Twitter files for IPO, analysts value company at $10 to $20 billion

Twitter is kicking into motion one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in the tech industry since Facebook. The popular microblogging service yesterday announced -- via a Tweet, no less -- that it has confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. Details are still scarce on how many shares of the company will be offered, the timing of the offering and the price of the shares.

Company executives had long dodged questions about going public, claiming they were more focused on the long term and creating lasting value than near term optimization of revenue. The Guardian speculates it is likely that Twitter was forced to file for an IPO because it had enough private investors that regulations required it. Under the Jobs Act a company in the US has to go public if it has more than 2,000 private investors.

This Act, which stands for Jumpstart Our Business Startups and became law in 2012, also provides a vague hint at Twitter’s revenue, as only companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue are allowed to file IPO plans confidentially and keep financial data under wraps until three weeks before marketing its stock in a “road show”. The road show is one of the final steps in the IPO process, in which the company gives presentations to potential investors, and is typically followed by pricing of the shares and the first day of trading.

For what it’s worth, the service is known to have over 200 million active users and is believed to have generated more than $100 million in revenue in the final quarter of 2012. Twitter makes its money primarily by selling ads, and is increasingly becoming an attractive venue for advertisers due to its timeliness and topicality, with people actively tweeting alongside specific events such as TV shows, concerts, and breaking news. According to eMarketer, Twitter will rake in in $583 million in advertising revenue for 2013 and hit $1 billion in 2014.

Twitter is currently believed to be worth between $10 billion to $20 billion. That’s a far cry from Facebook’s $100 billion valuation last year, but going public at this stage leaves them more room to run up revenue and valuation, which is very important when it comes to Wall Street. The timing is also noteworthy as investors are recovering confidence in mobile and social, with Facebook’s shares hitting a record high this week at $44.75.

Twitter suffers ongoing outages, UGNazi hackers take credit

In what is said to be its largest outage in eight months, Twitter experienced several service interruptions Thursday afternoon, with one outage lasting at least 40 minutes according to various reports. Data from analyst firms such as Sandvine, Apica and Pingdom show sporadic downtime starting at approximately 11AM ET.

Pingdom specifically cites downtime between 11:59AM PT and 1:08PM ET in addition to many briefer outages.

As of writing (5:30PM  ET), the service appears to be working properly, though the company hasn't posted a status update since earlier today, at which point engineers were working to resolve the issue: "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue. Update: The issue is on-going and engineers are working to resolve it," the company wrote on its status blog.

Hackers of UGNazi quickly took credit for the downtime, with member Hannah Sweet (a.k.a. "Cosmos" and @CosmosTheGod) claiming the group disabled Twitter for 40 minutes worldwide with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack -- a favorite weapon among hackivists and other mischievous Webgoers. Sweet said UGNazi is targeting Twitter because it supports the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

Despite Sweet's claims, Twitter says the outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of its infrastructure components, promising more details soon.

Google giving away 10 Galaxy Nexus smartphones on Twitter

Google has launched a contest on Twitterto give away 10 Galaxy Nexus smartphones in 10 days to promote the phone’s pending release. The promotion started on Saturday and will run until Monday, November 21.

To enter, you must first have a Twitter account and follow @googlenexus. Each day Google will post an essay question or puzzle for hopefuls to answer. To submit a solution, reply to Google's tweet and include the #googlenexus hashtag.

To give you an idea of what to expect, the first challenge presented contestants with an image and asked them to decipher a code to finish the following sentence: “#GalaxyNexus is well-traveled, coming to @googlenexus from [answer].” The answer was “The Sandwich Islands”, although I have no clue how to arrive at that answer based on the hint. Any ideas?

Challenge two required users to make something geeky and edible. Photo and video submissions were accepted for this challenge and entries were evaluated based on creativity, originality and use of humor. The third challenge is set to kick off today at 3pm PST. A complete list of rules can be foundhere.

Samsung and Google announced the Galaxy Nexus at a press event in Honk Kong on October 18. The handset features a curved 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display running at 1270 x 720 resolution, a 1.2GHz dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, your choice of 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, a 5MP rear camera with zero shutter lag, backlit-illuminated sensor, built-in stabilization and LED flash and a 1.3MP front-facing camera for video chat.

Aside from its impressive hardware specifications, the device is the first to ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google’s latest mobile operating system. The phone will be sold exclusively by Verizon Wireless in the US although an exact launch date hasn’t been announced.