Twitter seeks developers and acquisitions
Twitter is trying to grow beyond its main messaging app and use acquisitions to become a mobile platform capable of competing with its larger rivals Google, Apple and Facebook.
The company will unveil a suite of tools for app developers at its Flight conference on Wednesday in an effort to woo the developer community and create a potential new business for the future.
The new Twitter kit – called Fabric – is an assembly of its some of its key acquisitions from Crashlytics, a company that created a software which allows developers to locate the bug that is causing their app to crash, to MoPub, the mobile advertising exchange it bought last year.
Jessica Verrilli, director of corporate development and strategy at Twitter, said the “seeds were planted” before the company even went public.
Wall Street has been focused on Twitter’s user numbers. The company may have beaten revenue expectations on the back of expanding its advertising platforms – it does not make a profit – but investors are concerned it will not be able to expand its 271m userbase large enough for advertisers to take it seriously.
Fabric is an effort to expand the company’s horizons and show it has future revenue streams beyond the promoted tweets it includes in users’ timelines. It is composed of four services offered to developers for free.
Twitter intends to continue making deals, using the proceeds raised from its initial public offering, the $1.8bn of convertible bonds in September and the $1bn credit facility it took out before the IPO. But these numbers combined with a $30bn market capitalisation means deals such as Facebook’s $22bn purchase of WhatsApp are out of reach.
Source: FT- Twitter seeks developers and acquisitions
