Twitter Acquires Mobile Start-up Cloudhopper
Popular micro-blogging and social networking site Twitter is on a roll. Earlier this month the company announced that it bought Tweetie – which it plans to turn into the official iPhone Twitter client. The company has now announced that it made another purchase.
This time Twitter bought Cloudhopper, a mobile start-up that makes it easier to connect to mobile text-messaging (SMS) carrier services around the world. According to Director of Mobile Business Development with Twitter, Kevin Thau, Twitter has been working with Cloudhopper for the past 8 months now. The goal of this cooperation is to “become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world”.
Just to put things in perspective, about 1 billion SMS tweets are processed by Twitter on a monthly basis. That number isn’t going down – it is constantly increasing.
“Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world. To help us further grow and scale our SMS service, we are happy to announce the acquisition of Cloudhopper, a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet,” commented Kevin Thau.
When Twitter acquired Tweetie, it welcomed Loren Brichter on board. Loren Brichter, a.k.a Atebits is the one who developed the Tweetie application for the iPhone. Now that Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper, it will welcome Joe Lauer on board. Joe Lauer is the one who founded Cloudhopper back in 2008.
"There are over four billion mobile phone accounts in the world, all essentially Twitter-ready," co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Biz Stone said during a keynote presentation at this year's CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. "Compare that to only about two billion PCs. So it creates a huge growth opportunity for us. When a farmer in a rural village in a Third World nation can get information over SMS, it can have a dramatic impact on his life. We've always been excited about Twitter being able to work over this rudimentary network of SMS as well as the high tech smartphones."
This time Twitter bought Cloudhopper, a mobile start-up that makes it easier to connect to mobile text-messaging (SMS) carrier services around the world. According to Director of Mobile Business Development with Twitter, Kevin Thau, Twitter has been working with Cloudhopper for the past 8 months now. The goal of this cooperation is to “become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world”.
Just to put things in perspective, about 1 billion SMS tweets are processed by Twitter on a monthly basis. That number isn’t going down – it is constantly increasing.
“Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world. To help us further grow and scale our SMS service, we are happy to announce the acquisition of Cloudhopper, a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet,” commented Kevin Thau.
When Twitter acquired Tweetie, it welcomed Loren Brichter on board. Loren Brichter, a.k.a Atebits is the one who developed the Tweetie application for the iPhone. Now that Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper, it will welcome Joe Lauer on board. Joe Lauer is the one who founded Cloudhopper back in 2008.
"There are over four billion mobile phone accounts in the world, all essentially Twitter-ready," co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Biz Stone said during a keynote presentation at this year's CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. "Compare that to only about two billion PCs. So it creates a huge growth opportunity for us. When a farmer in a rural village in a Third World nation can get information over SMS, it can have a dramatic impact on his life. We've always been excited about Twitter being able to work over this rudimentary network of SMS as well as the high tech smartphones."
