In A Bullish Move, Twitter To Report Earnings Ahead Of Employee Lock-Up Expiration

Following its blockbuster IPO, Twitter soared north of $70 per share, topping out at $74.73. Not bad for a company that priced at $26 per share. Since that late-2013 high, Twitter has retreated, trading today just over the $40 mark. It traded under that threshold last week.

In the face of that slide, and despite a massive share-price correction — read: selloff — following its fourth-quarter earnings, Twitter is scheduled to report its first quarter earnings before May 5, the date when a large number of its shares owned by employees will unlock. Unlocked shares are available for sale on the public markets.

That flood of freshly free equity could lead to a share price depression, as employees hungry for liquidity dump their long-held equity onto the public market. There is a wrinkle, however. If employees are largely convinced that the best days of their employer are ahead, they have a large financial incentive to hang on to those shares.

This makes the timing of Twitter’s decision to release its earnings pre-lockup interesting. It’s a power play of sorts. If Twitter were expecting a poor earnings report, it would want to release it post-lockup, thereby lessening the incentive for employees to cash out on the first day possible. The company wants to avoid its employees selling shares en masse, as that would provide a very negative signal to the investing public.

So Twitter is publicly betting that, by releasing earnings ahead of the lock-up expiration, employee interest in selling their shares will decrease. And you don’t negatively incentivize your denizens against harming your firm.

So log cabins aside, Twitter could be obliquely signaling that it had a big first quarter, or at least one good enough to prevent a mass sell-off of its shares by its workers.

Executives at Twitter indicated today that they intend to hold onto their shares in the company after the lock-up period ends

Twitter is expected to lose $0.03 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $240.93 million. In the fourth quarter of 2013, Twitter made $0.02 (non-GAAP) on revenue of $242.7 million, besting analyst expectations on both scores. However, investors soured on its slow user growth.

TechCrunch reached out to Twitter for comment on the timing of its earnings, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER Andreas Eldh UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED)

Mimic Your Boss's Body Language to Build Rapport and Get Ahead

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To build a relationship with your superiors at work and have a better chance of moving up the ladder, try mirroring their mannerisms, says LearnVest. In other words: monkey see, monkey do.

According to a study out of Duke University, subtle forms of mimicry can prove useful when you're trying to win someone over. It's known as the "chameleon effect" because, in the same way that a chameleon changes the color of its skin to match the environment, people can change behaviors and mannerisms to mirror the person who they're interacting with. Plus, another study from Nijmegen University in the Netherlands reveals that mimicry increases rapport — and your chances of getting what you want.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the LearnVest team is quick to add that this mimicry needs to be subtle and you need to choose your timing well. Trying to mirror your boss when he's mad at you will backfire, so make sure it's the right person at the right time.

How To Finally Get Ahead At Work | LearnVest via The Daily Muse

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Galaxy S5 gets last-minute bug squashing update ahead of launch

With hours left until the global release of the Galaxy S5, Samsung is pushing a stability update to the device.

Just like it did with the Gear Fit, which received a significant update the day ahead of its release, Samsung is pushing a last-minute modification to the software stack of the Galaxy S5. The update weighs in at about 30MB and, at least on the surface, the changes are limited to improvements to the phone’s stability. In other words, there should be fewer bugs and crashes spoiling your new smartphone experience.

The update brings firmware version to XXU1ANCE and may be available to Galaxy S5 buyers as soon as they power up their devices starting tomorrow. The device is currently on sale in South Korea (where it debuted with a solid performance), as well as in some Middle Eastern markets.

If you’re still on the fence about it, our fresh Galaxy S5 review is a great resource to visit, thoroughly going through everything from build quality to the software experience.

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Project Ara gets a progress update video ahead of developers conference

Just in case your excitement level for Project Ara was dwindling, the Phonebloks crew has put up a video teaser – a little behind the scenes action of Project Ara and the folks that are making it possible.

