CHART OF THE DAY: Twitter Is Still Very Small
Twitter, despite feeling ubiquitous to people in the media, remains a relatively small platform. This chart from BI Intelligence shows that just 18% of U.S. Internet users are on Twitter. The people that are on Twitter are using it largely to track news. There’s two ways to look at this. On the one hand, it means Twitter has room to grow. On the other, it suggests Twitter isn’t mainstream, and it might not ever go mainstream. Join the conversation about this story » Tech
Silicon Alley Insider - Saturday, September 28, 2013
Mobile Insights is a daily newsletter from BI Intelligence delivered first thing every morning exclusively to BI Intelligence subscribers. Sign up for a free trial of BI Intelligence today. BlackBerry’s Manufacturing Partner Wants To Cut Ties (All Things Digital)Many are speculating how BlackBerry’s new parent company will handle the future of the handset maker’s phone manufacturing business. Soon, it may not have a choice. Jabil Circuit, BlackBerry’s manufacturing partner, has come forward claiming BlackBerry’s struggles are flowing through to its business. This may force them to cut ties. BlackBerry is currently Jabil Circuit’s second-largest client and makes up about 12% of the manufacturer’s revenue. Read > ... 
Estonia, the tiny Baltic state that holds fewer people than San Diego, has been praised recently for both the apparent success of the country’s austerity policies (and President Toomas Hendrik Ilves’ very public defense of it against Paul Krugman) and the country’s remarkable emergence as an Eastern Europe technology hub. Speaking at the Concordia Summit at New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on Friday, Ilves was on hand to discuss the latter. The feisty, perpetually bow-tied head of state outlined two clear factors in Estonia’s technological success — and made a convincing argument that the United States wasn’t doing either well. First, ... 
He’s pumped. (Photo: Tumblr) If you’re filling up your calendar with concerts and festivals this fall, make sure you leave some room for the Google Glass Tour. Load your empty water bottles with vodka and find your most business-casual zip-up because it’s on, bitches!
For the most part, investors have been lapping up enterprise tech IPOs. Not so for Violin Memory, makers of flash storage systems for enterprises. It raised $ 162 million by selling shares for $ 9 to investors that subscribed to its IPO, but when the opening bell rang on Friday, public investors weren’t biting at that price. The stock tanked, opening at under $ 8 dollars and trading as low as $ 7.02, on Friday, down 22%. Ouch. We got on the phone to ask CEO Don Basile what happened. He shrugged it off. “We raised over $ 160 million ... 
Miss u boo (Photo: Wikimedia) Last month, longtime Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that he would be leaving the company within a year, and so the goodbyes began. The Verge reports that yesterday Mr. Ballmer held his final company meeting as CEO, and it sounds like he went out playing the role of Steve Ballmer, Tech Industry Character, to the hilt.
A big regulatory victory for Airbnb today: the company has managed to win an appeal in New York City over a fine against a host called Nigel Warren, whose landlord was fined $ 2,400 in June after Warren rented out a room in his apartment. If the fine had stuck, it would have set a business-threatening precedent for Airbnb in the city. “This decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we,” ... 
Spend ten minutes talking to, listening to, or reading about anyone in the startup community, and you’ll almost inevitably hear the word “disrupt” in one of its many forms. They’re going to disrupt the industry. The company is disruptive. It’s a classic disruptor. The startup and tech worlds have taken a perfectly useful word and turned it into something devoid of meaning — a cliche thrown around by would-be insiders. While it originally referred to a strategy scrappy, young companies used to beat out giant firms, it’s now bandied about to describe almost any effort to alter or improve a ... 
Year after year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison lands on the lists of the highest-paid paid CEOs. Ellison is the heart and soul of Oracle. He’s the cofounder, the visionary, and the longest sitting CEO of a major tech company. His pay reflects that. Even so, by nearly every measure imaginable, his annual compensation is massive, especially considering that Oracle’s share price has languished below $ 40 since the Internet bubble crashed way back in 2000. In 2013, Ellison was paid $ 78 million in cash and stock, mostly stock, compared to an industry average of $ 29 million, according to ... 
