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Rumors earlier this week of Twitter negotiating a new round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion are confirmed today by co-founder Evan Williams on the Twitter Blog. TechCrunch reports this latest round of funding has closed with Twitter receiving $100 million.

Twitter’s previous round of funding raised $35 million in February of 2009 at a valuation of $250 million. The new figure of $1 billion quadruples Twitter’s valuation in just 7 months.

Keeping in the spirit that you have to spend money to make money, Twitter has yet to produce a viable revenue stream. We anticipate that this $100 million injection is contingent on Twitter rolling out a paid advertising platform in the very near future. It’s worth noting that Facebook received $716 million in funding before finally announcing, less than two weeks ago, the company is now cash flow positive.

Evan William thanks Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley as contributing investment firms. Twitter to date has received $155 million in venture funding.

Sources: Twitter Blog, TechCrunch

The first free social IT management software application Spiceworks today announces new features with the release of Spiceworks IT Desktop 4.0. More than 700,000 IT professionals from small and medium size businesses manage and collaborate on ”Everything IT” with Spiceworks, a complete network management, monitoring, help desk, PC inventory and software reporting solution. New features announced today include…

Network Mapping is a fully integrated application which automatically creates graphically enhanced network diagrams that display network elements, relationships, and bandwidth usage.

Management Application Plug-ins are now available from top vendors such as Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel, and Trend Micro. New custom widgets integrate directly with Spiceworks and offer features to improve the management of technologies from these vendors.

Help Desk Tickets Anywhere is a new feature that allows users to create, edit, update, and delete support tickets via the Spiceworks helpdesk from email-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones.

Social Windows Events gives users the ability to see how other IT professionals manage and prioritize Windows Events. View Windows event background pages and community discussions with one-click.

Twitter Alerts allow activity updates to be forwarded from Spiceworks to a user’s Twitter account, leveraging social networking channels to stay better informed.

Spiceworks also hosts as series of events known as SpiceWorld “Where IT all comes together.” The events are focused towards IT leaders from small and midsize businesses and promotes discussion of new products and challenges within the IT industry, professional networking, hands-on IT training, and more. The next SpiceWorld will be held in Orlando Florida on July 17th, with events to follow later this year in Austin Texas and London. Rumors of a Spice Girls reunion at the UK event have not yet been confirmed.

Twitter is a massively popular micro-blogging platform that is quickly catapulting information into real-time over the Internet. Business executives, entrepreneurs, marketers, and technologists are all on board.  On the 10th day of every month we are going to introduce you to ten notable tweeters to follow. These influential individuals are embracing social media as a marketing and business tool and we encourage you to do the same.
 
@guykawasaki
Guy Kawasaki, author and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.

@johnabyrne
John A. Byrne, executive editor of BusinessWeek.

@jowyang
Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research analyst.

@marismith
Mari Smith, relationship marketing specialist, Facebook business coach.

@mashable
Pete Cashmore, CEO at Mashable.com.

@mcuban
Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

@olivermarks
Oliver Marks, enterprise collaboration management consultant.

@peterkim
Peter Kim, social business design services and technology.

@pistachio
Laura Fitton, CEO and founder of Pistachio Consulting Inc.

@tammycamp
Tammy Camp, serial entrepreneur, advisor, kiteboarder, globetrotter.

@collabocom
Collabo.com, don’t forget to follow us too!

If you have any recommendations for us please post in the comments below.

As the exchange of information on the Web increasingly approaches the now, innovators at Topsy Labs Inc have launched a real-time search engine built off of Twitter’s API. With $15 million in venture funding, co-founder Gary Iwatani isn’t the only one banking on the success of Topsy’s search technology. “We’ve architected what we believe is a next-generation platform for search on the Web,” Iwatani told VentureWire.

Traditionally search giants such as Google have dismissed content from social media sources to reduce spam within search results, reliant on the model of link popularity along with favoring original relevant content when indexing websites. Topsy frontmen, who also founded anti-spam company Cloudmark Inc, are no amateurs when it comes to filtering out the junk. By watching signals, such as the authors who or are producing spam messages, they can more effectively filter out the trash tweets and bring relevant information to the top of search results.

While technically Topsy may be a Twitter app at the moment, the potential for it’s real-time search technology to expand to other social media charts a potentially strong future for this company.

Check out the video for more insight on how Topsy works…

Source: Venture Capital Dispatch

After turning down a $500 million buyout offer from Facebook earlier this year, rumors have been flying about Apple, Microsoft, and Google acquisitions of popular microblogging social network Twitter. Co-found Biz Stone goes public on the topic, squashing those rumors with an appearance on ABC’s “The View.”

“We’re just getting started as I’ve said. The company is two years old, we have so much to do, so much product stuff to fix, and so much growing to do.”

Nielsen Online reports that Twitter received over 7 million unique visitors in February of this year, compared to 475,000 one year earlier.

Source: Twitter co-founder says company not for sale

Facebook, in response to other popular social sites such as FriendFeed and Twitter, has redesigned their traditionally click-to-update news feed into a live status stream. New advanced filters have also been added to the mix that allow you to view your status stream for just family members, local friends or a variety of other options. Preview the new Facebook design set to go live mid next week.

Last week an article discussing Twitter’s lack of loyalty stated that this was not an issue for Facebook or MySpace. Well at least for the latter there seems to be a difference of opinion, or actually fact. Today an article in the New York Times discussing a MySpace makeover and the challenges facing their new CEO Owen Van Natta who is just starting his second week, also points out comScore statistics that show MySpace in actually losing users, most likely to Facebook. Several of my friends have used MySpace bulletins to let their friends know that they are moving to Facebook. Some even go as far as to change their profile names to phrases such as “Jenny (Who now only uses Facebook).”

Well in Twitter’s case, my opinion is that these flaky tweeters are simply the effect of Twitter’s recent popularity spike. Microblogging is not for everyone. I’m sure Twitter will settle into steady growth pattern in the near future. Perhaps if Twitter does add new features to their platform they may appeal to a wider and more dedicated user base. As for MySpace, they may need to focus their efforts on their younger users to bring some momentum back to their social networking super-engine! Both of these platforms still have alot of potential that I think has yet to be realized.