys artificial intelligence group Whetlab

WASHINGTON -- Twitter on Wednesday acquired the artificial intelligence startup Whetlab, bolstering the analytics capacity which is becoming increasingly important for social networks.

Terms were not announced for the deal, which was disclosed in a tweet by the Twitter engineering team and on the website of the Massachusetts-based Whetlab.

Twitter did not comment on its plan for the service, but artificial intelligence can be used to determine the most relevant tweets and advertising messages for each user, or to better filter spam.

"Over the past year, we have created a technology to make machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically," a statement on the Whetlab website said.

"Twitter is the platform for open communication on the Internet and we believe that Whetlab's technology can have a great impact by accelerating Twitter's internal machine learning efforts."

The move comes with Twitter searching for a new chief executive following Dick Costolo's announcement he is stepping down. Co-founder Jack Dorsey will be the interim CEO.

Whetlab, which was founded by computer scientists and neuroscientists from Harvard and Canadian universities, aims to help companies make better use of artificial intelligence, or machine learning.

With some 300 million active users, Twitter has been growing at a slower pace than some rival social networks and has yet to show a profit, despite creating new advertising products for the one-to-many messaging service.

Facebook has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence to show more relevant items in user news feeds.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Twitter's Dick Costolo to step down as CEO

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter Inc Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo abruptly announced he was stepping down on Thursday amid increasing scrutiny of the company's slow user growth and inability to attract advertisers at the same rate as its competitors.

Costolo will be replaced by co-founder Jack Dorsey on an interim basis.

According to a source familiar with the matter, it was Costolo's decision to leave, and Costolo said he brought it up with the board last year as it began talking about succession planning.

Twitter has had a number of shake-ups in its management. Co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams both served as CEOs of the company before Costolo, and Costolo has overhauled much of his management team over the past year.

"Unfortunately this news isn't surprising," said Nate Elliott of management consultant Forrester Research. "The bottom line is that Twitter isn't very good right now at serving either its users or its marketers."

Costolo said on a conference call that Twitter will consider both internal and external candidates for its next CEO and that it has the "strongest management team (it's) ever had," which influenced his decision to step down. In a statement earlier he said he was "tremendously proud" of his six years at Twitter.

In an interview with Reuters, Dorsey said he was not thinking "at all" about remaining CEO permanently because the search has just begun but did not rule out the job. He also said he did not anticipate any change in Twitter's strategy or direction. Although he was ousted by management in 2008, Dorsey said that he is now surrounded by a strong executive team and had learned from his experience running Square Inc.

Dorsey said the CEO search has not begun, but he noted the company was looking for a CEO who uses Twitter every day and "loves" the product.

Dorsey continues as CEO of Square. He had served as Twitter's president and CEO from May 2007 to October 2008.

Wall Street reacted positively to the news, as Twitter shares rose to $37.17, up 3.6 percent, after the announcement, meaning investors thought Twitter was worth $900 million more without Costolo than with him.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

What Twitter must do to counter fears of plateau

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter, whose shares had soared more than 150 percent since their November debut on Wall Street, stunned investors this week with a one-two punch of bad news: near-flat user growth and a drop in engagement among its 241 million members.

To assuage fears that the company's growth is plateauing, and to justify its rich valuation - still at $28 billion even after a 24 percent drop on Thursday - Chief Executive Dick Costolo must now convince investors that he can quickly make the right moves to broaden Twitter's appeal.

"The fact that we've seen timeline views per user go down two quarters in a row suggests that it's more than just a design problem, that they may be hitting a ceiling for their current iteration," said Nate Elliot, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Clearly we've seen that other social sites, even ones that are much bigger, have kept growing by adding new features and new functionality."

So far, Costolo has asked for time to implement a series of changes that, while not directly lifting Twitter's user growth, will help the service gain traction over several quarters.

Costolo told analysts on a conference call Wednesday that tweaks such as directly displaying pictures and videos in the timeline, or stringing conversations into a thread, have raised user engagement metrics by 35 percent and that the company must continue its course.

"We don't think we need to change anything about the characteristics of our platform, we simply need to make Twitter a better Twitter," the CEO said.

