Twitter, which has fended off several buyers, intends to remain an independent company and is not considering going public at the moment, chief executive Dick Costolo said on Friday.
“My sincere hope is for Twitter to be a successful independent company,” Costolo said at a conference organized by technology blog AllThingsD.com on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we’ve set out to do and we have all this crazy potential,” he said of the micro-blogging service, which has attracted more than 175 millions users since it launched in 2006.
Asked about a potential initial public offering, Costolo said “I just don’t think about it.”
Costolo said for the moment Twitter’s goal is to be present on more devices and platforms.
He said that an advertising program implemented last year that involves paid for “promoted tweets” was working “fantastically well.”
“A couple of promoted tweets are in the top 10 promoted tweets of all time,” he said. “It’s a big enough business for us to be an independent company.”
Twitter last month received an injection of US$200 million in funding from investors to help fuel its growth, reportedly giving the San Francisco-based company a valuation of US$3.7 billion.
“Our business plan is to continue to raise money,” Costolo joked.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day