Twitter passes 241m monthly active users, 184m mobile users, and sees 75% of advertising revenue from mobile

While sharing its financial results for its fourth quarter, Twitter today announced a number of new milestones that showed the service’s user growth has slowed while its mobile advertising share has grown. The social network has now passed 241 million monthly active users, 184 million of which were monthly active mobile users as well.

Twitter Reach: Q4’13 avg Monthly Active Users 241 million, up 30% y/y. #TWTRearnings http://ift.tt/1fvInhh

— TwitterIR (@TwitterIR) February 5, 2014

The company also revealed that it generated $242.7 million in revenues, $220 million of which came from advertising. Of the latter, a whopping three-quarters came from mobile.

Here are the numbers as they appeared in the release:

• Average Monthly Active Users (MAUs) were 241 million as of December, 31, 2013, an increase of 30% year-over-year.


• Mobile MAUs reached 184 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, an increase of 37% year-over-year, representing 76% of total MAUs.


• Timeline views reached 148 billion in the fourth quarter of 2013, an increase of 26% year-over-year.


• Advertising revenue totaled $220 million, an increase of 121% year-over-year.


• Mobile advertising revenue was more than 75% of total advertising revenue.


• Data licensing and other revenue totaled $23 million, an increase of 80% year-over-year.

When Twitter filed its IPO in October, the company revealed it had 215 million monthly active users, 100 million daily active users, and was seeing 500 million tweets per day. Those were round numbers, and the company only offered an exact figure for the first metric: 218.3 million average monthly active users in the three months ended June 30, 2013.

During the same time period, Twitter found 75 percent of that number accessed the service from a mobile device (phone or tablet), or about 163.5 million monthly active mobile users. According to the numbers released today, that percentage is now at 76.3. As you can see in the chart above, user growth is slowing, as is the growth for the percentage of mobile users.

Twitter also said at the time that over 65 percent of the company’s advertising revenue was generated from mobile devices, and that it expected that proportion to grow “in the near term.” Indeed it has: 75 percent is nothing to balk at.

Like Facebook, Twitter has shown it can make money from mobile, even though its user growth has started to slow. The difference is, that Facebook makes a lot more money, and the fraction of its users going mobile continues to grow.

This was a decent quarter for Twitter, but there’s still a long road ahead as a public company. Investors want to see long-term potential, and if the social network doesn’t figure out a way to stop the slowing of its user growth, it will have a very hard time.

Top Image Credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

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Google is working on a way to run Chrome apps without the full Chrome process

Google is working on a minimal environment that allows Chrome packaged apps to run without requiring the whole Chrome process. Currently called app_shell, this is still an experimental project, but the broader goal appears to be minimizing the resources required to run Chrome apps.

The news comes by means of a Chromium Code Review we found with the minimal description “[App Shell] Add README.” This led us to the readme for the project, which is also very short but contains the essentials:

#Introduction

app_shell is an experimental project to build a minimal environment like content_shell. The goal is to be able to run a v2 app and supply most of the chrome.* extension APIs without running the rest of Chrome.

app_shell is only officially supported on Chrome OS.

#How to run

app_shell –app=/path/to/extension

Put another way, Google isn’t happy with just bringing Google apps to Android and iOS along with all the main desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). No, the company is considering completely ripping the Chrome part out of Chrome apps, leaving in only the necessary APIs, so that developers can build cross-platform Web apps that really are comparably fast to native apps.

For those who don’t know, Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps. In other words, they’re Google’s way of pushing the limits of the Web as a platform, which may one day no longer include the company’s browser-as-an-operating-system strategy.

It’s easy to see that if the company can get app_shell working on Chrome OS, it will bring the environment to Chrome as well. You can already launch Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux without the need for a Chrome window, but soon you won’t even need the full Chrome process in the background either.

We have contacted Google for more information about this project but didn’t hear back. We will update this article if that changes.

See also – Chrome Web Store to get multi-platform app support for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and Chrome OS and Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark

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Fundera is a marketplace that matches small businesses with non-bank lenders

In 2011, group text-messaging service GroupMe was acquired for $85 million by Skype. Two years later, GroupMe co-founder Jared Hecht is back with his next startup called Fundera. This goal this time: help match small business owners who need loans with the best alternative non-bank lenders.

