October 16, 2009
Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, reiterated Thursday that his micro-blogging start-up wants to go it alone.
“Twitter is not interested in being acquired by a bigger company, we want to build an impressive company on our own and we believe that we can,” Mr. Stone told an audience at an event in Tokyo on Thursday evening.
His statement, after being translated into Japanese, drew a few cheers and claps from the audience, PC World reported.
Deal rumors have been hovering around the start-up, with chatter that companies like Apple and Google were potential buyers. Last month, Twitter announced that it had raised $100 million in new financing, valuing the start-up at $1 billion.
Mr. Stone was on hand as the popular microblogging service launched a Japan-based mobile version Thursday, hoping to penetrate a country where other American social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground, The Associated Press reported.
Japanese is Twitter’s sole foreign language platform so far, and the company’s efforts here indicate it’s serious about making it big in Japan — and eventually all over the world.
Twitter teamed up with a Tokyo-based Internet firm, Digital Garage, in early 2008. It launched a Japanese-language platform for cellphones and other mobile devices in the spring of 2008, and hired a Japan country manager earlier this year. >>>> Continue Reading here
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