By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
Social-media company gets a mild lift, Rackspace falls on
earnings results
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks put in a mixed early
trading performance Tuesday, with Twitter Inc. on the rise and
Rackspace Inc. losing ground after the cloud-hosting company's
middling quarterly results.
Twitter (TWTR) was up 2% at $44.08. Late Monday, the
social-media company said it a regulatory filing that 11% of its
271 million monthly active users used Twitter via third-party apps
during the second quarter of the year. Twitter had earlier said
that 14% of its users accessed Twitter through such apps.
Twitter also said "8.5% of all active users used third party
applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for
regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated
action." Or, nearly 23 million Twitter users are actually "bots"
that are automated to send out information without really
interacting with Twitter or its ads.
Mild gains also came from Apple Inc. (AAPL), Amazon.com Inc.
(AMZN) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).
Rackspace (RAX) shares fell almost 7% to $29.09. On Monday, the
provider of cloud-based hosting services reported second-quarter
earnings that were essentially flat with a year ago, even as sales
rose.
Losses also came from Facebook Inc. (FB), eBay Inc. (EBAY),
Intel Corp. (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) .
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) rose 7 points to
4,394 and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) was off
0.5%.
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