(Reuters) – Israeli chip manufacturer TowerJazz (TSEM.TA) is targeting annual revenue run-rate of $1 billion a year by 2015, its chief executive Russell Ellwanger said.

The company, which has plants in Israel, the United States and Japan, had revenue of $639 million in 2012.

“We would have to accelerate growth (to reach this goal),” Ellwanger told Reuters on the sidelines of a company symposium. “Our biggest focus is on sustainable GAAP net profit.”

Ellwanger believes this will be achieved when the company reaches quarterly revenue of $190 million to $200 million.

TowerJazz had a net loss on a GAAP basis in the second quarter of $23 million and has had few profitable quarters on a GAAP basis in recent years due to heavy investments in its second chip plant in Israel.

The company has forecast revenue in the third quarter of $130 million to $140 million, compared with $125 million in the second quarter.

TowerJazz, which makes chips used in smartphones like Apple’s (AAPL.O) iPhone and Samsung’s (005930.KS) Galaxy models as well as battery chargers and AC/DC adapters, expects to start seeing revenue next year from an anticipated contract to build a plant in India.

TowerJazz (TSEM.O) is part of one of two consortiums that have proposed building semiconductor plants in India.

TowerJazz’s consortium includes India’s Jaiprakash Associates (JAIA.NS) and IBM (IBM.N). The group has proposed a plant near New Delhi at a cost of about $4 billion.

Ellwanger said he expects a formal government notification regarding a contract will be made in the next few weeks.

Groundbreaking on the plant could be about six months later and it would take two years for silicon to start and three years to begin shipping revenue wafers, Ellwanger said.

TowerJazz’s share in revenue from the construction and running of the plant would be $300 million over eight years, according to Israeli media reports.

TowerJazz will also be able to use part of the facility for its own products, enabling it to penetrate the Indian market.

(Reuters) – Five buyout firms are expected to bid next week for a stake in Deutsche Telekom’s online classified advertising business Scout24, valuing the equity and debt of the whole unit at $2.2-2.3 billion, three sources close to the process said.

However, the auction is proving to be more than just a battle over price, with some bidders hoping the German telecoms firm can be persuaded to sell a larger stake and several unhappy with its proposals on the future funding of Scout24.

Deutsche Telekom wants to sell part of Scout24 – originally seen as a way to compensate for declining earnings at its traditional telecoms business – in order to free up cash for a planned 6 billion euros of investment in broadband in Germany.

The sources said private equity groups Apax, TPG, Hellman&Friedman, EQT and Silver Lake were expected to table offers in the latest round of bidding next week, valuing the whole of Scout24’s equity and debt at roughly 1.6-1.7 billion euros ($2.2-2.3 billion).

Final offers are due in early November, they added.

The sources said Deutsche Telekom was looking to sell a 30 percent stake, and that was causing some friction with bidders.

“An investor will have almost nothing to say,” an adviser of one of the potential buyers said, adding Deutsche Telekom had rejected offers for 100 percent of Scout24.

The buyout groups are also critical of Deutsche Telekom’s plan to grant Scout24 a shareholder loan worth several hundred millions of euros on what they see as unacceptable terms.

“Deutsche Telekom wants a coupon that is 100 basis points higher than the buyers’ refinancing costs,” one of the sources said.

The buyout groups have made counter-proposals to organize Scout24’s financing themselves, but in that case Deutsche Telekom would demand an even higher valuation of Scout24’s equity, the sources said.

Terms of shareholders loans have been a sticking point for Deutsche Telekom before.

Earlier this year it had to sweeten the loan terms for its acquisition of U.S. peer MetroPCS, which it merged with its T-Mobile US unit.

Only after cutting the debt load it was planning to transfer to the combined company and after sweetening the loan terms did Deutsche Telekom manage to save that deal.

Deutsche Telekom and three of the buyout groups declined to comment. Silver Lake and Hellman&Friedman were not immediately available for comment.

Separately, German daily Handelsblatt reported on Thursday that Swiss publisher Ringier had made a 200 million Swiss Francs ($220 million) offer for Deutsche Telekom’s 50 percent stake in Scout24’s Swiss operations.