But Wall Street's lingering concerns point to a central dilemma about Twitter's evolution. In the past six years, the service has spread precisely because of its spare, lightweight format, which has fueled everything from mass protests in the Arab world to Hollywood celebrity spitting matches.

Yet critics say Twitter has failed to innovate quickly, especially compared to Facebook Inc, which famously lives by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's mantra: "Move fast and break things." Twitter's overseas rivals, such as Sina Weibo , also often copy each others' features and overhaul their own offerings with ruthless efficiency.

Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, said Twitter's relatively slow evolution was part of the company's cautious culture, which has been highly methodical in testing how to deploy advertisements or how to venture into a new line of business.

For instance, speculation has mounted for years that Twitter would introduce real-time commerce to its platform, but executives have only begun to openly address the subject in recent months and staff up its e-commerce team.

In comparison, Facebook in 2006 introduced the "news feed," which completely changed the feel of the service but has since become its most central element. By 2010, its sixth year, the world's largest social media site was still gaining users at a rate of more than 10 percent quarter over quarter, and had topped 600 million members by the end of that year.

In the most recent quarter, Facebook delivered its strongest revenue growth in two years, beating Wall Street targets, and said it now has 1.23 billion monthly users.

Twitter reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, but investors focused on user growth of just 3.8 percent, the lowest rate of quarter-on-quarter growth since Twitter began disclosing user figures.

"The challenges around user metrics in the fourth quarter are likely to raise more questions around whether Twitter can become a truly mainstream product," JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth said in a research note.

BIGGER CHANGES IN STORE?

Some of the tweaks Costolo spoke of were cosmetic, such as helping new users find their friends more easily so they won't abandon Twitter within the first hours or days. But the CEO also hinted that Twitter might make more drastic changes, including introducing an alternative to the chronological timeline, which until now has underpinned the user experience.

"We want to do a better job organizing content for our users along topical lines rather than just chronological," Costolo said on the conference call. "Topic-based discovery on our platform will make Twitter easier to understand and use for everyone."

Under Costolo's stewardship, Twitter has been credited with conceiving the advertising model of injecting ads directly into the timeline, now the de facto business model for social media in the mobile era. But it also came under pressure for not moving quickly enough in 2010 and 2011, when it was quietly perfecting that advertising product with experiments.

Costolo on Wednesday repeatedly stressed that the company conducts extensive research into user behavior before making moves to juice up user growth. An uptick in traction may only take effect slowly through 2014, he warned.

Blau said he agreed with Costolo's belief that Twitter possessed a basic appeal to people around the world, but he said the management needs to move faster.

"It's basic human behavior that people want to have open public discourse," Blau said. "It may be a matter of changing Twitter's interface to make that smoother. They need time to figure it out, but time right now is a luxury."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Twitter revamps to connect the world

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter says it has finished rolling out overhauled pages crafted to boost the appeal of the message-sharing service to users around the world.

“At the very core there are fewer places you have to click and less you have to learn,” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said as he and other executives unveiled the changes at the startup’s San Francisco headquarters. “We’ve done a lot of user testing and it has proven to be much simpler.”

Overhauled navigation features take advantage of the fact that Twitter symbols such as @ and # are making their way into common culture, showing up anywhere from text messages to advertising billboards and television.

Twitter designed Connect navigation tools that essentially turn those symbols into new age URLs, or web addresses, to let people find all posts or other information being fired off about topics.

Twitter also expanded profile pages, letting users tell more about themselves or, in the case of companies, their brands.

Dorsey said revenue from “promoted tweet” style ads has been steadily growing and the startup is easing out a self-service advertising system.

Advertising revenues at Twitter grew 213% to $139.5 million in 2011, up from $45 million in 2010, according to eMarketer.

The market tracking firm predicted that Twitter will bring in $259.9 million in advertising revenue this year and that the global revenue would hit $540 million by the year 2014.

The Twitter overhaul completed on Friday includes new Timeline that brings together all Twitter chatter or content related to a particular “tweet.”

“There is a universe within every tweet,” Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo said at the unveiling. “The 140 characters are a caption associated with a rich canvas that could be a song, a video, a photo or more.”

The new Twitter design was described as a platform on which the service will build to reinforce its effort to “reach every person on the planet.”

“Of course tweeting is still front and center,” Dorsey said. “Any time you have something to tell the world you can do it instantly.”

source: japantoday.com