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Elon Musk

Elon Musk Confirms Acquisition Of Twitter For $44 Billion.

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Elon Musk, a billionaire, has taken control of Twitter in one of the biggest tech deals in history. Elon Musk will pay approximately $44 billion for the social network, with shares valued at $54.20. On April 14, Musk announced his takeover bid, calling it his ‘best and final offer.’

Free Speech

“Free speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where important issues affecting humanity’s future are discussed.” I also want to make Twitter better than it has ever been by adding new features, opening up the algorithms to increase trust, defeating spambots, and authenticating all humans. “I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock Twitter’s tremendous potential,” Elon Musk said in a press statement posted to his Twitter account.

On the platform, he has been a staunch supporter of ‘free speech.’ “I invested in Twitter because I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “Twitter has extraordinary potential,” he wrote in the filing.

“I hope that even my harshest critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means,” Musk said earlier today on Twitter. It’s also worth noting that Musk sent out a rather obnoxious tweet about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Saturday, ostensibly in response to Gates shorting Tesla. More than a million people have liked the tweet. He then joked that his tweet was being reviewed by the ‘shadowban council.’

Elon Musk
Image source: news7h.com

New Ownership

According to Twitter, the publicly-traded company will now become a private company owned by Musk, who negotiated a $54.20 per-share purchase price.

“Twitter serves a purpose and is relevant to the entire world. We are immensely proud of our teams and inspired by work that has never been more critical, “Parag Agrawal, the company’s CEO, said in a tweet.

Musk secured $46.5 billion in financing last week to complete the deal, and Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, predicted earlier in the day that the board would likely accept his offer because no other buyer could be found.

In an interview with CNBC, he said, “This basically put (their) back against the wall, and they had to come to the negotiation table.” Around 1915 GMT, Twitter stock was trading 5.9% higher on Wall Street.

Poison Pill Strategy

While the board initially stated that it was considering Musk’s offer, it later rejected him and implemented a “poison pill” strategy that would have made it more difficult for Musk to gain control of the company.

Musk, whose immense wealth stems from the popularity of Tesla electric vehicles as well as other ventures, announced last week that he had secured funding.

Despite Musk’s wealth, the issue of financing had been viewed as a potential stumbling block because a large portion of his holdings is in Tesla stock rather than cash.

Musk claimed in a filing that the deal was made possible by a $13 billion debt facility from a financing consortium led by Morgan Stanley, a separate $12.5 billion margin loan from the same bank, and $21 billion from his own assets.

Musk’s efforts have sparked optimism about Twitter’s commercial potential, which has struggled to achieve profitable growth despite its cultural and political clout.

New Features

Twitter has made progress on new monetization features, such as subscription products, under Agrawal, who took over as CEO late last year. “Short term, Musk’s involvement at this stage runs the risk of disrupting those efforts,” Truist Securities said in a note.

However, the campaign of the polarising Tesla CEO has alarmed technology and free-speech experts, who point to Musk’s erratic statements and history of bullying critics, which contradict his stated goals.

According to the progressive group Media Matters for America, Trump could return to Twitter if Musk’s acquisition goes through, according to the progressive group Media Matters for America.

In a statement, the group’s president Angelo Carusone said, “Any negotiations to sell Twitter to Musk must include clear enforceable mechanisms to uphold and maintain existing community standards, including the removal of those who violate those standards.”

Smartly.io

How Smartly is Making Millions By Giving Life to Ads

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Almost every company wants to take their business online, and if they aren’t, it is because they already are online! In a heavily digitized world, a business can stay relevant only if it can attract people online. Doing so is becoming more and more difficult due to the sheer volume of competitors online. Social media marketing is a sure-fire marketing method used by most modern companies nowadays. Let us take a look at a company smartly that made full use of this to propel itself forward. 

About the Founder

Ovaska grew up in Helsinki, studying Economics and Finance with Statistics and Mathematics on the side. He began his career as a researcher working on how Russian’s economy impacted Finland’s economic growth. He soon got restless and left to start Aaltoes.com at his university in 2008. That company became a leading university-level startup association for entrepreneurs.

Tuomo Riekki
Image Source: Google Images

It was through this initiative that he met his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki. When Tuomo’s startup ran out of funding, the duo got together to build a company. They began with FunRank before moving on to Metrify and finally settled on Smartly.io.