(Reuters) – Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has decided not to list its shares in Hong Kong, but has not yet committed to listing on any other exchange, including the New York Stock Exchange, CEO Jonathan Lu told Reuters on Thursday.

The company, founded in 1999 by billionaire Jack Ma, had planned to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange in an IPO analysts and bankers have said could raise up to $15 billion.

Alibaba failed to convince Hong Kong regulators to waive rules over the group’s unique partnership structure – specifically that 28 partners, mainly founders and senior executives, would keep control over a majority of the board, even though they own only around 13 percent of the company.

“We’ve decided not to list in Hong Kong,” Lu said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in China’s Hangzhou city in Zhejiang province. “The Hong Kong authorities need time to study this corporate governance structure (for knowledge-based companies).”

In his first public comment on Alibaba abandoning Hong Kong for the IPO, Lu added the company had not yet committed to list on any other exchange, including the New York Stock Exchange.

Alibaba, whose platforms handle more goods in a year than EBay Inc and Amazon.com Inc combined, expects to nearly triple the volume of transactions on its marketplaces to about 3 trillion yuan ($490 billion) in 3-4 years from 2012, eventually surpassing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“In three years we hope to be the No. 1 retail network in the world – larger than Wal-Mart,” Lu added.

(Reuters) – Months before Fairfax Financial Holdings Inc bid $4.7 billion for BlackBerry Ltd, Fairfax boss Prem Watsa played a role in securing a golden parachute worth as much as $55 million for the smartphone maker’s chief executive, according to company filings.

Watsa, Fairfax’s chief executive, joined BlackBerry’s board in January 2012 and was one of three directors charged in March with reviewing the compensation of the Canadian company’s chief executive, Thorsten Heins.

The three directors – Watsa, BlackBerry Chairwoman Barbara Stymiest and long-time board member John Wetmore – decided to boost Heins’ basic salary and incentive bonus, as well as sharply increase the size of the equity awards that he would receive if he loses his job in the event of a takeover.

The new contract that Heins signed in May tripled his compensation to an estimated $55.6 million if there is a change of control at BlackBerry, up from $18.9 million previously, according to a securities filing on May 21.

To be sure, the $55.6 million figure is based in part on BlackBerry’s share price in early March, and the stock has fallen by more than a third since then, which may mean that Heins’ parachute would be worth less.

Still, Watsa’s role in deciding Heins’ compensation is drawing scrutiny from some pay experts after BlackBerry on Monday accepted a conditional buyout bid from a consortium led by Fairfax, a property and casualty insurer that owns almost 10 percent of the smartphone maker.

“(Watsa) was part of the committee that was negotiating this agreement. Did he anticipate that he would make some sort of offer to buy the company? I feel like that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to know,” said Joe Sorrentino, managing director at executive pay advisors Steven Hall & Partners in New York.

Sorrentino added, “The only concern I would have is since they structured his compensation equity award so that it all is granted at the beginning … it is all getting captured in a change of control golden parachute, as opposed to if they did a more typical process” of granting equity awards annually.

When asked for comment on Thursday, a Fairfax spokesman said Heins’ compensation was reviewed and approved by the entire BlackBerry board.

Watsa stepped down from the board in August, citing a potential conflict of interest after BlackBerry announced a strategic review and sought a buyer. The Fairfax-led consortium aims to take BlackBerry private and give it time to rebuild away from Wall Street’s gaze.

A spokeswoman for BlackBerry said the company had no comment on Watsa’s role or Heins’ compensation, and Heins himself did not respond to a direct request for comment.

Towers Watson, the human resources consultancy firm that worked with BlackBerry’s board on the compensation package, also declined to comment on Thursday.

BlackBerry is not the first company in the spotlight for large payments for outgoing executives. Nokia’s departing chief executive, Stephen Elop, stands to pocket 18.8 million euros ($25 million) if shareholders agree to sell Nokia’s handset business to Microsoft Corp. Elop is set to rejoin Microsoft, his former employer.

