{"id":542266,"date":"2010-04-23T18:22:05","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T22:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=75595"},"modified":"2010-04-23T18:22:05","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T22:22:05","slug":"twitter-buys-seattle%e2%80%99s-cloudhopper-to-expand-sms-service-globally-the-story-behind-the-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/542266","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Buys Seattle\u2019s Cloudhopper to Expand SMS Service Globally: The Story Behind the Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
startups<\/a>, deals<\/a>, Mobile<\/a><\/div>\n

\t\t\"Cloudhopper\"<\/a>
\n\t\tGregory T. Huang wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an exciting day for Joe Lauer. The Seattle entrepreneur and founder of Cloudhopper, a mobile messaging service, just told me his startup has been acquired<\/a> by Twitter, the micro-messaging giant based in San Francisco. Financial terms of the cash-and-stock deal weren\u2019t released, but Lauer and fellow employee Kristin Kanaar have joined Twitter full-time. Lauer says he will stay in Seattle and commute to San Francisco regularly.<\/p>\n

Lauer couldn\u2019t give any specifics about the purchase price, but he says, \u201cI\u2019m super happy with it. It\u2019s a great early exit. It was good enough to get me to exit early, let\u2019s put it that way.\u201d The deal is Twitter\u2019s fourth acquisition overall, after Surmise, Myxer, and the Tweetie iPhone app. It is Twitter\u2019s first Seattle-based purchase.<\/p>\n

Lauer founded Cloudhopper<\/a> in late 2008. Previously he had co-founded Simplewire, an SMS text-message aggregator, in 2001. That company was bought by Seattle-based Qpass in 2006. Lauer stayed there for two and a half years before using the money he made from the acquisition to start Cloudhopper.<\/p>\n

Cloudhopper makes software and infrastructure to help optimize how text messages flow, so that companies can make SMS programs that work at huge volumes and across different geographies. \u201cAs Twitter grows around the world, if we want to service Indonesia really well [for example], we want to keep SMS and tweets localized in a data center in Asia,\u201d Lauer says.<\/p>\n

In other words, Cloudhopper handles the routing through data centers in an efficient way, with a focus on international mobile operators. \u201cWe\u2019re going to really aggressively expand and keep adding on carrier partnerships overseas,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s going to become more and more important as we add more countries around the world.\u201d Currently people can tweet via SMS in about 30 countries. Lauer says that \u201cabout 100 operators are coming up over the next year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lauer\u2019s connection to Twitter actually dates all the way back to his days at Simplewire. \u201cWe were Twitter\u2019s first SMS aggregator years ago,\u201d Lauer says. At that time, Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams were running Odeo, and that\u2019s how Lauer knew them. <\/p>\n

Twitter has been using the Cloudhopper service for the past eight months. \u201cI had no plans of selling now,\u201d Lauer says. \u201cIt was kind of a coup when I won the Twitter business.\u201d The bulk of his business before that was in wireless consulting for companies including Seattle-based Ground Truth (another \u201cQpass mafia\u201d connection, as Ground Truth is led by former Qpass CEO Sterling Wilson).<\/p>\n

Lauer says Cloudhopper was handling a billion SMS messages per month on behalf of Twitter. \u201cWith those numbers, they\u2019re the single largest mobile program in the world,\u201d he says—much bigger than, say, \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d SMS voting. (Which is interesting, because until recently nobody really knew how big Twitter was.)<\/p>\n

Cloudhopper had seven employees before it was acquired, some of whom will be joining Twitter full-time. Lauer now works in Twitter\u2019s mobile group, which has a dozen people. He reports to Twitter\u2019s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, who also used to work at Qpass, out of Atlanta. <\/p>\n

Lauer says there are now a handful of Twitter employees based in Seattle, but no local office space as of yet. \u201cTwitter\u2019s hiring like crazy,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of good momentum in the area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, at San Francisco headquarters (where Lauer was today), late-night TV personality Conan O\u2019Brien stopped by to meet and greet the staff. \u201cIt\u2019s more like a media company these days,\u201d Lauer says.<\/p>\n

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startups, deals, Mobile Gregory T. Huang wrote: It\u2019s an exciting day for Joe Lauer. The Seattle entrepreneur and founder of Cloudhopper, a mobile messaging service, just told me his startup has been acquired by Twitter, the micro-messaging giant based in San Francisco. Financial terms of the cash-and-stock deal weren\u2019t released, but Lauer and fellow employee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,16,7,10,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-542266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-mobile","category-news","category-software","category-wireless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}