Free Republic

US-listed Chinese microblogging platform Weibo is seeking to raise up to US$547 million in a share offer in Hong Kong, documents showed Monday (Nov 29), the latest China tech company to list closer to home as tensions with the United States rise. Several US-listed Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba have held initial public offerings in Hong Kong over the past two years as the United States has stepped up scrutiny of Chinese companies. Listing in Hong Kong is seen as a hedge against the risk of being removed from US exchanges and a way of accessing an investor base...

New Delhi -- The Government on Wednesday asserted that microblogging platform Twitter has lost its legal protection in India because it deliberately chose non-compliance despite multiple opportunities to it. Losing legal protection means Twitter’s top executives, including the nation’s managing director, face police questioning and criminal liability under the Indian Penal Code over “unlawful and inflammatory” content posted by users on Twitter. Accusing Twitter of deliberately refusing to comply with Indian laws, in identical posts on Twitter as well as its Indian rival Koo, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Twitter was given “multiple opportunities to comply” but it...

Micro-blogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, which is an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in The Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month-over-month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks, MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year. Because Twitter can be used with ease on both PCs and mobile devices and because it limits users to very short messages of 140 characters or...