Past Efforts

Prior to Smartly.io, Kristo Ovaska and his co-founder, Tuomo Riekki, started Metrify, which made value predictions for gaming companies. The company began in 2012, a year that marked the beginning of the big data analytics bubble. Around that time, most gaming companies acquired customers using outdated methods and hence was not visible.

Metrify used their analytics to predict where to invest their acquisition money. Around this time, Facebook went public and so needed to make money. Facebook knew that mobile-gaming companies had the money they needed and would be good buyers. They also had the data that such companies needed, and so the gaming companies moved to Facebook.

Early Struggles

Slowly these gaming companies began to pump in money, and their advertising helped attract people to Facebook’s News Feed. This huge shift into social media advertising became Smartly’s stepping stone into the industry. The duo opened in Germany, coding and rapidly scaling their features. The company began as an eight-member team partnering with Rocket Internet. The company scaled rapidly and doubled its size every month for the next ones.

In six months, the company became profitable going international thanks to Rocket Internet. Facebook trusted the small team from Helsinki so much that they recommended them to several big customers abroad! So much so that they now have customers such as Ubisoft, Uber, and eBay, helping manage over $1.8 billion in ads.

Growth and Future Plans

The company doubled its headcount from 150 to 400 within a span of 18 months. Similarly, they expanded their office chain from seven to seventeen. The rise of Facebook Stories has also helped the company improve its visibility and reach. The company raised €100,000 in 2013, following it up with another €1 million a year later.

The company became profitable in 2015 and raised an additional €20 million, two years before. Almost 25 percent of Smartly.io is in the hands of the employees themselves. Recently, Smartly.io, raised $20 million through secondary funding thanks to Highland Europe. The company recently announced hitting a $1 billion run rate with over 500 happy customers.

 With a headquarters in Helsinki, the startup has a very Nordic working culture, which celebrates communication and freedom. The workforce hierarchy is very flat and straightforward regardless of position and seniority. Currently, the company has employees in several cities from around the world like New York, Helsinki, Dubai, and Sydney.

The team plans on expanding their creative side by offering the tools to ad teams. They have launched in alpha phase with Pinterest recently. They are also in talks with the likes of Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.

Tumblr

David Karp : The Young Entrepreneur Who Founded the Biggest Microblogging Website Tumblr

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Experience matters, and when it is earned since childhood, it can help you achieve many things. As a kid, humans are sharper than adults and capable of learning even the toughest of things. These days we see many little kids coming up and showing off their skills and knowledge, whereas many are already launching their startups in the various fields. Thanks to the evolving technology. Though David Karp is not a teenage entrepreneur, he had achieved a lot before he passed his teens. David Karp is the founder of Tumblr, the microblogging website, and has an interesting success story to follow.

Early Life

Karp was born to a science teacher and a film and television composer, on 6 July 1986, in New York City. He was a bright student and got his primary as well as middle school education from Calhoun School, at the same place where his mother worked. Karp, at the age of 11, started learning HTML and was soon developing websites for businesses.

Karp always wanted to join MIT for his graduation, so, he after studying for one year at The Bronx High School of Science, dropped out and opted for homeschooling, to make his resume interesting for admissions in the university.

Career

David Karp
Image Source: charitybuzz.com

Things to go according to one’s will is not always possible. Karp wanted to add more to his resume, so he was doing many things alongside his homeschooling. He started working at the Frederator Studios as an intern when he was 14. At that time, he was also learning Japanese and had joined maths classes. Along with his maths tutor, he learned some of the programming skills. At the Frederator Studios, he got to work on various software products, and he even developed studio’s first blogging platform and its first internet video network, named Channel Frederator.

Later, he got to work with UrbanBaby. One day, at the firm, he solved a glitch in the software successfully in a comparatively lesser amount of time. The incident helped him to win the attention of John Maloney the founder of UrbanBaby.

Maloney appointed Karp as the head of product at UrbanBaby. Karp continued to work with the company for four more years and left it in 2006 after the company was acquired by CNET. Four years spent in a company made him leave the dream of joining MIT behind, as he had also not received a high school degree yet and he was doing great as a programmer.