STOCK DOWN MORE THAN 50 PCT

Heins was appointed BlackBerry CEO in early 2012, taking over from former co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. In the months before they stepped down, Lazaridis and Balsillie had cut their base salary to $1, a symbolic gesture that they would not draw fat checks while the company was obviously suffering.

Heins’ compensation has increased from $1.9 million in fiscal 2011, when he was chief operating officer, to $10.3 million in fiscal 2012 when he was appointed CEO, before slipping back slightly to $9.1 million in fiscal 2013, which ended on March 2 this year.

Since Heins took over, BlackBerry shares have fallen more than 50 percent as the company delayed the release of its first BlackBerry 10 devices and they then failed to excite sales.

In May, Heins signed a new contract that raised his base salary to $1.5 million from $1 million; bumped his maximum incentive bonus to 150 percent of salary from 125 percent and granted him more than $34 million in front-loaded equity awards that vest over three years.

It is those equity awards that provide the bulk of the enlarged payout if BlackBerry is taken over – the shares would vest immediately instead of over a three-year period.

According to company filings, if Heins is terminated due to a change of ownership of BlackBerry, he’ll receive $3 million to reflect his base salary, annual incentives worth about $4.5 million, and equity awards of $48 million.

The board said the higher payouts were justified to retain Heins and ensure his interests are aligned with those of shareholders, and to reward the executive for leading BlackBerry through a period of massive upheaval.

“The necessary speed and scope of this transformation, as well as its critical importance to the future success of the company, demand leadership of exceptional skill, agility and vision,” BlackBerry said ahead of its July annual general meeting, when shareholders approved the changes.

The filings show that BlackBerry’s board also gave Heins a “special achievement bonus” of $3 million for launching the BlackBerry 10 platform used for its latest smartphones, and for maintaining cash and liquidity above $1.5 billion.

Last week, the company said it would book almost $1 billion in writedowns, mostly on unsold BlackBerry 10 devices, when it reports second-quarter results on Friday.

($1 = 0.7418 euros)

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; Editing by Janet Guttsman, Tiffany Wu and Lisa Shumaker)

(Reuters) – Google Inc has overhauled its search algorithm, the foundation of the Internet’s dominant search engine, to better cope with the longer, more complex queries it has been getting from Web users.

Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search, told reporters on Thursday that the company launched its latest “Hummingbird” algorithm about a month ago and that it currently affects 90 percent of worldwide searches via Google.

Google is trying to keep pace with the evolution of Internet usage. As search queries get more complicated, traditional “Boolean” or keyword-based systems begin deteriorating because of the need to match concepts and meanings in addition to words.

“Hummingbird” is the company’s effort to match the meaning of queries with that of documents on the Internet, said Singhal from the Menlo Park garage where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin conceived their now-ubiquitous search engine.

“Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You’d sit down and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem, type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had those words,” Singhal wrote in a separate blogpost.

“The world has changed so much since then: billions of people have come online, the Web has grown exponentially, and now you can ask any question on the powerful little device in your pocket.”

Page and Brin set up shop in the garage of Susan Wojcicki — now a senior Google executive — in September 1998, around the time they incorporated their company. This week marks the 15th anniversary of their collaboration.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Bob Burgdorfer)

Now private companies can try to raise funds from the public at large.

By Antonio Regalado

During a “demo day” in Silicon Valley last August, entrepreneur Mattan Griffel took the stage with a well-practiced, carefully timed pitch.

“We teach people how to code, online, in one month,” said Griffel, adding meaningful pauses between the words. The startup he cofounded, One Month Rails, will “change the face of online education,” Griffel promised.

Such technology salesmanship used to be reserved for a select audience of angel investors, like those who attended the invitation-only Y Combinator event where Griffel’s video was filmed.

But starting Monday, Griffel’s pitch appeared on the Internet, next to a clickable blue button that says “Invest.” Buying into his startup is now almost as easy as purchasing a toaster on eBay.

