Stockholders Okay Twitter CEO's Plan to Donate Shares to Employees

Celebrating Twitter's 10th birthday at its annual meeting on Wednesday, stockholders of the micro-blogging site have approved CEO Jack Dorsey's pledge to give away one-third of his shares to employees.

Last October, Dorsey had pledged to donate shares to a pool to be "granted over time to Twitter's employees and other service providers," Forbes reported on Thursday.

The 6.8 million shares that the Twitter CEO plans to donate were worth about $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,343 crores) when he promised to give them to employees in October.

Since then, Twitter stocks have slid more than 50 percent owing to stalled users growth and falling revenues, lowering the value of the promised shares to $98 million (roughly Rs. 658 crores), the report added.

Twitter shares fell sharply about 12 percent after the micro-blogging website - which managed to add 5 million people to take its monthly active user base to 310 million - missed the first quarter revenue estimates last month.

The company posted $595 million revenue in the first quarter ending March 31. It was up 36 percent from $435.9 million (roughly Rs. 2,924 crores) in the same quarter last year but missed the $607.9 million (roughly Rs. 4,079 crores) expected on average among analysts, Forbes reported.

Twitter posted a net loss of $79.7 million (roughly Rs. 534 crores) compared with a year-earlier loss of $162.4 million (roughly Rs. 1,089 crores).

Twitter has predicted revenue for the second quarter between $590 million (roughly Rs. 3,962 crores) and $610 million (roughly Rs. 4,096 crores) much lower than the $678 million (roughly Rs. 4,551 crores) analysts expected.

"Revenue came in at the low end of our guidance range, as brand marketers did not increase spend as quickly as expected in Q1," the company tweeted.

According to Dorsey, the engagement on Twitter is growing. Direct messages are up about 50 percent year-over-year and tweets shared via direct message are up more than 75 percent quarter-over-quarter.

Twitter said more than 800 million people visit the site and there are more than 1 billion monthly unique visitors to pages that syndicate Twitter content.

The company also said that new follows on the service are up about 48 percent.

Dorsey hinted that Twitter's deal with the National Football League (NFL) to stream 10 games this fall will help the company earn better traffic.

Source: http://gadgets.ndtv.com

Spread of Locky Virus in Mantralaya PCs Contained, Data Safe: Official

The state's Information Technology department has managed to contain the spread of Locky virus, a file-encrypting ransomware, in computer systems at Mantralaya and all the data are safe, a senior official claimed.

The virus had affected about 150 computers, mostly in Revenue, Public Works Department and some isolated computers in other departments of Mantralaya and these computers have now been isolated and being sent for forensic tests, Principal Secretary, IT department, V K Gautam, said.

All the data on the Maharashtra Local Area Network (Maha LAN) are safe, he said.

"The virus first showed its presence around Friday last week, which probably sneaked into the Maha LAN through a spam mail," Gautam said.

After gaining entry into the system, the virus begins encrypting the DOC, PPT or other files into Locky files, the official said.

"When one tries to access these encrypted files, the system asks the user for lock key and then asks to pay for it in Bitcoins for granting access to the files," he said.

He added that the virus is actually very dangerous for the world of finance and corporates, wherein data related to financial accounts and other sensitive information gets locked and the user is asked to pay for the access to own data.

"The virus begins to send spam mails using the official e-mail ID deceiving the user in opening it or its mail attachments allowing the virus to enter the system," he said.

Users need to guard against accessing spam mails of such nature by clicking on to the senders' e-mail address to know the real sender and better still use only the official government e-mail Intra-net rather than private e-mails like Gmail, Yahoo and others, Gautam added.

"There are around 53,000 computers in various government departments in Mantralaya that are on the Maha LAN," he said, adding that following the incident, the IT department has fortified its server and data center and that no damage has been caused to the government files.

Both the Centre and the state government have a policy that mandates all its employees to use the official government intra-net rather than private e-mail, he said.

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Source: http://gadgets.ndtv.com