back to article Twitter slips into the world of venture capital with barely a chirrup

Twitter has quietly extended its venture-capital appendage for the first time to invest in Cyanogen, a start-up challenging Google's Android. The creatively named "Twitter Ventures" was announced as party to Cyanogen's recent $80m pass around of the collection plate, and is listed alongside Rupert Murdoch, Vivi Nevo and a …

  1. James 47

    Twitter recently acquired MoPub, which is a mobile advertising exchange. This probably has more to do with that than writing an app for reading tweets.

  2. paulf
    Terminator

    Twitter harvesting phone numbers now?

    Sorry I know this is a bit OT but the story is as much about Twitter as their investment in Cyanogen.

    I run several twitter accounts for an organisation, along with one for myself. These are all secured using the Twitter app login verification. Last night I had emails for all accounts noting that continued use of login verification would require me to give my phone number to Twitter in the account's settings (with this verified by a text to that number). No reason for this was given. Also a number can only be registered against one account which kinda makes a mockery of the Twitter App (based on Tweetdeck) that can manage multiple accounts in a single app.

    Does this mean they have thought up some evil way to push ads at me via texts or calls from PPI service droids, to improve their revenues?

    I can see two outcomes here, and neither sound particularly good:

    1. Twitter harvest a large quantity of phone numbers for spamming purposes (both their own and that of others when their system gets quietly hacked)

    2. People who don't want to be subject to 1 and thus don't submit their number, or don't have enough numbers for the accounts they manage, turn off login verification making their account that bit less secure.

  3. Seth Johnson
    IT Angle

    Gosh. But I wonder where the money is...

    I'm genuinely amazed. I had to look up if this is the same cyanogen of cyanogenmod fame that I installed on various previous phones and tablets over the last few years. Hats off to them to have come so far and reached this new playing field from just another homebrew custom mod, albeit a slightly more polished and less buggy one.

    It really shows the difference between a nice piece of tech (the OS) and the people connections that it takes to e.g. get it installed by default on a whole new handset and then to get into the room to talk to people who can invest megabucks to make a viable financial proposition.

    But I'm just wondering where's the money?

    After a few links, I found the following (http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/03/23/meet-cyanogen-the-startup-that-wants-to-steal-android-from-google-2/):

    "The deals will take many forms, from distribution to in-app purchase agreements to customized services for specific countries, says Vikram Natarajan, who runs business development for Cyanogen."

    So to me this sounds like:

    1. Pay us for the OS, we'll charge you less than google and people love it.

    2. Pay us a cut for in-app purchases but less than you'll pay google.

    3. hmm country services.

    I can see money to be made from 1. but much less than 2 so maybe that's the business plan? Just sell it to mobile phone makers? Otherwise can't really see it making that much money.

    Interested to hear other people's thoughts and predictions.

  4. Crazy Operations Guy

    The bubble will be bursting soon

    A company that continues to lose massive amounts of money is going to be giving money it doesn't have to a company that will continue to hemorrhage cash for the foreseeable future...

    This will all come crashing down once companies no longer see a good return on the money they are pouring into advertising. Companies like Twitter and Facebook are dependent the display of ads translating in enough sales for the advertised product to create profit for the product's manufacturer.

    1. Jay 2

      Re: The bubble will be bursting soon

      Yes I do wonder how exactly a loss-making company can get away with investing in another. I'm sure there's smoke and mirrors involved (as well as some very creative accounting).

      All part of the bubble 2.0 (or whatev) when people are throwing money at t'interweb/app companies that have no firm plan of how to actually make a profit. It's almost as if they ignored what happened last time...

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