Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion, won't cut off access to Twitter

Shawshank, VA 4/9/12 (StreetBeat) -- Facebook has agreed to purchase the photo sharing application Instagram for $1 billion.

The app lets users take photographs, add a filter, and then share them to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. After gaining 27 million users on the iPhone, it recently was made available on Android.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to preserve Instagram's ability to share photos to multiple social networks beyond Facebook. "We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience," Zuckerberg said in a blog post. "We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook."

Zuckerberg didn't say how Facebook will make money on Instagram, which doesn't yet have advertising. He did note that it's the largest acquisition Facebook has ever made when measured by the size of its user base. Zuckerberg added that Facebook will try to boost Instagram's capabilities "by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure." The acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of June.

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Americans Tweet Concerns and Opinions about Debt

Oxford, MS 7/28/2011 (PennyPayDay) -- Americans took to the phone lines and the Internet on Friday after President Barack Obama urged them again to call lawmakers and weigh in on a war over raising the U.S. debt limit that has sharply divided Congress.

Obama was making his second televised appeal in a week, asking Americans to press lawmakers to make a deal. The Treasury says Congress has four days left to raise the U.S. debt limit and avoid an unprecedented debt default.

"Now, on Monday night, I asked the American people to make their voice heard in this debate, and the response was overwhelming," Obama said, referring to the massive response by telephone and email after he asked Americans to let lawmakers know if they wanted to see a compromise on Capitol Hill.

"So please, to all the American people, keep it up," he said, appearing on many TV networks in midmorning. "If you want to see a bipartisan compromise -- a bill that can pass both houses of Congress and that I can sign -- let your members of Congress know. Make a phone call. Send an email. Tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington, and we can get past this."

Shortly after his speech, telephone circuits in the Capitol were overwhelmed by a high volume of external calls, resulting in busy signals or difficulty getting through jammed phone lines.

An hour after Obama's speech, the House Call Center sent out a system alert warning that telephone circuits were near capacity, resulting in outside callers getting busy signals, instead of having calls bounce to a free line.

By midday, Dan Weiser, communications director for the chief administrative officer in the House, said there was about a 10 percent increase in calls over normal numbers.

Several calls to the office of House Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress who is trying to get a short-term debt limit increase through but is receiving resistance from his own party, could not get through.

At first the only response was a busy signal, but in successive attempts the phone was answered by an automated message and patriotic music played after callers were told to wait to be answered in the order the call was received.

But a spokesman for Boehner's office said the amount of phone and email traffic had been holding pretty steady over the past week or so with no real increase after Obama's speech.

TWITTER

Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid's office received several thousand calls on Friday supporting a bipartisan long-term compromise, his spokesman Zac Petkanas said.

Obama also used 21st century communications, sending messages to his 9.4 million Twitter followers asking them to contact their lawmakers.

"The time for putting party first is over. If you want to see a bipartisan #compromise, let Congress know. Call. Email. Tweet.-BO," said one Tweet, using his initials to show that it was a personal appeal from the president, not his staff.

But then his staff kept Obama's Twitter feed busy, posting Twitter handles of Republican representatives and senators from each state so people could personalize their appeal.

The "compromise" hashtag, which helps categorize Tweets into themes -- was flooded with messages from people using the 140-character Twitter limit to make their wishes heard.

One example came from the Twitter account of John McMullen, who describes himself as a designer from California. The Tweet, addressed to Colorado Republican representatives Cory Gardner, Mike Coffman and Scott Tipton, read.

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Tweet Beat Gaining Traction

Oxford, MS April 28, 2011 (PennyPayDay) -- Tweet beat is a website that uses an advanced technology that categorizes tweets by being able to understand relationships without the use of hash tags and keywords. With this, users can see the tweets that have the most relevance to the subject.

You can also see the number of tweets in the elapsed time and the number of papers that have articles online about the subject. This is known to the site as “Twitterati”.

As many now know, Wal-Mart has purchased this company that owns and operates this web page. Kosmix was worth was purchased by Wal-Mart to expand in the world of social media and their business.

With the addition of this company, I expect Wal-Mart to expand further as time passes. The social media has become the source of many of the world’s news and gossip. With sites such as Facebook and Twitter, people are becoming more dependent on knowing the opinions of others. This is obviously seen in the business world as well.

I believe that more and more companies are going to jump on the bandwagon without considering that like all trends, this will fade. What I would like to know is what happens to the advertising world when it does.
However, for right now, Tweet beat is a growing site which will help Wal-Mart succeed in social media standings and yield more business tactics.

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Twitter Disables New Version of its Website

Oxford, MS 4/6/2011 (Penny PayDay) -- Twitter experienced service disruptions on Tuesday, displaying an older version of the social networking website to some users and becoming completely inaccessible to others.

A message on Twitter's Web page that provides updates on the service's status said: "We've temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and we'll update you shortly."

