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We thought it would be great if people and organizations were more open with what they're reading - so we created our own company newsroom to share what our team is Amplifying.

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Derek Krzanowski
Eric Skiff
Eric Goldstein
Dave Grossman
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Reserch Firm values Twitter at $526 - $674 million

Interesting analysis by Next Up Research that values Twitter at less than the $1.1 billion valuation from their recent round… There some other good information in the report.

Amplify’d from gigaom.com via Google Reader

How Much is Twitter Worth? Less Than You Think

Twitter, the San Francisco-based micro-messaging start-up, recently raised about $98 million dollars from T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. valuing the company at a whopping $1.1 billion. NeXt Up Research, the firm founded by veteran financial analyst, Michael Moe, disagrees with that post money valuation, and instead values Twitter at about $526-to-$674 million. Read more at gigaom.com
 

Twitter Snags Digg Talent…

Twitter is beefing up operations and I imagine some other announcements on the horizonl…  On an Amplify note, I had to clip the last sentence ; )

Amplify’d from www.techcrunch.com
Twitter Continues Talent Scoop, Takes Digg’s UX Guy
Fresh off their new $100 million funding round, Twitter continues to scoop up talent from around the web to expand operations. The latest catch is Mark Trammell, who had spent the last two years working on user experience for Digg. Trammell will start his new job at Twitter in a week on the design team working to build a user research program.
Despite the loses, Digg still has no real peer in terms of size in the social news space. Read more at www.techcrunch.com
 

Twitter and the revenue question…

Amplify’d from www.techcrunch.com
Twitter And The Revenue Dilemma
The company has to decide whether or not to turn revenue on. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a real decision. Once revenue is on, how the company is valued by the market can change dramatically.

Some of the biggest blockbuster acquisitions on the Internet have been pre-revenue companies. YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006 is one example. Reaching back further, Hotmail to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 is another. Neither had any revenue to speak of, but both “owned” a new and fast growing market. And there are lots more examples.

When you don’t have revenue you can’t be valued based on a multiple of revenues. Read more at www.techcrunch.com
 

@fredwilson on speculating on private companies

Fred Wilson takes a wider look at Robert Scoble’s recent claim that Twitter is worth $5 Billion.

Amplify’d from www.avc.com

Is Speculating On What Private Companies Are Worth A Good Idea?

Robert Scoble wrote a post at 4am on the road in Indianapolis last night proclaiming that Twitter is “probably worth $5bn to $10bn.”
Is all this speculation good or bad? I’m honestly not sure.

But I think all the focus on what a company is worth can be bad. These companies are private for a reason. Most of them aren’t mature enough to be public companies. They often don’t have full management teams and some don’t even have revenues. The focus inside these companies needs to be on building the company, the product, and the business. And endless discussions about what their company is worth can be terribly distracting.

At the end of the day, this speculation about what companies are worth is useful if everyone keeps it in context. It’s a lot like fantasy baseball. Your team might be doing great, but at the end of the day, you really don’t own a major league baseball team. It’s just a game.

Read more at www.avc.com
 

Twitter Use and Tweet Distribution

excellent analysis…

Amplify’d from blog.rapleaf.com

Rapleaf Study on Twitter Use and Tweet Distribution

With studies suggesting that the majority of Twitter users are not active participants, we thought it would be interesting to study tweeting behavior in more detail. So, we sampled over 4 million Twitter users and analyzed the distribution of their tweet frequency.
rapleaf_study_tweet_distribution
Highlights:
  • 76% of Twitter users have sent less than five tweets; of those, half have never tweeted
  • The cutoff for the top 10% of Twitter users is 50 tweets
  • The top 1% of Twitter users have sent over 1,000 tweets
    • Read more at blog.rapleaf.com
     

    Twitter set to launch commercial accounts

    Premium services coming soon…

    Amplify’d from digital.venturebeat.com

    Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year

    Co-founder Biz Stone said the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces, creating a “commercial layer” over the social network.

    “Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

    He also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of further acquisitions, acknowledging that Twitter had talked to FriendFeed about collaborating or acquiring the company before it was bought by Facebook.

    Read more at digital.venturebeat.com
     

    Twitter + “Opt-in” Beacon = Justbought.it?

    Amplify’d from mashable.com
    justboughtit
    Part Twitter, part TwitPic (Twitpic), and part Google Maps (Google Maps), the site encourages users to tweet whenever they’ve “just bought something” (get it?) with a picture of the product and the location where they purchased it
    The site then takes this data to create a community of Twitter shoppers. Upon logging in (using Twitter OAuth), you’ll see any recent purchases from your area, by category (shoes, art, etc.) or just browse the latest tweets sent out from JustBought.it shoppers
    Much like StockTwits (which bought Chart.ly), JustBought.it is attempting to establish community around something people are already doing on Twitter – sharing their shopping experience. Although the site certainly faces the issue of needing lots of users to become exciting, it seems they have a solid strategy in place to get thereRead more at mashable.com
     

    I was initially pessimistic about this concept. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how great people’s desire to publish their lifestream is…including what they purchase. As an opt-in service rather than what beacon tried to do, it might just work. I have not tried the service and the execution of the idea is critical, but there are potential ecommerce, lead generation, and advertising opportunities that could provide justbought.it with a rare money making formula.

    battle of the retweets

    TweetMeme is not happy with Retweet…

    Amplify’d from www.techcrunch.com
    Defending Its Turf, TweetMeme Is Already Threatening To Sue ReTweet

    It hasn’t even been 24 hours since we wrote about the impending launch of TweetMeme competitor ReTweet, and already TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead is threatening ReTweet with a lawsuit. He takes being king of retweets very seriously.

    I just hope all of these startups realize that Twitter could just end up trademarking the term just like they did with Tweet.

    Read more at www.techcrunch.com
     

    Twitter just gets it right.

    Forget all the snarky chatter about twitter for a minute and take a look at this awesome error message i got when I went to check out a user from a new follower email link. Its very direct, but the humor in the messaging just takes the edge off the jarring experience you get landing on a page you never expected to see…briliant. Kudos to the development team.

    Amplify’d from twitter.com

    Who goes there?

    Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity. Mosey along now, nothing to see here.

    …or if you’re curious as to why an account might be suspended, head over this way for the juicy details.

    Read more at twitter.com
     

    @batterista nails it…

    the quote below is how we’ve felt about Amplify. substitute “talking” with “clipping.”

    Amplify’d from twitter.com

    batterista

    On Twitter, “people aren’t talking to be searchable, which makes the content good.” - Twitter board mtg docsRead more at twitter.com