AllThingsD » Iain Dodsworth

Hey! What Happened To TweetDeck's UberMedia Deal?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:19:49 +0000

Is Twitter really going to buy TweetDeck for $50 million?

Got me. The last time I reported on the Twitter start-up, it was supposed to have been acquired by UberMedia for $30 million.

I’ve asked all the relevant parties and aside from a public non-comment from Twitter, have yet to hear back.

Here’s what I do know:

In February, after TechCrunch reported that UberMedia had acquired the Twitter client, I asked around and was told that the deal hadn’t been closed but was “pretty far along, with signed term sheets, etc.,” and would be worth $30 million in cash and UberMedia stock.
Following that report, I heard that some TweetDeck investors were grousing that the company had sold too early, for too little.
Last week, a person familiar with TweetDeck told me the deal still hadn’t closed because there were “valuation issues.” That explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Or more precisely, it sounds more like a polite way of saying “something came up that moved this thing from ‘almost done’ to ‘in limbo.’”
It’s worth underscoring that the original TweetDeck/Uber deal was going to be paid for primarily with UberMedia stock. If you’re bullish on UberMedia, that’s a good thing, because it could end up being worth much more down the road. On the other hand, it would be no sweat for Twitter to hand over $50 million in its own stock for this deal. And if you’re an investor who’s eager to turn that paper into cash via secondary market sales, it would be easy to do so–much easier than selling UberMedia shares.

So now that we’ve moved from known knowns, let’s move to known unknowns:

What was UberMedia going to do with TweetDeck, anyway?

The two answers you hear most often is that Bill Gross and company were rolling up Twitter-related startups so they could either: Do what Twitter hasn’t done so far, and make real money selling ads against Tweets; or gather up enough users to create a Twitter-like platform that they could run on their own.

But neither of those answers makes much sense to me, either.

Because by all accounts Twitter CEO Dick Costolo seems to have a real problem with Gross, which makes a partnership unlikely. And because splitting off a chunk of Twitter’s users and creating a better/more reliable/whatever service sounds like the kind of thing that appeals to tech pundits. But not real people.

What would Twitter do with TweetDeck, anyway?

This one seems a little easier to figure out: TweetDeck is one of Twitter’s most popular clients, and the service has become increasingly interested in owning its own distribution.

On the other hand! Twitter has been asked about TweetDeck’s role in its ecosystem several times in the last year or so, and each time, the company has responded with the same answer: We love TweetDeck, but it’s not for us–the people who use that thing are hard-core power users, and we’re aiming at a broad audience. (Fun/frustrating game for new users: Boot up TweetDeck and try to find the “search” function.)

Twitter founder/product guru Jack Dorsey is the most recent Twitter official to say something along those lines, in a Q&A last month. TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth found his statement worth highlighting for his own Twitter followers, though he only called out the first paragraphs of this exchange:

Q: So are you saying there shouldn’t be all of these other clients out there? I love TweetDeck, and I like it better than Twitter.com. Is your job as product director to make Twitter.com as good as TweetDeck?

A: I think the biggest challenge is to build a cohehesive user experience, and at the same time, enable and allow for multiple views on the same thing. TweetDeck is a very interesting client, because it presents a view that no other client in the world presents, which is this multicolumn, massive amounts of information in one pane. And people really, really enjoy that.

But I think that’s maybe five percent of the Twitter population. That five percent of the Twitter population are some of the most high-value publishers that we have, and they’re using the service at extreme velocity. So of course we have to pay attention to that, and I’m not saying we need to rid ourselves of interfaces like that. We have to embrace them.

But, we also need to speak to the 80 percent that will not be using an interface like that, that don’t really understand what Twitter is and that see Twitter as mainly a consumption experience. We spend a lot of time on people tweeting but a lot of the value that one gets out of Twitter is being able to follow their interests, and not necessarily tweet about it. But just consume it. So we need to put a lot more effort into the consumption experience and the consumer experience.

So maybe Twitter changed its mind and decided that it’s worth owning that small slice of power users, after all. Or maybe TweetDeck’s owners ended up looking for more money and less risk (and less upside). Or maybe both, or something else. Positively Rumsfeldian.

TweetDeck Finds a Home, and $30 Million, at UberMedia

Peter Kafka — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 04:02:48 +0000

UberMedia, the holding company that specializes in Twitter-based start-ups, has added its highest-profile company to date: TweetDeck, the biggest Twitter application not owned by Twitter itself.

UberMedia, run by Internet pioneer Bill Gross, will pay $30 million in cash and stock for the London-based company, which has raised less than $5 million from investors in the last two years.

The deal, first reported by TechCrunch, isn’t done yet, but it’s pretty far along, with signed term sheets, etc. All of TweetDeck’s investors will take a portion of their payout in UberMedia equity, I’m told.

Both Gross and TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth (pictured here) have been trying to build businesses within the Twitter ecosystem, though it’s never been clear how Twitter felt about that.

Gross, in particular, has had an uneasy relationship with Twitter: Last year, an earlier incarnation of his company tried to launch an “AdSense for Tweets” product at the same time that Twitter launched its own Google-like ad product, and that didn’t go well.