Entrepreneurial Journey towards Tumblr

Karp work and experience opened new doors for him, and he went on to start his own development consulting company named Davidville. He hired a programmer named Marco Arment, through Craigslist, with the help of whom, Karp started to work on a new project. Karp had grown an interest in microblogging and was looking forward to developing a platform based-on microblogging. It took him a year and a half on deciding to finally work on his interest, and he launched Tumblr in February 2007.

David Karp was aware of the scope of a microblogging website, but he did not know that his website will gain 75000 users just within two weeks of its launch. In six months, he realised that Tumblr has got huge potential, so to focus on it, entirely, Karp shut down his consulting business and rebranded his company as Tumblr, Inc.

The Rise of the Company

In 2009, the company launched an iOS app for Tumblr, and in 2010, another app was launched for Blackberry phones. In 2011, the company valued at $800 million, and in the same year, raised a funding of $85 million. In October 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging website that hosted American President Barak Obama’s blog.

The 3.0 version of Tumblr launched in 2012, which also included support for Spotify. This way, the users could now post HD pictures on the platform and also use it at offline mode. In August 2012, the company monetized the platform through advertisements.

Major investors including Union Square Ventures, Fred Seibert, John Borthwick, and Sequoia Capital, etc. were the major investor in the company at that time. Karp sold 25% of the company share to few of its investors.

On May 20, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it will be acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Karp remaining the CEO of the company. After working together with Yahoo! for four years, Karp resigned from his post.

David Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek in August 2009. He was also named in the list of MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Instagram down

Instagram Goes Down Again; Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter Also Faces the Outage

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Reportedly, the major social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Twitter, went down for over an hour on Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET. The users of these apps around the world reported issues while downloading and sending images, audios, and videos for some time.

It has become quite common for Instagram to go down, in the past few months. But this time, the other three prime apps, FB, Twitter, and Whatsapp, were also facing the same issues at the same time.

Instagram down
Image Source: telegraph.co

Every time the users were trying to see an Instagram post, it was showing the error, “Couldn’t refresh feed” or “Couldn’t load the image. Tap to retry”. Though, the app was able to load the caption under it. Same issues went with Whatsapp multimedia sending and downloading, whereas Facebook was unable to publish the posts.

Twitter users, on the other hand, were unable to direct message. It was showing notification of unread messages, even after the users read the message.

Facebook, while facing these issues, said on the behalf of all its apps in a report, “During one of our routine maintenance operations, we triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to upload or send photos and videos. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Where Facebook gave a proper explanation for its app going down, Twitter did not say anything on what caused the issue. But after resolving the issue, Twitter took it to its support handle and wrote, “almost at 100% resolved. There may be some residual effects for a small group of people, but overall your DMs should be working properly now. We appreciate your patience!”

Around 8 p.m. ET, Facebook also said, “The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone.”

Instagram has been facing such troubles quite often. Last time, it was three weeks ago when the platform faced the interruptions, that too for two hours. Before the four apps went down yesterday, apps like OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and DownDetector have also gone down the day before yesterday, after an outage at Cloudflare.

Sean Rad : The Founding Memeber and Former CEO of Tinder

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Digitalization has made every activity so convenient for us that we can literally do anything with a swipe of our fingers. Moreover, the younger generation prefers doing everything through the internet, starting from shopping, payment, booking shows, and even, finding a perfect date unless they happen to meet under the mistletoe. Now, how great it would be to use a mobile app where you can find a perfect match only by swiping left or right? Tinder is one such mobile dating app, using which you can chat with other users and find a ‘good match’ for yourself.

The app provides the option to swipe right if you like someone’s profile and the other way around if you don’t like any. The app was launched in 2012, and in less than a couple of months, it grew to a million users. Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, along with Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and many other executive members. Rad was also the former CEO of the company. One of the founding members, Whitney Wolfe, left Tinder after some time to work on another dating app, Bumble.

Early Life

Born into an Iranian family, Rad moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1970s and settled in Beverly Hills. His parents worked in the technology industry, which might be one reason why he knew tech very well. Since his childhood, Rad was passionate about doing something big in life and making his life worthy.

Sean Rad
Image Source: businessinsider.in

When Rad was in high school, he did an internship as an entertainment manager, and that’s how he realized that he can make money even from the things he enjoyed doing. Though Rad and Mateen went to different schools, they knew each other since they were fourteen.

