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Episode details

World Service,05 Nov 2013,17 mins

Twitter floats but will it soar?

Business Daily

Available for over a year

Twitter has just upped the price of its first shares. If it gets what it's asking for, it may mean the company is worth over 15 billion dollars - a lot of money for a firm which is yet to turn a profit. So, are we in the middle of another tech bubble? Our technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones takes a look at the company's USP; and and we hear from Aswath Damodaran, finance professor at New York University's Stern Scholl of Business, about the challenges ahead. And Twitter announced its intention to sell stock not with a huge submission to the US stock market regulator the SEC detailing its finances, but with a simple tweet. This right to keep much of the company information confidential is allowed under a provision of a new act, the JOBS act. It's being called a "secret IPO" and the idea is to encourage more companies to go public. Jeffrey Vetter with legal giant Fenwick & West explains why tech companies are being allowed to keep secrets when they are going public and why they want to?

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