The two companies have other things in common as well. TweetDeck has been shepherded along by Betaworks, the New York-based holding company/platform/incubator that also specializes in the Twittersphere. And Betaworks is also an investor in…UberMedia.

Here’s an interview I conducted with Dodsworth last April, when the Twittersphere was particularly confused about the prospects of Twitter apps, like TweetDeck, that weren’t owned by Twitter itself. Looks like this one turned out just fine.

[ See post to watch video ]

QOTD: Dear Mr. Jobs – Please Get Off My Side

Peter Kafka — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:36:58 +0000

Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”

- TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth, taking issue with Steve Jobs’ use of his company as an anti-Google data point during Apple’s earnings call.

More Money for Twitter Apps: TweetDeck Raises Another $3 Million

Peter Kafka — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:22:05 +0000

Remember last month, when everyone was convinced that Twitter was going to cut off the oxygen to all the start-ups that had built up around the service?

I talked to TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth at the time, and he seemed reasonably confident that Twitter wasn’t going to crush his small app company into pulp. His argument: We serve a specific niche of Twitter users, and Twitter is happy to let us do that. We’ll be fine.

Others seem to be buying in. TweetDeck got a big push yesterday from Google (GOOG), which gave it a slot during its I/O developer conference. And today, the company has announced that it raised another $3 million in a Series B round. It has now raised about $5 million in less than two years.

This is an inside round, with all the previous investors, led by Betaworks, participating. So if you want to be a skeptic, you might wonder why the company didn’t get new money this time.

But regardless, it’s a vote of confidence that there’s plenty of growth left for companies–at least, some companies–that want to service Twitter users.

There’s also a new version of TweetDeck out now. Here’s a preview video of the upgrade:

And here’s my interview with Dodsworth last month.

[ See post to watch video ]

LIVE from New York: Twitter Pitches Ads to Madison Avenue

Peter Kafka — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:39:41 +0000

Twitter has quietly been reaching out to marketers about its new ad platform for a few months, but now it’s a full-fledged marketing blitz. The messaging service rolled out its ad strategy to the press last night; today it’s going directly to the ad industry, via COO Dick Costolo’s presentation at Ad Age’s Digital Conference.

I’m not sure how much more Costolo will reveal that Twitter hasn’t put out already–or may be waiting to talk about at tomorrow’s Chirp conference. But since I’m here I’ll liveblog it anyway.

Liveblog

Costolo says he has been waiting five or six months to give this presentation. It’s time to walk through the rollout, he adds, making note of his “fascinating nontraditional” prediction last fall.

He explains the Twitter ecosystem. The ad platform has to go everywhere, not just to Twitter.com. He refuses to call the ads, “ads.” They’re “just tweets.”

“Promoted tweets,” that is.

He walks through the @hashtagtees example.

There’s a menu from which ad buyers can pick search terms and associate them with specific tweets they’ve already published.

Promoted tweets look and act like regular tweets except that they’re labeled as promotions and stay at the top of the Twitterstream.

A promoted tweet “combines earned media and paid media in one space,” Costolo says.

“Earned” media are free, Costolo reminds the audience. That is, if people retweet your paid tweet, there’s no charge additional charge.

The pitch continues: Ads are “real time,” and so are analytics–you can see how ads are performing second-by-second.

Twitter will start with Twitter.com search. That’s phase one. The plan will roll out more broadly, but the company is doing it this way because it wants a “thoughtful, user-centric approach” to figuring it out. “We will quickly expand into syndication…all of our syndication partners.” And here, Costolo specifically mentions UberTwitter in the list of partners.

Important: Twitter will definitely expand into the regular timeline at some point. That is, you will be getting ads in your stream whether you search or not. Ad-free Twitter is over.

Costolo talks about the “resonance” metric Twitter will use to figure out which promoted tweets show up and where.

Each ad partner will see a scoreboard with different metrics: Retweets, @replies, #tag click, avatar clicks, link clicks, views after RT.

Advertisers won’t pay for ads that don’t resonate with users.

Next, Costolo describes communication on Twitter as both “one to many” and as a “real-time interest graph.”

Pricing will start as CPM. Twitter is doing this because it doesn’t know how to correlate “resonance” with value yet. As the company figures this out, it will move to a pricing model based on ROI.

Here comes Porter Gale, VP of marketing for Virgin America, a launch partner. She notes that @jack is flying VA right now.

[You're not missing anything here.]

Um, here’s a free ad for two-for-one tickets on Virgin. Don’t really follow it but sure you can figure it out if you’d like.

And here’s Ellen Stone, SVP of marketing at Bravo.

She is also excited!

[You're not missing anything here, either.]

Stone describes some sort of live, real-time convergence between shows broadcast and users’ tweets. Makes my head hurt. Hope it doesn’t pop up during “Top Chef.”

Back to Costolo: More monetization coming. Commercial accounts coming after promoted tweets will “feather into this platform very very nicely.” One dashboard will manage both products.

