Well, at least we have something else to gossip about besides Apple buying Beats now. Twitter may be buying SoundCloud, although for now the story is equally speculative: Recode’s scoop includes lashings of “considering a deal” and “If the deal goes forward, and that’s by no means a certainty”. Neither company is commenting for now, but as the story notes, an acquisition would be expensive for Twitter given that SoundCloud was valued at $700m when it raised a $60m funding round earlier this year. The two companies share an investor in Union Square Ventures, and had been working together on the Twitter #music app in 2013 before SoundCloud was whipped out of it at the last minute before launch. With 250m monthly visitors last time it updated its public stats, SoundCloud would certainly bump up Twitter’s audience numbers – a challenge analysts have been chattering about increasingly loudly since Twitter went public. But a big-bucks acquisition would also increase the pressure on SoundCloud to strike licensing deals with labels and publishers for the music on its service.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…