Skip to main content

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).

Popular posts from this blog

33 Indoor Location Related Start-up Acquisitions

  Acquisitions Continue in the Indoor Location Industry; Grizzly Analytics Shows Price Growth at the High End and Continuity at the Low End New York, NY, February 22, 2021 - Despite the recent pandemic, M&A deals in the indoor location area have maintained a steady pace of 4-5 deals a year. At the high end of the spectrum, prices have increased to up to $400 Million for the highest priced recent deal and $165 Million for the second highest. At the lower end, many earlier stage companies have been acquired in the $2-3 Million range. A newly updated report from Grizzly Analytics gives prices and strategic details for 33 acquisitions in the indoor location area.  While the highest priced indoor location acquisitions have historically involved chip-based technologies, recent acquisitions have been more varied. “A few years ago the focus of indoor location M&A was all around pure localization technologies. The biggest deal to date is in fact for a chip-based localization ...
Read more

Adding real value to smartphone camera pictures

Most technology features follow a similar path, from imitation to improvement to transformation.  First they imitate something that came before, like telephones imitating the telegraphs of yesteryear.  Then they improve on them, like phones entering individual homes. Then they transform the entire endeavor, completely surpassing the previous technology, like phones automatically connecting people without operator involvement, which enabled society to communicate in ways that telegraph users never contemplated. Cellphone cameras are following a similar path.  At the beginning cellphone cameras were imitating digital cameras, adding the convenience of carrying only one device but basically doing the same as digital cameras did.  Then they improved on them, both with quality improvements and with the ability to share pictures wirelessly without wiring the phone to a computer.  The ability to instantly share and synchronize pictures from a phone is somewhat transf...
Read more

See great indoor location tech from the 2017 testbed

The videos from the Indoor Location Testbed at GeoIoT World 2017 are now released! Here is your chance to see how these solutions performed in our real-world evaluation, in the videos below. The testbed evaluated each solution by walking around a real-world venue, the GeoIoT World 2017 conference, measuring performance at 10 pre-selected points. Click here for the testbed report, which analyzes each solution's performance in a wide variety of metrics, including real-time accuracy, accuracy stabilization, consistency, latency, floor change, first fix, setup time & more. Let's start with BlooLoc's tag-based solution, which achieved accuracy under 2m in real-time and under 1.5m after stabilization: Then let's look at the infrastructure-free solution from GipsTech , which achieved accuracy under 2m without using any beacons or radio signals: Next is GipsTech's solution with BLE added: Next is BlooLoc's phone-based solution: Fin...
Read more