Joined by software entrepreneur Rohan Deshpande and co-founder of Earndit.com Andres Moran, Hecht is looking to help bring more transparency to the alternative lending process.

“Every year, nearly half of all small businesses report needing working capital and over 75 percent of those who apply do not receive the financing they need from their bank,” he says. Fundera lets small businesses pick from among vetted lenders to see which one offers them the best opportunity to grow.

Fundera hand-selects all the lenders and eliminates those that it believes won’t match well with small business owners. It looks at various factors including length of time in business, annual revenue, credit score, and other data points to determine the correct course of action. Acting as the middleman, the company doesn’t let either party contact one another unless previously approved.

In return for its efforts, Fundera receives between a 1 to 3 percent fee from lenders. It says that so far, the company has helped execute 9 loans and matched more than 200 small business owners with lenders during its beta testing period.

Fundera has raised $3.4 million from Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, and several angel investors.

Photo credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Toshiba’s new 13.3-inch Chromebook is now available to pre-order for $280

Toshiba’s newest Chromebook is now available to pre-order from Amazon in the UK and US, as well as via the company’s own website.

We had known the device was on its way, but we were expecting it to go on sale on February 16, as was stated when it was announced. However, the model currently listed on Amazon UK at £249 is showing as set for release on February 10.

With 2GB RAM, a 13.3-inch (1366×768 pixel resolution) display, the newer Haswell architecture Intel Celeron processor and a claimed battery life of up to 8.5 hours, it’ll certainly provide some added competition in the Chromebook market, which tends to see most devices hover between the £200-£300 mark. The exception to this is the Chromebook Pixel that still costs in excess of £1000. Whether or not the average everyday consumer is ready to switch to Google’s Chrome OS is yet to be seen.

➤ Toshiba [Via OMGChrome]

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Laudville graduates its social entertainment discovery platform from beta

Laudville has wrapped up its open beta and officially launched its social discovery service for movies, TV shows, music and books. The site helps users find entertainment through a learning algorithm and friends’ recommendations.

To mark the milestone, Laudville has also released an updated version of its service with new features such as a friend-finder, Twitter widget, user histories and a redesigned portal. The site began its open beta last July.

Laudville CEO Phoebe Scott started the company because she couldn’t find a solution that brought together recommendations based on her specific tastes and opinions of her friends. Scott described the resulting product as “Yelp meets Kayak for entertainment.” It’s meant to show users where they can find a piece of content while also displaying recommendations from people you know and/or trust.

While Laudville has nice design and the right approach, its biggest weakness is the lack of integrated services. The site includes content from Amazon, iTunes and Hulu, but it doesn’t yet have data from popular streaming services like Netflix, Spotify and Rdio. Also missing from Laudville is a mobile app, though the startup says it plans to release one in the next six months.

If Laudville manages to build a comprehensive personalized hub for where to find digital content, it will have a killer app on its hands. The odds are stacked against it, but, at least for now, it’s off to a good start.

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BBM for Android and iOS gets Find Friends feature to help automatically add existing users, invite others

BlackBerry today updated its BBM app for Android and iOS with a new Find Friends feature that removes the need to share PINs. You can download the new version now directly from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

As you can see above, the feature detects who in your smartphone’s contact list already use BBM, and allows you to quickly send them an invite to join your BBM contact list. At the same time, for contacts that don’t yet have BBM, you’ll have the option to invite them to download the app via an email or SMS.

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FTC charges marketer $185,000 for sending millions of spam text messages promoting ‘free’ gift cards and iPads

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today < ahref="http://ift.tt/1kTinQw">announced it has charged affiliate marketer Jason Cruz more than $185,000 for sending millions of spam text messages to random phone numbers. The unwanted text messages sent to consumers falsely promised “free” gift cards and electronics.

Cruz has agreed to settle with the FTC, but isn’t able to pay the judgment of more than $185,000, which represents all of the money he received in connection with the scam. As a result, all but $10,000 of the monetary judgment has been suspended, meaning he has to pay just over 5 percent.

The FTC alleges Cruz’s text messages offered free merchandise such as $1,000 gift cards to major retailers, or free iPads, to individuals who clicked on links in the messages. A typical message read, “You have been selected for a $1,000 Walmart GiftCard, Enter code ‘FREE’ at [website address] to claim your prize: 161 left!”

More to follow.

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