By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
Social-media firm gets mild lift; Rackspace falls on
earnings
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks put in a mostly
negative trading session Tuesday, with Twitter Inc. closing with a
small gain and Rackspace Inc. losing ground after the cloud-hosting
company's middling quarterly results.
Twitter (TWTR) ended the day up 1.3% to close at $43.81. Late
Monday, the social-media company said in 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.
In its filing, 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." Put another way, nearly 23 million Twitter
users are actually automated "bots."
Twitter also said it has begun testing a sponsored video feature
that allows advertisers to both post videos and measure how
effective such postings are on Twitter's site.
Mild gains also came from Intel Corp. (INTC), Amazon.com Inc.
(AMZN) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).
Rackspace (RAX) shares fell almost 6% to close at $29.50. 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),
Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) .
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) fell 12 points to
close at 4,389 and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) also
closed with a small loss.
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