Twitter Buys a Referee in the Fight Over Online TV Chatter

The hottest fight in social media right now is between Twitter and Facebook over which platform is a better host for online conversation â€" and advertising â€" around live television shows. Both companies are vying to convince consumer brands to run ads targeted at users who are chatting online about popular TV shows while they are airing.

Now, Twitter has just bought one of the referees of this competition.

Twitter said Wednesday that it has purchased Trendrr, which was one of the leading independent firms analyzing the real-time conversation on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for television channels seeking insights into what audiences were saying online.

It was Twitter’s second big purchase of a social TV analysis firm. In February, it acquired Bluefin Labs, which has since become the backbone of its Amplify program, which works with advertisers and TV channels to hit a show’s fans on Twitter with ads that reinforce the commercials they are seeing on TV.

Trendrr made headlines last month with a study that found that Facebook was the host to five times as much chatter around television shows as all the other social platforms combined, with particular strength in network TV and Spanish-language shows.

That was not exactly surprising, given that Facebook has far more users than any other social network. But Facebook and Trendrr promoted the study, which was done at Facebook’s behest, since it was the first time that the big daddy of social media had shared detailed data about the TV-related conversation occurring on its platform.

“This is the start of an exciting relationship between Facebook and Trendrr,” Trendrr wrote at the time. “The potential development of an open system for accurate measurement of the entire Facebook platform will provide our clients and the larger Social TV ecosystem with more insights and tools to make better decisions.”

On Wednesday, Trendrr made it clear that its dalliance with Facebook was over.

“What makes Twitter uniquely compelling among these platforms is its connection to the live moment â€" people sharing what’s happening, when it’s happening, to the world,” the company’s chief executive, Mark Ghuneim, wrote in the blog post announcing the sale of his company. “We think we can help amplify even stronger the power of that connection to the moment inside of Twitter.

Twitter, which declined to disclose how much it paid for Trendrr, plans to shut down that firm’s research division and focus on its Curatorr product, which helps TV channels sift through the flood of Twitter comments about their shows and find the best ones to highlight on screen or in advertising.

No word yet on whether Trendrr’s spelling idiosyncrasies will induce Twitter to make any changes to its name. Twittr anyone?

Today’s Scuttlebot: Shopping Through Tweets and All Things D’s Options

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »

The ‘Other’ Server Makers Are Gaining Ground

This quarter’s market-share reports on computer server shipments and sales from Gartner and IDC are an unusually eloquent statement about the world’s transition to cloud computing and commodity machines that don’t command a big profit margin.

The reports are bad news for well-known companies selling servers that suit a specific purpose or those that hope a household brand name, like Hewlett-Packard, will help sales.

At first pass, you might think little has changed. I.B.M.’s high-end machines still held the most revenue, bringing in about $3.2 billion, according to Gartner, and $3.3 billion, according to IDC. That was off 9.7 percent and 10 percent, however, from the analysts’ year-ago numbers.

Hewlett-Packard shipped the most units of any company, Gartner said. These were mostly commodity servers, built on the X86 chip, the most common chip architecture used in PCs and servers.  Intel is the biggest producer of these kinds of chips. Once again, H.P.’s leadership position was off 13.6 percent compared with the third quarter of 2012.

But the real story here is losses by big companies and impressive gains by the category both analyst firms call “Others,” which are largely Taiwanese and Chinese makers who ship very cheap machines with little or no brand association.

“Others” came in third after I.B.M. and H.P. in revenue, Gartner said, growing 7.9 percent to $2.7 billion (like I.B.M., H.P.’s server revenue was down significantly.) I.D.C. had Dell slightly higher, and it put the “Others” in fourth place.

The “Others” blew everyone away in volume. Gartner said they shipped 969,342 units, a stunning 14.4-percent increase.  Cisco’s growth rate was far lower than the commodity manufacturers’.

Companies like Quanta ship these computers in shrink-wrapped racks that go into the world’s biggest data centers. According to a Facebook engineer, last year Quanta racks made up 80 percent of Facebook’s servers.

There were other stories inside the numbers: Dell’s push into servers is making impressive gains, probably at the expense of H.P. It is not clear that this will translate into new demand from cloud consumers. Cisco’s network-based servers, part of the company’s overall push into network-based cloud computing, is gaining ground.

But for now, the real tale is the rise of the faceless suppliers, and the incessant demand for their undistinguished raw power by cloud-computing data centers.

Oxford Dictionaries Online Adds ‘Selfie,’ ‘Emoji’ and Other Tech-Oriented Terms

Selfie, phablet, emoji. A few years ago, these words held little to no meaning for most Americans. But thanks to the onward creep of new and pervasive technologies like smartphones, Facebook and photo-sharing, and communication services like Snapchat and Instagram, they have become nearly ubiquitous.