“Crowd investing” is the idea that anyone should be able to invest easily in startup companies. That idea took a big step forward thanks to new federal regulations that allow startups, for the first time, to invite large swaths of the public to invest in them.

The new rules are part of the 2012 JOBS Act, a basket of regulatory changes that Silicon Valley lobbied for and that are meant to make it easier for small companies to raise money. The rule that took effect Monday reverses a longstanding ban on “general solicitation” or advertising risky securities to the public.

Under the new regulations, startups can advertise their shares anywhere—on billboards, on Facebook, via direct mail, e-mail lists, or via a dozen online crowd investing portals that have been set up to solicit and manage investments from the public at large.

Griffel’s company appears on Wefunder.com. The site, which was founded last year but became fully operational today, allows anyone to navigate through pitches from two dozen companies developing everything from small farms in shipping containers to new ways to transmit money overseas.

Crowd investing could ultimately have broad effects on what types of technology are able to win financial backing. In particular, it could lead to more gadgets that appeal to narrow markets or those that are developed by the maker movement (see “What Technologies Will Crowdfunding Create”). It might also create competition for traditional venture capitalists (see “Silicon Valley Dynasty Adapts to Fast-and-Cheap Startups”).

Mike Norman, president of Wefunder, says popular technologies that are highly “sharable” will generate the most interest. On Wefunder, for instance, a company called Terrafugia is developing a “flying car”—a plane that has retractable wings and can drive on highways. Most startups can’t yet rely on crowd investing to raise as much money as they need, however. Terrafugia, for instance, has already raised more than $10 million from conventional investors. For many companies, crowdfunding will instead be a way to reach out to hard-core fans and potential customers.

Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia’s CEO, called crowd investing “an interesting experiment to see what happens.” His company already has 83 different investors, many of whom chose to back flying cars because they believe such vehicles should exist and might increase people’s freedom. “What Wefunder is doing is providing the crowd an avenue for direct input into what the world should look like, and what kind of companies there should be.”

Wefunder’s website, with a menu of companies and short promotional videos, looks a lot like Kickstarter, the popular site where filmmakers, authors, and technology companies can raise donations for individual projects. That site has already spawned several technology companies, like Pebble, maker of a smart watch (see “A Smart Watch, Created by the Crowd, Debuts in Vegas” and “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013”).

With crowd investing, however, people will actually be buying shares in new companies. For now, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates financial markets, is limiting crowd investing to accredited investors, or people with $1 million in the bank or who earn more than $200,000 a year. However, the SEC is developing other regulations, due out next year, that would let any member of the public invest small sums in startups.

Some investors may hope to get in early on the next billion-dollar technology company, but the odds say most small investors will be losers. Since 1999, even professional venture capitalists have had dismal returns, barely above zero (see “The Narrowing Ambitions of Venture Capital”). And because individuals invest in fewer companies than professionals, the chance they will see their money again is even lower. “People should not be betting their retirements or kids’ education on startups,” Norman says.

Registering to invest on Wefunder’s site takes only a minute or two. Users agree they meet the financial cutoffs, such as having an income of $200,000. Then a box appears, asking them to click on statements including “I understand most startups fail” and “I can bear a 100% loss on my investments.”

Due diligence: A sign-up screen at crowd investing site Wefunder cautions users that putting money behind startups is risky.

Crowd investors will have to judge startups and their technology based on very limited information. For each company, Wefunder offers a short “elevator pitch” and financial highlights summarized in three or four bullet points. There are stylized photos of company founders, whom investors can then “meet” by watching short personal statements, or visiting their LinkedIn pages.

While that seems like little to go on, it’s not unusual for early-stage investors to make quick decisions, Norman says. “Angel investors sit down for an hour, and then write a check,” he says. “At this stage of the company so many things are going to change that it’s really about the founders.”

According to CFIRA, a trade group, there are more than a dozen crowd investing sites in operation or being planned, including SecondMarket, Equitynet, SeedInvest, and OfferBoard. Details of how to buy shares vary between funding platforms. On Wefunder, up to 100 small investors will join a limited liability company, which will then make the actual investment in the startup. Wefunder, acting much as a venture capital firm would, manages the investment and collects 20 percent of any profits.

