Talent Tussle: Twitter Pays $10 Million For Engineer

Christopher Fry’s name stands out amongst the various engineers that are part of Twitter’s list of highest paid executives. Last year, the senior vice president of engineer was able to rake in about $10.3 million and was only a little behind Dick Costolo, the chief executive officer of Twitter who had been given a salary of $11.5 million. This information has been obtained from the IPO documents of the social messaging service. These amounts are way more than the paychecks that were given to chief financial officer Mike Gupta, chief technology officer Adam Messinger and chief operating officer Ali Rowghani.

This is Silicon Valley; where there is a shortage of valuable engineering talent amidst an explosion of startups backed by venture capitalists, which has eventually inflated the paychecks of existing engineers. According to Iain Grant, a recruiter at Riviera Partners, which specializes in recruiting engineers for startups backed by venture capitalists, stated there is a limited number of A players in Silicon Valley. However, he added that the demand for these individuals has simply gone through the roof. It is quite common to hear stories regarding the length to which employers are willing to go for attracting the top engineering talent.

This includes offering them laundry services, free cafeterias and shuttle buses, which are also given Google, Facebook and other renowned companies. Venky Ganesan, a venture capitalist said that a coveted engineer had been offered a year’s lease on a Tesla sedan by a startup and this had led to a cost of about $1000 a month. He did not give the name of the company though as his firm is an investor in it. Sam Shank, the CEO of At Hotel Tonight that offers a mobile app for making last minute bookings said that the office area was staged to make it appear lively for a prospective hire. Two potential employees were roped into a ping pong game while others were positioned at the bar.

The strategy bore fruit and the recruits ended up designing an important part of the software. According to the IPO documents that were registered with securities regulators by Twitter; the compensation given to Fry was mostly in the form of stock awards that had been valued at $10.1 million. He had been given a bonus of $100,000 while his salary had totaled around $145, 513. Some people may regard him as an underpaid employee as well. This is due to the fact that before Facebook’s IPO, Mike Schroepfer, its vice president of engineering had been given $24.4 million in stock awards.

He had also been given a bonus worth $140, 344 and a salary of $270, 833. However, the total revenue that had been posted by Facebook that year had been 10 times greater than that of Twitter. Grant had added that cash compensation more than $250,000 had been paid to around three fourth of the candidates who had taken VP of engineering roles in his client companies in the last two years. Equity grants had also been given to many such candidates.

Mission of Transparency Undermined By Twitter’s Secret IPO

Twitter is demanding respect without giving any in exchange because it has chosen the path taken by elite investors instead of the truly public viewing. This is not a company that would typically be identified with the act of stealing. The CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo regards it as a worldwide or global town square. This is because 400 tweets take place in a day that covers various aspects ranging between personal feuds, twerking controversies and revolutions. If people wish to publicize something, they should take it to Twitter. However, the company itself has made the choice of going undercover when it is going public.

As per the Jobs Act, a company that has revenues less than $1 billion has the privilege of filing a ‘confidential’ initial public offering. Twitter is opting for that privilege. This means that people don’t really know when Twitter made the decision of going public because it is keeping the IPO confidential. The social messaging site could go public in three months or even seven months. But, this isn’t a great choice for a company that earns its fortune by applying time stamps on instant communication. It is perfectly legal for a company to choose the Job Acts Secrecy, but it doesn’t hold true for the spirit with which Twitter conducts its business.

It is a major fail when one of the most prominent communications companies decide to go for a secret IPO. The purpose of introducing the Jobs Act was to prevent small startup companies and business to be intimated by the huge public market. It wasn’t introduced for allowing international companies such as Twitter, which are under public scrutiny to choose this option for avoiding any discomfort with facing their finances. For Twitter, a confidential IPO is not a good choice at all. This process is called the ‘roadshow’.

It also means that the public will not have any access to the history, business plans, documents and finances of the company until it finally chooses to issue shares to large institutional investors. Only elite investors can be part of the IPO and this procedure is conducted by banks to discover how much the large investors are willing to pay for Twitter. Later, the price offered to the public will be influenced by this research.  But, the public will have no news or access unless there is a leak. Instead, they will be relying on rumor and speculation.

The whole process of going ‘public’ is undermined in this manner. The purpose of going public is to allow the public to discuss the company, examine it and debate on it. However, what Twitter is asking is that the public give it the same respect as is given to the public company and also the rich valuation that’s demanded by the internet stocks. But, the company is refusing to give the same respect to the public. They will not be aware of what they are buying. Twitter is not a startup, but it has to confront its finances and do so publicly.

Twitter and New York Times Struggling After Syrian Attack

Most of the time, the internet is a blessing for people because it has made lives much easier and convenient. However, there are times when it can also be a curse. One of the most serious downsides of the internet is that it gives people the opportunity to hack and get access to confidential, private and personal information. A damaging hack was carried out on Tuesday on the websites of Twitter and the New York Times and they are still suffering from problems related to this attack. Hackers maliciously edited the domain name details of these two websites and hit them severely.