The video comes at us less than two weeks ahead of the first Project Ara developers conference on April 15-16, and within days of the expected release of the Ara Module Developer’s Kit. We’d say that is good timing, indeed. Shot and pieced together by Dave Hakkens of Phonebloks, the video is a bit of a tour of what the Project Ara team has going on, and it is looking pretty good.

Let me just say one thing before you start the video – electro-permanent magnets are cool!

Instead of turning to screws, plastic clips or a full back cover, the engineers have a Project Ara prototype running that uses electro-permanent magnets to secure the individual modules in place on the main phone board. These magnets are made of various materials that operate as an electro-magnet, however, are able to hold a magnetic state without the need for constant electricity, just set it and forget it and your pieces stay attached.

The module connection technique allows the device to aesthetically embrace the modular design without needing to hide it all behind a cover. Allowing for ultimate customization, users can order modules in different colors, textures and designs. An Ara Configurator app will let you play with various designs and modules, and presumably allow you to order pieces, or an entire phone.

Finally, the video reveals what appears to be three distinct sizes of Ara devices, Mini and Medium appear to be in progress now, with Large coming in a future release. No indication is given what the actual sizes are, but Mini will provide a 2×5 module grid, Medium gets you up to 3×6 modules and Large will come in with a grid of 4×7 modules.

For more great Project Ara information, please take a look at our in-depth analysis here. What do you think, is Project Ara on track to take over the phone market, or is it just another gimmick?

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PayPal Expands Its In-App Pay At Table And Order Ahead Services In UK

It’s still very early days for mobile payments, with the vast majority of consumers still not convinced that it really is a lot easier to pay for things using their phones instead of pulling out a payment card or even cash. But companies like PayPal continue to lay the groundwork with interesting implementations for how and where a mobile payment might come in handy — the idea being, it seems, that if you put out enough of these, some will be bound to find traction with one demographic or another and achieve what eBay-owned PayPal calls the “beginning of the end of the wallet.”

The latest development is now coming online in some of PayPal’s international markets and specifically around the business of food. PayPal is today turning on two features in its iOS and Android mobile apps in the UK, to let users order food ahead of visiting the restaurant, and using the app to pay for their food when eating at a restaurant by way of a four-digit code.

Neither requires the customer to present a payment card to complete a transaction.

Both Pay At Table and Order Ahead were announced last year in the U.S. Rob Harper, head of retail services at PayPal UK, tells me that this rollout will kick off a wider push of the services across Europe in the near future. At the same time, it appears that PayPal is rolling out the same features in Australia.

They also follow a successful trial of a pay-by-picture service that PayPal launched last year, which is now also getting expanded across more locations.

The new features are more in line with the work that PayPal has been doing around barcodes and other software-based payment innovations, and they stand in contrast to the more hardware-based approach of Here.

They also seem to differ in terms of what kinds of merchants PayPal is targeting. While PayPal’s Here effort — a dongle that attaches to a smartphone that turns the handset into a card-reading device — has been mainly focused on small businesses that may have found taking card payments in the past too expensive, Pay At Table and Order Ahead seem to me much more focused on how PayPal deals with larger restaurant chains. Early agreements cover eatieries like Wagamama, Gourmet Burger Kitchen and the Prezzo pizza chain.

Whereas Here and PayPal’s other services geared at smaller businesses tend to be very transparent on pricing, in the case of these services, Harper would not tell me the commissions that PayPal takes. Interested restaurants need to make contact with PayPal, which then arranges fees on a case-by-case basis.

While services like Here are about introducing new pieces of hardware into the point of sale system, the new services, PayPal promises, integrate with all standard electronic point-of-sale systems. To use the Pay At Table service, users who are “checked in” to a specific location can get a code generated for them by the restaurant, which then they can enter into their app to pay for a meal, or share with their dining companion to split a bill, either line by line or by percentages. Conversely, if a user forgets to pay before leaving the table, the restaurant can make the charge anyway.

Order Ahead, meanwhile, gives users the ability to access a complete menu from a restaurant, select what they want before going to the location, and then having it there waiting to be picked up, with the charge made at the time of pick up. The first chain to sign up for this is Wagamama, covering some 107 locations.