It’s still uncertain how big an impact crowd investing will have. The SEC is considering further rules, including requiring startups to track all their advertising, including every mention in the news media. That has some investors worried that crowd investing could flop. Investor Brad Feld, a partner at the Foundry Group, recently called the SEC’s additional rules “one scary mess that could undermine the whole thing.”

Upgrades to Google’s search engine will make it better at understanding conversational queries – helping its mobile search apps tread on Siri’s toes.

By Tom Simonite on September 26, 2013

Google announced a series of upgrades to its search engine and mobile search apps today that strengthen its ability to understand queries in the form of natural sentences like those used in conversation. The changes are particularly focused on enabling more complex spoken interactions with Google’s mobile apps, boosting the company’s challenge to Apple’s Siri personal assistant.

“We are making your conversation with Google more natural,” said Amit Singhal, who leads search technology at Google. He spoke at a press conference held in the Menlo Park garage that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made their first office space in 2000.

The new features apply to all Google searches, but were all demonstrated with queries spoken out loud to Google’s mobile apps. One change sees Google better able to understand broad questions about categories of concepts. For example, saying “tell me about Impressionist artists” to the Google search app on a mobile or tablet calls up a page that presents many ways to explore the topic. A carousel of images at the top of the page allows a person to swipe through different artists, and tapping one leads to another summary page with a carousel of works from that artist. Asking Google about a band brings up a list of their songs to hear. Movies and many other topics can be explored in the same way.

Another upgrade gives Google the ability to compare different things or concepts. For example, asking the search app to “compare coconut oil versus olive oil” produces a table contrasting their nutritional qualities. Google selects the most relevant criteria to compare things. Asking for a comparison of two celestial bodies would see it use properties such as brightness, age, weight, and orbital period, for example.

Google’s new features rest on a system called Knowledge Graph, which the company unveiled last year. It gives the company’s software the ability to understand the meaning, concepts, and relationships behind text mentioning concepts and things (see “Google’s New Brain Could Have a Big Impact”).

Tamar Yehoshua, vice president for search at Google, also demonstrated an upgraded version of Google’s search app for Apple devices. “We have made voice a much bigger feature,” she said. The changes puts it into even more direct competition with Siri, which is promoted as a personal assistant people can talk to like a real person.

One new feature of the upgraded iOS app makes it possible to ask the app to remind you of something when you get to a specific location. If you tell it to “Remind me to get crackers when I go to Safeway,” the app will confirm which store you mean, and then notify you the next time you visit that location.

Singhal also announced that roughly one month ago, his team had made a complete overhaul of Google’s core search ranking system to improve its ability to handle longer, more conversational queries. The upgraded system is known as Hummingbird, and replaces one known as Caffeine used since 2010. About 90 percent of Google searches have been affected by the change.

“People have started asking many more complex questions of Google, and our algorithm had to go through some fundamental rethinking,” said Singhal. The changes were focused on improving Google’s ability to understand the concepts a person refers to in a query and how they are related, he said. “You have to balance all that meaning of what the query is looking for with what the Web document is saying.”

A carbon nanotube computer processor is comparable to a chip from the early 1970s, and may be the first step beyond silicon electronics

By Katherine Bourzac on September 25, 2013

For the first time, researchers have built a computer whose central processor is based entirely on carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with remarkable material and electronic properties. The computer is slow and simple, but its creators, a group of Stanford University engineers, say it shows that carbon nanotube electronics are a viable potential replacement for silicon when it reaches its limits in ever-smaller electronic circuits.

The carbon nanotube processor is comparable in capabilities to the Intel 4004, that company’s first microprocessor, which was released in 1971, says Subhasish Mitra, an electrical engineer at Stanford and one of the project’s co-leaders. The computer, described today in the journal Nature, runs a simple software instruction set called MIPS. It can switch between multiple tasks (counting and sorting numbers) and keep track of them, and it can fetch data from and send it back to an external memory.