The responsibility of the attack was accepted by a group of hackers that are supporting the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are known as the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The group has carried out several hacking attacks, but this one is the most severe and serious one so far. Major media companies have become the target of these hackers in recent months and these include some prominent names like BBC, CNN, Washington Post and the Financial Times. However, in this latest attack of the SEA, they used a technique that caused more sustained damage and the Huffington Post hit was also cited by the news and comments.

Melbourne IT was the hosting company that managed the domains, which were attacked. The company stated that it is taking additional steps and providing greater security for keep the domain details safe. It was the DNS i.e. domain name system information that was compromised for the attack. Typically, this DNS is used for directing web traffic to a specific server that holds the website being searched by the user. In simple terms, this means that users can browse the web easily by using easily remembered websites instead of complete IP addresses.

The domains of the New York Times and Twitter were registered with Melbourne IT and the SEA was able to access their system. The DNS details were changed by the hackers so instead of heading to the websites of Twitter or New York Times, people were taken to a website that the SEA was hosting. In the case of Twitter, a separate domain called the twimg.com was targeted by the SEA as this is where the social network stores all its styling codes and image data. This meant that the social network was active, but a number of pages were incorrectly displayed.

Twitter made a statement and clarified that user data hadn’t been compromised in any way. The attacks on both the sites were publicized by the SEA with the use of its Twitter account where it posted pictures of its activities. A reseller was blamed by Melbourne IT for the breach, which is basically a third party that uses the company’s system for selling domains. The company said that the log-in credentials of the reseller were obtained by the SEA and that’s why they were able to access the system and inflict the attack. These hacking attempts on important media websites seem to be increasing gradually.

Twitter in General

Social media portals have gained an immense popularity in the eyes of online marketing. Everyone can understand that social media can do wonders for their business, which can help them in growing their business substantially. Twitter is considered to be amongst the most popular social media portals in the world. It is a tool where a person or an organization can continuously ‘tweet’ their thoughts about different products, service or business. Initially, it was only used by some learned people who used to share their thoughts or popular quotes through tweeting them. But later, business owners understood its potential and these days, almost every business has an account on Twitter. You can easily see the links of Facebook or Twitter on their websites. Whenever you will click on those links, it will take you to their respective Twitter or Facebook account.

Twitter basically works with the help of ‘followers’ and ‘following’. Followers are the people who are following your activities and they have subscribed you after you have approved them to do so whereas following means those people whom you are following. It is not necessary that these accounts are only handled by people. Different business or companies or products have also created their Twitter accounts and they keep tweeting about the activities that are happening within their business.

But first of all, it is necessary that you should have a good amount of Twitter followers who have subscribed for your updates. You can ask your social media expert to do that for you. You can either hire an individual expert or you can hire the services of an online marketing company who is efficient enough to promote your business. You can increase your followers by sending invitations to people who are associated to your business or who comes under your target market. But it is necessary to segment them properly because you can’t add random people who have no interest in your product or business.

You can either use your Twitter account to tweet about your products or you can use it in assisting you in your online marketing strategies. Basically, you are only allowed to tweet certain amount of characters and it’s a kind of a limitation but you can send as many tweets during the day as you want. Many people use these tweets to promote the link of different web-pages on their website. They also use it to promote a certain video or blog as well.  But usually, they wrap those links by using bitly.com, which helps them in shortening the big links. In this way, they can easily tweet a link along with a small description. It is necessary to rethink before tweeting because a lot of people are misusing it by abusing people or companies etc.

Twitter Launches A Music Service with Recommendations from Artists

Twitter has revealed a new music application which is going to suggest tracks depending on who you are following on their network. Tracks can be played in the application directly through the services like iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. The software shows songs that your friends currently are listening to. Also, you see the suggestions from various artists. It follows the moves by other different social networking websites, like Facebook for incorporating music recommendations into the new Twitter music services.

In the last year, Spotify made an announcement of its own system of "follow", but the feature is still to be unveiled to mobile users. Twitter's new application, named #Music, will expectedly be available for iPhone to download shortly. No such application has yet been made for the users on Windows Phone or the Google's Android platforms, but there’s going to be a browser-based version available.

The app will in beginning be available in the US, UK and Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with further countries soon being added.

The Idea of surfacing Songs on Twitter

The #Music app was compared to a "twenty first Century mixtape" divulged on Good Morning America. Twitter's Stephen Philips, in a blog post, explained that the app will use Twitter activity, comprising engagement and tweets, for detecting and surfacing the emerging artists and most popular tracks. He said that the Twitter music app also brings artists' Twitter activity relating music front and center. Users can visit their profiles for seeing who they are following and for listening to the songs of these artists.

He further added that almost half of Twitter’s users are following at least one music artist and that’s why most of the artists turn to Twitter for connecting with their fans and admirers, and that’s the reason Twitter wanted to come with a way to surface the songs that people tend to be tweeting about.
In advance to the release of app, Twitter has given early access to several musicians. These artists include Moby who commented the #Music to be an interesting music resource.

The Failure of Apple

Several companies have already tried to get into the prospective of music’s social recommendation. Apple also came into the market with its app called Ping. This service was built within its iTunes which promoted music that it thought users might like. At the launch of Ping, late Steve Jobs said that the Apple thinks that the app is going to be popular rapidly, since 160 million people will switch it on. The Ping was closed last year in September.