Twitter Inc.’s share price up, reveals Gnip Inc. was acquired for $134.1 million, hints e-commerce ambitions

Twitter Inc. revealed in a regulatory filing that it paid $134.1 million in May to acquire the social data provider Gnip Inc.. According to the filing, the San-Francisco based company paid $107.3 million in cash, while the rest of the price was paid in stock.

The acquisition of Gnip Inc. managed to provide Twitter Inc. with more control over the information that is collected from the content that is running through its network. According to people familiar with the situation, Gnips competitor Topsy Labs was purchased by Apple Inc. in December 2013 in a deal valued at about $200 million.

The acquisition of Gnip is not the biggest deal of Twitter to date. The social network acquired the mobile ad network MoPub in 2013 in a deal estimated at $350 million. The company has concentrated on taking a bigger role when it comes to analysing its tweets for its advertisers, who are trying to get a better perspective of the users preferences.

Gnip Inc. is currently one of the companies that have access to all the tweets published on Twitter, which are reported to be about 500 million on a daily basis. Gnip Inc. uses, analyses and resells this information to companies, which are interested in the customers opinion.

Apart from announcing the acquisition of Gnip, the company also said in the filing that it may be liable for risks associated with “credit card processing”. This is considered the latest hint that Twitter is interested in becoming a center for e-commerce, after the company recently agreed to acquire CardSpring Inc., a service that lets users redeem deals and discounts through merchants tweets.

Currently, the company does not provide its subscribers with the opportunity to purchase directly through its website, but the social network is said to be working on a strategy to change this.

As reported by Bloomberg, Mr. Jim Prosser, who is one of the spokesmen of Twitter, said: “Twitter previously indicated that for this period approximately 14 percent of all active users used applications that have the capability to automatically contact our servers for regular updates, but later discovered that this number included certain users who accessed Twitter through owned and operated applications.”

Twitter Inc. was 0.32% up to close at $43.27 per share yesterday. According to the information published on CNN Money, the 29 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Twitter Inc. have a median target of $55.00, with a high estimate of $65.00 and a low estimate of $28.00. The median estimate represents a +27.11% increase from the last price of $43.27.