The nanotube processor is made up of 142 transistors, each of which contains carbon nanotubes that are about 10 to 200 nanometer long. The Stanford group says it has made six versions of carbon nanotube computers, including one that can be connected to external hardware—a numerical keypad that can be used to input numbers for addition.

Aaron Franklin, a researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, says the comparison with the 4004 and other early silicon processors is apt. “This is a terrific demonstration for people in the electronics community who have doubted carbon nanotubes,” he says.

Franklin’s group has demonstrated that individual carbon nanotube transistors—smaller than 10 nanometers—are faster and more energy efficient than those made of any other material, including silicon. Theoretical work has also suggested that a carbon nanotube computer would be an order of magnitude more energy efficient than the best silicon computers. And the nanomaterial’s ability to dissipate heat suggests that carbon nanotube computers might run blisteringly fast without heating up—a problem that sets speed limits on the silicon processors in today’s computers.

Still, some people doubt that carbon nanotubes will replace silicon. Working with carbon nanotubes is a big challenge. They are typically grown in a way that leaves them in a tangled mess, and about a third of the tubes are metallic, rather than semiconducting, which causes short-circuits.

Over the past several years, Mitra has collaborated with Stanford electrical engineer Phillip Wong, who has developed ways to sidestep some of the materials challenges that have prevented the creation of complex circuits from carbon nanotubes. Wong developed a method for growing mostly very straight nanotubes on quartz, then transferring them over to a silicon substrate to make the transistors. The Stanford group also covers up the active areas of the transistors with a protective coating, then etches away any exposed nanotubes that have gone astray.

Wong and Mitra also apply a voltage to turn all of the semiconducting nanotubes on a chip to “off.” Then they pulse a large current through the chip; the metallic ones heat up, oxidize, and disintegrate. All of these nanotube-specific fixes—and the rest of the manufacturing process—can be done on the standard equipment that’s used to make today’s silicon chips. In that sense, the process is scalable.

Late last month at Hot Chips, an engineering design conference hosted, coincidentally, at Stanford, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA made a stir by discussing the end of silicon electronics. In a keynote, Robert Colwell, former chief architect at Intel, predicted that by as early as 2020, the computing industry will no longer be able to keep making performance and cost improvements by doubling the density of silicon transistors on chips every 18 to 24 months—a feat dubbed Moore’s Law after the Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, who first observed the trend.

Mitra and Wong hope their computer shows that carbon nanotubes may be a serious answer to the question of what comes next. So far no emerging technologies come close to touching silicon. Of all the emerging materials and new ideas held up as possible saviors—nanowires, spintronics, graphene, biological computers—no one has made a central processing unit based on any of them, says Mitra. In that context, catching up to silicon’s performance circa 1970, though it leaves a lot of work to be done, is exciting.

Victor Zhirnov, a specialist in nanoelectronics at the Semiconductor Research Corporation in Durham, North Carolina, is much more cautiously optimistic. The nanotube processor has 10 million times fewer transistors on it than today’s typical microprocessors, runs much more slowly, and operates at five times the voltage, meaning it uses about 25 times as much power, he notes.

Some of the nanotube computer’s sluggishness is due to the conditions under which it was built—in an academic lab using what the Stanford group had access to, not an industry-standard factory. The processor is connected to an external hard drive, which serves as the memory, through a large bundle of electrical wires, each of which connects to a large metal pin on top of the nanotube processor. Each of the pins in turn connects to a device on the chip. This messy packaging means the data has to travel longer distances, which cuts into the efficiency of the computer.

With the tools at hand, the Stanford group also can’t make transistors smaller than about one micrometer—compare that with Intel’s announcement earlier this month that its next line of products will be built on 14-nanometer technology. If, however, the group were to go into a state-of-the-art fab, its manufacturing yields would improve enough to be able to make computers with thousands of smaller transistors, and the computer could run faster.

To reach the superb level of performance theoretically offered by nanotubes, researchers will have to learn how to build complex integrated circuits made up of pristine single nanotube transitors. Franklin says device and materials experts like his group at IBM need to start working in closer collaboration with circuit designers like those at Stanford to make real progress.

