• Twitter Strikes Tweet Firehose Deal With Japan's Largest Carrier, NTT DOCOMO

    Monday, May 16th, 2011

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    Up until now, when Twitter has struck deals overseas with carriers, it has mainly been for SMS deals so that users can send/receive tweets for free and/or cheap. Today, Twitter has announced a new type of deal with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest carrier: a content deal.

    As they’ve announced in Japanese on their blog (with English translation below), “Tweets and other Twitter content will be included in DOCOMO i-mode portal search results, providing access to relevant, real-time information.” In other words, it’s a deal similar to the one that Twitter struck with Google, Microsoft and others a few years back.

    And like those, it’s a full firehose deal, a Twitter representative tells us. That means that NTT DOCOMO will be able to do cool things with their portal and search results, but also other things as well which we’ll see down the road.

    As usual, terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

    Deals like this one around the world seem more likely as Twitter continues to expand their reach. Japan is a natural first step as it’s the country that the service has worked most closely with since their inception.

    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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