Twitter gives new VR head the boot after 24 hours

Well, that didn’t take too long. Twitter hired and then soon fired former AngelHack CEO Gregory Gopman. How soon? It took less than a day. Gopman was supposed to come onboard as the social network’s VR program manager. However, he claims a TechCrunch article that detailed his controversial rants back in 2013 about San Francisco’s homeless had sent him packing.

Source: Fast Company

Salesforce ‘walked away’ from Twitter bid

With Google, Disney, and Apple supposedly out of the picture, Salesforce was the other big company rumoured to be taking over Twitter. But according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff that’s also over. “In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Benioff told the Financial Times. Now, it looks like Twitter won’t have a buyer anytime soon. Salesforce confirmed Benioff’s quote but didn’t have any additional comments. Twitter, on the other hand, declined to comment.

Source: CNET

Twitter grounds Flight developer conference

Kurt Wagner / Recode

With Twitter facing its own set of issues, it comes as no surprise that the social network opted out of hosting its annual Flight developer conference. The event was supposed to happen again this month and they started planning it but it eventually got scrapped. According to Will Stickney, Twitter’s spokesperson, Twitter wants to focus on smaller developer events.

“We heard feedback after last year’s Flight conference that small, more intimate events are where our developer community are seeing the most value. So instead of holding a single developer conference in San Francisco, we are hosting a series of regional developer events, continuing the momentum from our global #HelloWorld. Given the diversity of things developers are building with Twitter (from MoPub, to the Ads API, to Gnip, Fabric, and more) having more local events will enable us to engage with our community in a much more personal way,” Twitter says in a statement.

Source: Recode

Reports claim Twitter plans to sell itself off before year’s end

If the recent reports are to be believed, it seems like Twitter is looking for a potential buyer before 2016 ends. Three big companies are already being named as potential suitors: Alphabet's Google, Salesforce, and Verizon. Microsoft is also being rumoured to be in the mix, if only to prevent Salesforce from acquiring the company. While Twitter has been struggling to get new users, monetize, and keep user engagement up, tons of real-time data and over 300 million active subscribers make for an attractive purchase. The social network is currently valued at US$18 billion and would make for a great investment if it starts to make the money the way Wall Street hopes it will. This recent round of rumours were enough to boost Twitter’s stock. But then again, they are still rumours and the companies have not issued any statements regarding these reports.

Source: Droid Life