Higher Education and Career

Rad started pioneering in the world of technology since he was just eighteen and launched Orgoo, his first startup that was envisioned to build a webmail service. Both Rad and Mateen went to the University of Southern California, but Rad dropped out after a couple of years, to explore the entrepreneurial world and developed a platform called Adly, in the mid-2000s.

These two young entrepreneurs, along with other members, launched Tinder in 2012 and promoted the app heavily in various college campuses. They knew very well, where they could grab the most attention, and thus, gained a billion swipes per day, within a couple of years of Tinder.

Success of Tinder

A year after the release of Tinder, the app received TechCrunch’s Crunchie Award for ‘Best New Startup of 2013’. In March 2013, the company realised the application was used only in a few localities, and hence, Alexa Mateen, social media director, promoted it in other college campuses as well. And by May 2013, Tinder became one of the top twenty-five social networking apps on the basis of users. The frequency of users kept rising, which made Tinder the first online dating app as one of the top five online utilized applications.

In 2014 Webby Awards, the company was named as ‘breakout of the year’, and by October 2014, the application finally incorporated swiping motion and processed more than a billion swipes per day. It made around twelve million matches per day, which is appreciable for a company, which is only two years old. In 2015, the company launched a new feature to let the user access the profiles they rejected earlier, but chatting of two users was only possible when both of them swiped right. Apart from this, a lot of new features were added and deleted from the app in 2015. Tinder’s main complementing site was Facebook, as the user needed to connect their Facebook account with the app for profile verification.

In September 2016, Tinder came in partnership with Vina, a social networking app, and tested ‘Tinder Boost’ in Australia. In October 2016, it went live around the world, which basically, allowed your profile to be on top in your area for 30 minutes. In the same month, Tinder announced the opening of their first office in Silicon Valley, such that to enhance the quality of the employees. In November 2016, the app introduced more freedom on the grounds of choosing gender, breaking the typical mindset of society. This feature raised the number of users by a hefty amount, and by 2018, Tinder had over 3.7 million paid subscribers. The company is now deciding to launch a lighter version of the app, called Tinder Lite, which will take relatively less storage space and consume lesser data.

Majority of the Tinder, today, is under the acquisition of IAC and its subsidiary, Match Group. Till 2018, Rad changed positions quite a number of times, stepping down from the position of CEO and getting back in the helm again. But, in August 2018 a lawsuit was filed against IAC by a group of Tinder employees including Rad. They are suing IAC of alleged stock information and seeking at least $2billion in damages.

Amazon Closes Down Spark Before it Completes its Two Years Anniversary

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Most of the people might not know, but approximately two years ago, Amazon had launched a social networking platform named Spark. And since it has not made it to the global audience, it seems, Amazon has shut the platform down, even before it completes its two year anniversary.

Amazon Spark
Image Source: sownagency.com

Amazon Spark was a similar platform to most of the other social media platforms, where users could post pictures, stories and could connect with people. One of the most important features, that Amazon had added to it, was the ability to sell and purchase things over it. The app was launched in a hope that people will come to the app through their influencers and will make purchases, accordingly. Users were even allowed to tag the products available on the Amazon website.

Like Instagram, the users could react to the posts through smiles and post comments on it. In fact, Spark was considered as one of the competitors of Instagram. But the platform was primarily developed for the Amazon Prime members and was focused more on shopping and sales.

“Whether you’re looking for inspiration for home décor or seeking advice for the best long-distance running shoes, Spark makes it easy to discover and shop stories and ideas from a community that likes what you like.” Amazon has said during the launch of Spark in 2017.

Though the platform entirely focused on sales and shopping, it had copied a few features from its rival Instagram, like the posts from fashion and travel bloggers. But the problem was that it was restricted to only the Prime members, and only they were able to use it. The reach of the platform was limited, and the users did not have anyone familiar to connect with over this very platform.

Though Amazon has not given any statement on the matter, meanwhile the link to Amazon Spark is redirecting to #FoundItOnAmazon site, one of the other easy shopping tools from Amazon. Earlier the Amazon’s notification section had been changed for including updates from Spark. But now the navigation has once again been simplified.