Q&A

Will tweets be syndicated to Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), and other partners that take the stream?
Costolo says yes, without mentioning any specific search engine or media pub.

Will there be revenue-sharing with publishers and bloggers?
Yes, with developers and publishers. Costolo says Twitter will talk about this at its Chirp conference and focus on the syndication piece there. Revenue sharing will be “very transparent,” he adds.

Early reaction from consumers?
Yes, Twitter is getting a “wait and see,” Costolo notes. [From whom? Who's seen it?] The company will take its “learnings” from search and go forward. Twitter ads should be live and running now.

What CPM are you charging?
Twitter is playing around with different numbers, trying to figure it out. When a term is owned or created by a client, like Virgin America, should it have “rights” to that hashtag, whereby no one can outbid it? Some hashtags only have value at certain times. Like “Super Bowl,” which is only useful for a couple hours in the year. So we have to play around and test different kinds of pricing. “We don’t know the answer to that yet.”

What kind of reactions are you looking for from users?
Costolo says Twitter is looking to see whether people click or interact with ads and paying attention to the tenor of reaction: Positive or negative, etc. Think about the iPad launch this month. People were having battery issues. Someone could have jumped in in real time and bought a promoted tweet that dealt with that. Twitter’s hope is that when people see these, they’ll get why they work.

Please talk about search volume.
“Massive. It’s huge.” Will talk about hashtags tomorrow. But on Twitter.com, it’s a small piece of traffic. So we’re not maximizing revenue now. We’re figuring it out.

How will location work with ads?
“We think significantly.” There are lots of opportunities down the road. As this gets more sophisticated, will see opps for small and big business.

Will marketers be able to get resonance scores for companies that aren’t using promoted tweets?
Not at first. But possibly.

Will you share revenue with TweetDeck, etc.?
Yes. We’ll talk about this tomorrow so we can save something for those guys. Revenue-sharing will be very transparent. Costolo name-checks Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck and Loïc Le Meur at Seesmic.

Finished up. I will have some questions for Costolo myself, a little later this afternoon.

Is the Twitter Sky Falling? Not for Us, Says TweetDeck.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:48:57 +0000

Talk to developers who build Twitter applications these days and you’ll hear one of two things:

Holy cow! We’re screwed!
We’re fine. But the other guys are screwed.

Put Iain Dodsworth in the second category. The founder of the popular TweetDeck client says he’s not worried about competing with Twitter for users, but he imagines that other developers are.

Dodsworth’s argument: TweetDeck is a big, cumbersome application with an overwhelming array of bells and whistles, aimed at a relatively small group of people–he says he has “millions” of active users–who like that stuff. Twitter, he says, is happy to let him target power users with his app, while it goes after larger market segments.

But “those guys that have got just a Twitter app…that is potentially ‘filling holes’–they’ve got a new competitor, which they didn’t have before. And a powerful one.”

Is Dodsworth just spinning? Perhaps. But if so, he’s doing a very fine job of it. Check out the interview I conducted with him yesterday, where we talked about hole-filling as well as the competition between Twitter’s new ad platform and the rival one offered by TweetUp.

[ See post to watch video ]

Another Twitter App Funded: TweetDeck Raises an Angel Round. Next Up: A Business Plan

Peter Kafka — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:54:58 +0000

Yes, you can still get someone to invest in a Web start-up with zero revenue. It helps if you can insert the word “Twitter” into your pitch, though.

TweetDeck, a one-man company that makes a very helpful piece of free software that organizes your Twitter streams, is raising an angel round led by Betaworks, the investment company with a hankering for all things Twitter. The round, which hasn’t closed yet, will eventually end up somewhere south of $500,000, I’m told.

When it does, the financing will make 34-year-old programmer Iain Dodsworth a paper millionaire. Nice work for a Brit who built TweetDeck just last June because he was following 30 people on Twitter and wanted a better way to organize their Tweets.

Dodsworth says TweetDeck has been downloaded 250,000 times since then and that users are sending out 120,000 messages a day using the software. That places it above other free Twitter clients like Twitterific and twhirl, both of which are cranking out 80,000 to 85,000 messages a day, according to tracking service TweetRush.

All of them are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.

And no money changes hands at any point: Twitter doesn’t charge for use of its data, and its partners do all their development work for free. That could change at some point. As Twitter casts about for a business model to support its service–it is, famously, just about revenue-free at this point–an obvious solution would be to start charging a fee to the likes of TweetDeck.

No problem, says Dodsworth, who says he’d be happy to pay Twitter, particularly if it gave him even more access in exchange. Oh. And what about his business model? It’s coming, Dodsworth says–he’d like to start selling a pro version of his software, targeting power users and corporations.

That strikes me as a fairly small market, but then again TweetDeck is a very small operation. Dodsworth says he doesn’t plan on hiring any additional help in the near future, even as he preps new features like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’ll let him explain himself, via a short video interview I taped with him yesterday–just as soon as the Internet cooperates and lets me post the clip. In the meantime, you can also track Dodsworth on Twitter here or here.

[ See post to watch video ]