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Strategies & Market Trends : Speculating in Takeover Targets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: richardred who wrote (3954)6/3/2015 5:56:15 PM
From: richardred  Respond to of 7140
 
Google Buying Twitter an ‘Instant Fit,' Investor Sacca Says

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Bloomberg By Sarah Frier 32 minutes ago

Longtime Twitter Inc. investor Chris Sacca said it would be a good fit with Google Inc. in a merger scenario, even as he pushed for the company to improve its products and services to lure more users and advertisers.

“I think it would be a fantastic use of Google’s cash,” Sacca said on CNBC Wednesday, when he was asked whether Twitter should remain independent. “It’s an instant fit. This is the thing that Google never had. They’ve never understood social, have never understood those personal interactions. This bolts in quite clearly.”

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Sacca’s comments follow his 8,500-word blog post on Wednesday calling on Twitter to broaden its appeal with new products to highlight the company’s content around live events and popular discussions. If Twitter follows suggestions like his, he said the company has a better chance of remaining independent. If not, he said Google, Microsoft Corp. or Facebook Inc. should make bids for San Francisco-based Twitter.

“I believe Twitter can be so much more than it is today,” said Sacca, who invests through his firm, Lowercase Capital LLC.

Sacca, known for being Twitter’s biggest cheerleader, has begun publicly criticizing the company for not taking advantage of its strengths. Still, the missive from an influential early investor adds to the burden facing Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo, who has struggled to boost Twitter’s users, even after replacing managers of its product and engineering teams. Twitter’s member base was 302 million monthly users in the first quarter -- about a fifth of Facebook’s audience.

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Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, and Winnie King, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Twitter is also holding its annual shareholders meeting today.
Bigger Risks
Twitter should take bigger risks, Sacca said. He pointed out that almost 1 billion people who have used Twitter didn’t stick with it. He predicted that some big changes -- such as apps that would organize posts by topic as opposed to chronologically, or prompts that help users decide what to post -- would bolster Twitter’s appeal.

Twitter, which lets users post 140-character updates with photos or video, has “failed to tell its own story to investors and users,” Sacca said. The stock has dropped 28 percent since late April, when the company cut its sales forecast and reported revenue that fell short of analysts’ estimates, prompting some of them to raise concerns about management’s credibility and assessment of advertiser and consumer demand.

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Wall Street
While the stock is up more than 40 percent since a November 2013 initial public offering, it’s about half of the peak set in December of that year. The shares of Twitter rose 1.7 percent to $37 at Wednesday’s close in New York.

“The transition to being public has been rough,” Sacca wrote. “The company has disappointed Wall Street more often than not. Twitter’s earnings calls are mostly dedicated to playing defense while discussing incremental improvements to sign-up flows and tweaks to the service.”

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Twitter has the potential to reach 500 million users, Sacca said in his previous blog post last month. Sacca, a former adviser to the company, also said then that he hadn’t been “as candid as I could be in public discussions about Twitter.”

Sacca also suggested today that Twitter make its service easier to use by building a separate application or service that would curate content, with the help of human editors, focused on particular live events. It would “be the place everyone visits first to see how the game is going or when the show starts,” without requiring people to log in or Tweet.
Done Right
He also suggested channels within the application that could be destinations for information about particular locations or popular topics. Other organizations, such as the National Basketball Association, could build separate applications that display Twitter posts, he said. Sacca wants Twitter to feel less lonely, and suggests adds like “hearts” and read receipts on tweets.

“Done right, and done soon, hundreds of millions of new users will join and stay active on the service, hundreds of millions of inactive users will return to the service, and hundreds millions more will use Twitter from the outside,” Sacca wrote.

More from Bloomberg.com

finance.yahoo.com



To: richardred who wrote (3954)6/11/2015 6:18:24 PM
From: richardred  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 7140
 
Twitter Ceo to resign! On the Street link. My SI link tells how Yahoo could avoid the tax . :+ )

thestreet.com



To: richardred who wrote (3954)6/16/2015 11:05:33 AM
From: Cautious_Optimist  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 7140
 
Down another $1 this AM -- another $655M in market cap.

If TWTR management screws this champion pooch, I am going to put all my remaining savings into a Costco tent for moving beneath the freeway. (And a pitbull to protect my laptop and smartphone.)

This is one of the biggest wasted golden opportunities in history. Someone's gonna swallow them, the question now is if strategic acquirers will bid the price up now, or signal disinterest to gamble for a bargain.

Between my TWTR and F picks I'm feeling like Marshawn Lynch, after the Superbowl early this year.

This has been a very tough market - the vultures appear to be circling all portfolios.

When the Greek mess is resolved, and the dollar weakens some, I believe globalized investor money will return to the US market. They won't tell us when the rally is coming, nor give us inside info when an M&A is about to be announced.

So I remain cold and lonely on my positions, but still tweeting!