iPhone News Updated

Twitter buys Seattle startup to handle mobile tweets

Twitter Inc. has made another move to take more control of tweets sent to mobile phones, this time with the acquisition Cloudhopper Inc., a Seattle messaging infrastructure firm.

The San Francisco microblogging service has already been working with Cloudhopper for the last eight months to process the nearly 1 billion SMS tweets sent each month.

“That number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and beyond,” according to a blog post from Kevin Thau, who works on Twitter’s mobile products and partnerships.

Terms of the deal were not announced. Joe Lauer, who founded Cloudhopper in late 2008, is joining Twitter’s mobile team.

Earlier this month, Twitter took steps it said were needed to improve member’s mobile experience. The company bought Atebits LLC., which created the popular iPhone app Tweetie. Twitter will rename it Twitter for the iPhone and has plans for an iPad version. Twitter also launched its own official app for the Blackberry.

iPad Users Use Wireless Data At 2.5x iPhone Usage

By comparing wireless connectivity on many of the top apps that are available on both the iPhone and iPad, a new study shows that iPad users are connecting online at a much bigger clip than iPhone owners.

Mobile Internet company Bytemobile says that on average, the iPad is generating more than two and a half times the amount of wireless data usage than its mobile phone brother.

Some of the top apps that it compared included: 1.5 times more people visited Ebay through the iPad app than the iPhone app, and 1.4 times more iPad owners used IMDb’s app.

Periodicals and news apps had a huge differential. The number of iPad users who went online with Bloomberg’s app was 2.5 times the same number for the iPhone, and USA Today’s iPad app was 6.3x more popular than its iPhone counterpart.

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