Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Friday following a report that Google was seeking to purchase the hot micro-blogging service that his goal was to build a “profitable, independent company.”
Stone, in a brief post on the Twitter blog, said that “it should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.
“Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started,” Stone said in the post, which he called “a response to the latest Internet speculation about where Twitter is headed.”
Stone’s comments came hours after influential technology blogger Michael Arrington, writing on his blog TechCrunch, said Internet search giant Google was in talks to acquire the hot San Francisco-based startup.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, Arrington said the price was unknown but it was likely to be “well, well north” of the US$250 million valuation placed on Twitter in a recent round of venture capital funding.
Arrington said Google would pay cash or publicly valued stock for Twitter, which turned down a US$500 million takeover offer from social network colossus Facebook just a few months ago.
Arrington initially reported that Google and Twitter were in “late-stage negotiations” but he backed off that assertion slightly in a later post in which he said the acquisition talks were “still fairly early stage.”
Kara Swisher, another respected Silicon Valley blogger, writing on her blog Boomtown, dismissed the report by rival TechCrunch.
“While the ‘news’ that Google was in ‘late-stage’ talks to acquire Twitter, which TechCrunch reported last night, certainly sounds exciting, it isn’t accurate in any way,” Swisher said.
Swisher said the two firms have held “product-related discussions” around “real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.”
“No negotiations, no deal, nada,” she quoted an unnamed source as saying.
Twitter’s potential as a real-time search engine has sparked recurring bouts of speculation that Google may be interested in buying the company.
“We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search,” Arrington said. “It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game.”
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt took some flak earlier this year for calling Twitter a “poor man’s e-mail” but backed away from the description in later comments saying “we admire Twitter.”
“We think Twitter did a very good job of exposing a whole new way to communicate,” he said.
But he said Google was not in the market for acquisitions at the moment.
“I’m not sure prices are at their low yet,” Schmidt said. “The situation globally is pretty dire. We are certainly looking. We haven’t seen anything yet that was really exciting.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is now ranked ninth among the world’s 100 most valuable companies after its market capitalization more than doubled over the past year, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said in a report last month. TSMC’s market capitalization surged 101 percent year-on-year to US$1.427 trillion as of March 31, the accounting and consulting firm’s 2026 Global Top 100 Companies by Market Capitalization report said. The gain catapulted the world’s largest contract chipmaker from 12th place to ninth in the rankings, and it was the fastest-growing among the global top 10, it said. TSMC was the only Taiwanese company among the top
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday fell sharply against the US dollar to close at its lowest level since May 22 amid a massive outflow of funds from the country because of investors panicking over global equity markets. The NT dollar ended at NT$31.580 against the US dollar, slightly lower than its close of NT$31.568 on May 22, after moving between NT$31.5 and NT$31.648 on combined turnover of US$3.062 billion on the Taipei Foreign Exchange and the Cosmos Foreign Exchange. The NT dollar received a significant hit in the morning session, slumping as much as NT$0.173 at a time when other Asian currencies
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported record revenue of NT$416.975 billion (US$13.17 billion) for last month, putting the world’s largest contract chipmaker on track to set a record for quarterly revenue. Last month’s figure surpassed March’s record NT$415.19 billion and represented increases of 1.5 percent from April and 30.1 percent from a year earlier. For the first five months of the year, TSMC generated NT$1.96 trillion in revenue, up 30 percent year-on-year, it said in a statement. TSMC has forecast second-quarter revenue of between US$39 billion and US$40.2 billion, representing sequential growth of about 10 percent and year-on-year growth of about
PATENT PROBE: US lawmakers called for a ban on imports of chips made by TSMC if they are found to infringe on US patents, with a preliminary ruling expected soon Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) yesterday expressed confidence in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) compliance with patent regulations after reports linked the company to a patent infringement lawsuit in the US. US Representative Ryan Zinke, and US senators Tim Sheehy, Roger Marshall and Bernie Moreno urged the US International Trade Commission in a May 22 letter to ban imports of chips made by TSMC if they are found to infringe on US patents, Axios reported on Wednesday. An administrative law judge is expected to issue a preliminary ruling this month, with the commission potentially making a final decision in
RSS