Apple acquiring Twitter? Here's why not and what instead

There's nothing better than huge juicy speculation. Usually they're Tweets starting "Google rumored to buy..." but lately, since Apple announced its $100B in cash reserves, the speculation has shifted to Apple.

The latest rumor is that Apple will buy Twittter. This blog article is the best explanation of why people think that this makes sense.

The problem is that if you look closely at the two companies, it doesn't make sense.

Apple exists to make money from devices. Specifically devices for content consumption, but the devices. Store sales, even iTunes, are a minimal percentage of their profits that are there to get people to buy iDevices. I haven't seen a single move they've made that hasn't been around the business model of selling devices. All the acquisitions they've made have been small ones that they hope will give differentiation to their devices.

Twitter exists to be a platform for information and links. They have very little ecosystem (in terms of a site or app that people do things in) or stickiness or advertising potential, since people use 3rd-party apps. Their profit will come from feeds and analysis of tweets. Maybe a bit from advertising from anyone who actually uses their site. But owning it won't give Apple a leg up in driving people to music or to iTunes or whatever, and it certainly won't help them sell devices, since Twitter's raison d'etre is to have everyone use their platform for free.

Want acquisition predictions that make sense? For big ones, try STMicroElectronics (market cap ~$7B, working on cellphone projectors and smartphone chips & sensors). For smaller ones like Apple's traditionally done, try Glopos (indoor location), P2i or HzO (waterproofing), and SoftKinetic or Omek Interactive or EyeSight (gesture recognition).

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

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