“We are well aware that silicon is running out of steam, and within 10 years it’s coming to its end,” says Zhirnov. “If carbon nanotubes are going to become practical, it has to happen quickly.”

By Matt Egan

Hoping to avoid the fiasco of Facebook’s (FB) initial public offering, micro-blogging site Twitter has reportedly decided to raise about $1.5 billion in an IPO listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite the report from TheStreet.com, sources told FOX Business a final decision about where to list the highly-anticipated IPO hasn’t been made and neither exchange has been contacted by Twitter.

Losing out on the highly-anticipated Twitter debut would be a blow to Nasdaq OMX Group (NDAQ), which was scarred by a recent glitch that caused a three-hour trading freeze for all Nasdaq-listed stocks.

The $1.5 billion figure represents just a fraction of the record-breaking $16 billion raised by Facebook’s IPO, which was marred by technical glitches on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

According to TheStreet.com, Twitter may sell between 50 million to 55 million shares at between $28 and $30 a share.

That range would allow the San Francisco social media company to raise between $1.4 billion and $1.65 billion and give the company a valuation of about $15 billion to $16 billion.

Representatives from Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

At this point neither Nasdaq nor NYSE have been informed about a listing decision by Twitter, and it’s possible discussions are ongoing.

“We don’t comment on filings at this early juncture,” said a Nasdaq spokesperson.

NYSE Euronext (NYX) said, “We do not comment on speculation.”

Twitter confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO earlier this month, paving the way for the most anticipated debut since Facebook’s offering in May 2012.

Companies with less than $1 billion in revenue can file for an IPO without making their records public right away under the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.

Research firm e-Marketer estimates Twitter will generate about $582.8 million in 2013 ad revenue and nearly $1 billion next year.

Ahead of its IPO, Twitter is reportedly seeking a revolving credit line worth $500 million to $1 billion from JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Morgan Stanley (MS).

By Mike Flacy

Announced on the Microsoft News Center as well as a joint letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop on the Official Microsoft Blog, the software company is acquiring Nokia’s Devices & Services business and the right to license Nokia’s patents to other entities. Assuming the deal is approved by Nokia’s shareholders and regulatory agencies, Microsoft will spend approximately $7.2 billion on the acquisition. Specifically, Microsoft will spend 3.79 billion Euros on the mobile devices unit and 1.65 billion Euros on Nokia’s patent portfolio. However, Nokia will continue to create cellular networking equipment, build maps and location-based services, and create other technology outside of the mobile devices unit.

Ballmer and Elop together state: “With the commitment and resources of Microsoft to take Nokia’s devices and services forward, we can now realize the full potential of the Windows ecosystem, providing the most compelling experiences for people at home, at work, and everywhere in between …We will continue to build the mobile phones you’ve come to love, while investing in the future – new phones and services that combine the best of Microsoft and the best of Nokia.”

In a separate email to Microsoft employees, Ballmer says that ”This is a smart acquisition for Microsoft, and a good deal for both companies. We are receiving incredible talent, technology and IP. We’ve all seen the amazing work that Nokia and Microsoft have done together.”

Ballmer went on to mention that Stephen Elop, the current CEO of Nokia, will be returning to Microsoft to manage the entire devices team. Many analysts believe that Elop is on the short list to become the next CEO of Microsoft after Ballmer steps down from the position in the next twelve months.

Microsoft hopes to use Nokia’s resources and technology to carve itself a much larger share of the smartphone market, which is currently led by Google’s Android operating system, and Apple’s iPhone. As detailed by Forbes, Microsoft has seen significant Windows Phone growth in European markets, but continues to lag far behind Android and iOS in the United States. Specifically, Microsoft’s market share in the United States is just 3.5 percent.

Regarding exclusivity of the Windows Phone platform on Nokia branded devices, Microsoft will continue to license usage rights of the the Window Phone platform to other companies, according to a blog post created by Microsoft VP Terry Myerson.