On Wednesday, Oxford Dictionaries announced it had added a number of new words, many of which were born of a distinctly digital era, into its online lexicon.

“With influences ranging from technology to fashion, there is something for everyone in the update,” the organization said in a blog post.

The organization reviews and adds new words each quarter, along with their formal definitions. This time, the organization added more than 60 new words and terms, including “bitcoin,” the upstart virtual currency that has attracted the attention of federal regulators; “emojis,” the colorful cartoon characters that can replace words in text messages; and “selfie,” a self-portrait taken and then uploaded to a social media site like Facebook or Instagram.

In addition, the dictionary added the word “phablet,” which refers to the larger-than-life smartphones that appear to be a cross between a tablet computer and a smartphone. And it pinpointed several popular Internet abbreviations, including “FOMO,” which stands for the “fear of missing out” and “tl;dr,” which stands for “too long; didn’t read.”

“The additions may have only just entered the dictionary, but we’ve been watching them for a while now, tracking how and where they are used,” said the organization in its blog post.

Live Updates on the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered one of the most famous speeches in American History, “I’ve Got A Dream” via YouTube.

CREDIT CAPTION

On the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, thousands of people descended on Wednesday on the Lincoln Memorial, where President Obama, joined by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, was scheduled to deliver an address at 1 p.m. As my colleague Michiko Kakutani wrote, the speech is a “testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words.”

Auto-Refresh: ON

Turn ON

Refresh Now

Feed

Twitter

Tips, sources, story ideas? Please leave a comment or find me on Twitter @jenniferpreston.

Live Updates on the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered one of the most famous speeches in American History, “I’ve Got A Dream” via YouTube.

CREDIT CAPTION

On the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, thousands of people descended on Wednesday on the Lincoln Memorial, where President Obama, joined by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, was scheduled to deliver an address at 1 p.m. As my colleague Michiko Kakutani wrote, the speech is a “testament to the transformative powers of one man and the magic of his words.”

Auto-Refresh: ON

Turn ON

Refresh Now

Feed

Twitter

Tips, sources, story ideas? Please leave a comment or find me on Twitter @jenniferpreston.

Daily Report: Casio, King of Smartwatch Field, Braces for Invasion

Clunky? Perhaps. Geeky? Absolutely. But for three decades Casio Computer’s G-Shock line of digital watches has dominated a small, yet lucrative, market, Hiroko Tabuchi reports.

The geeky-watch niche is now drawing interest from some of the biggest names in technology. Apple trademarked “iWatch” in several countries this year, which has fueled intense speculation that it is working on a wristwatch that would link with a smartphone. Samsung Electronics is expected to unveil a watch in early September that can make phone calls, play video games and send e-mails.

Last month, Sony revamped its Smartwatch, which communicates with smartphones and lets users play games or check Facebook by tapping their wrists. And a flurry of start-ups, like Pebble, are coming out with timepieces that claim to redefine what goes on the wrist.

“Suddenly, everyone’s discovered the wrist,” Kazuo Kashio, Casio’s 84-year-old chief executive, said in an interview at the company’s Tokyo headquarters. “We’ve known for a long time it’s prime real estate. We’re prepared.”

The spike in interest in wearable computing devices is shaking up the digital watch industry, catapulting a sleepy business to the cutting edge of personal technology. In the process, established digital watchmakers like Casio are finding that they must contend with new competitors.

But that is nothing new for Casio, a company with $3.06 billion in annual revenue that also makes compact cameras, musical instruments and calculators.

Daily Report: Casio, King of Smartwatch Field, Braces for Invasion

Clunky? Perhaps. Geeky? Absolutely. But for three decades Casio Computer’s G-Shock line of digital watches has dominated a small, yet lucrative, market, Hiroko Tabuchi reports.

The geeky-watch niche is now drawing interest from some of the biggest names in technology. Apple trademarked “iWatch” in several countries this year, which has fueled intense speculation that it is working on a wristwatch that would link with a smartphone. Samsung Electronics is expected to unveil a watch in early September that can make phone calls, play video games and send e-mails.

Last month, Sony revamped its Smartwatch, which communicates with smartphones and lets users play games or check Facebook by tapping their wrists. And a flurry of start-ups, like Pebble, are coming out with timepieces that claim to redefine what goes on the wrist.

“Suddenly, everyone’s discovered the wrist,” Kazuo Kashio, Casio’s 84-year-old chief executive, said in an interview at the company’s Tokyo headquarters. “We’ve known for a long time it’s prime real estate. We’re prepared.”

The spike in interest in wearable computing devices is shaking up the digital watch industry, catapulting a sleepy business to the cutting edge of personal technology. In the process, established digital watchmakers like Casio are finding that they must contend with new competitors.

But that is nothing new for Casio, a company with $3.06 billion in annual revenue that also makes compact cameras, musical instruments and calculators.