Twitter, which allows users to send short, 140-character messages to groups of "followers," has more than 200 million registered accounts and has become a popular communications service with businesses, celebrities and protesters in the Middle East.

Last month Twitter announced that it had moved its infrastructure to a new home at an undisclosed location, which the company said would allow it to constantly "stay abreast" of its capacity needs and provide greater reliability.

But a custom-built datacenter in Utah that was meant to house Twitter's gear has been plagued with problems, according to people familiar with the matter, forcing Twitter to move most of the site's operations to a facility in Sacramento, California instead.

Tuesday's disruptions meant that some people were using the version of the Twitter site that preceded a redesign unveiled in September. Other Twitter users were unable to log on at all, and were greeted with a page informing them that "something is technically wrong" and promising to have things "back to normal soon."

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had no details to provide beyond the statements on its special technical status Web page.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)

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Some LargeCap Stocks to Keep an Eye on Today

HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, said pretax profits in 2010 more than doubled to $19.04 billion from $7.04 billion a year earlier, but the figure came in below analysts' estimates. Shares of HSBC were down 4.3% to $54.80 in premarket trading Monday.

Ventas agreed to acquire Nationwide Health Properties in a stock-for-stock deal valued at $7.4 billion. There were no premarket trades for either of the real estate investment trusts. Ventas closed at $57.19, up 1.9%, on Friday, while Nationwide rose 2.4% to $38.96.

A fund of financial company JPMorgan is in discussions to buy a significant stake in Twitter, the rapidly-growing social networking site. Premarket quotes weren't available for shares of JPMorgan. The stock finished Friday's trading session at $46.68, up 1.7%.

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Twitter Fund Expected to Return +15-20%

Starting in February, a group of very bold hedge fund managers are launching a multi-million dollar hedge fund whose strategy relies on one very unusual market indicator: your Twitter account.

London-based hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets said it had successfully marketed a new venture to a series of high-net worth clients that makes investment choices using information gathered from over 100 million daily tweets.

Simply put: the fund mines the Twitter-verse to gauge market sentiment, and that information-which the firm futuristically brands as "The 4th Dimension" is used to drive the portfolio's holdings.

The 'Twitter Fund', officially marketed to clients as the Derwent Absolute Return Fund, has already attracted at least £25 million in investments, according to the fund's manager Paul Hawtin-who is also the firm's founder. And it is currently in discussions to hire John Bollen, an Indiana University professor who has championed academic theories linking market performance to Twitter moods.

In all, it's a bold strategy, with even bolder profit expectations.

Hawtin is confident he can achieve annual returns of 15-20 percent for the fund. But he hopes that's just the beginning. "I believe with the Twitter indicator (once fully optimized) we can achieve even better annual returns," he said in an emailed statement.

But even if the fund doesn't return a dime on its money, it may have already made history. Hawtin believes the Derwent Absolute Return Fund is the first ever "to use real time mood analysis as a major part of the investment decision process."

An informal search of publicly available hedge fund strategies seems to confirm that.

Asking investors to park millions in an investment vehicle that relies on the random musings of 190-plus million Twitter accounts was not without its challenges.

Hawtin says that investors were initially worried that the fund was simply going long or short based on its Twitter analysis. However, he says it's a more nuanced process than that. "Once they understand it's a far more sophisticated system they then realize the potential," he said.

Whether or not the fund can return on its lofty profit promises remains to be seen, but whatever the fund's future may be, it is sure to open the door for a new round of quantitative experimentation-as the investment world looks for new ways to profit from the endlessly vast amount of information streaming to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites every second of every day.

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Toyota Pays $500 for Tweets

How much is a tweet worth? $500, according to a recent promotion by Toyota — more than 1,000 times the value Eventbrite places on a tweet. The car manufacturer is rewarding those who purchase a new Toyota by January 3 with a $500 debit card for tweeting about it.

To qualify, users need to visit toyotashareathon.com and send the following tweet through Toyota’s application by December 15: “If I get my new Toyota during Toyotathon they’ll give me $500 just for this Tweet. http://buyatoyota.com @Toyota #shareathon.” After purchasing a Toyota, owners can redeem their $500 card on the same page.

The goal is to get users who may be even just lightly considering purchasing a Toyota to spread the word about the campaign, even if they don’t end up purchasing one (though we wouldn’t be surprised if those who tweet about the promotion got a little extra attention from Toyota’s marketing team in the next couple of weeks).

When asked why Toyota was willing to reward purchasers so heavily for tweeting, Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota’s national digital marketing and social media manager, wrote: “We wanted to leverage social media to build incremental awareness of our annual Toyotathon sales event. We feel that $500 is a significant enough offer to stimulate consumer interest and generate strong buzz throughout the social space.”

“Tweets and other Social Media (social media) efforts help us create velocity behind an immediate call to action for consumers to take advantage of a program like this with limited duration,” she added.

As a marketer, how much value would you place on a tweet?

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