Are any Twitter-based startups making money? If so, who and how?
Can Twitter be used for monetization directly or only for marketing?
What products and services are most effectively marketed on Twitter? Under what circumstances does marketing on Twitter produce a superior ROI to marketing on other media?
What products and services can be sold directly via Twitter? What companies are doing this and what tools are they using?
What business models require manually generated, original content vs. automated content? What are examples of some high-value automatically generated Twitter messages?
Are there viable business models based on receiving (rather than sending) Twitter messages? What kinds of messages can be directly monetized by receiving them?
Which content producers are monetizing Twitter most effectively?
Which platform providers are monetizing Twitter most effectively?
What are examples of pre-existing applications or content being successfully extended onto Twitter (vs. "native" Twitter start-ups)?
Which media does Twitter come closest to replacing? Will methods used to monetize these media be effective on Twitter?
Ivan Kirigin
Ivan is co-founder and CTO of Tipjoy - a simple, social payment processor. Tipjoy powers payments over Twitter, and has opened an API to enable Twitter applications to sell premium content & services. It also enables brands and e-commerce sites looking to leverage twitter actually sell things on that exploding platform. Tipjoy was founded in January 2008, and has received funding from Y Combinator, Betaworks, and others.
Andrew Kortina
Andrew is a software engineer at Betaworks and leads 3rd party app integration and API evangelism at Bit.ly. Prior to working on Bit.ly, Kortina consulted for brands such as MLB and Comedy Central on social media marketing strategy, worked as an engineer at iminlikewithyou.com, and co-created tinydb.org, wemusicstore.com, and several iPhone applications.
Phil Pearlman
Phil is an investor in, director of, and head of market research and community development at StockTwits and co-founder of Lumina Fund Management. StockTwits is a social, stock microblogging service with which users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. Phil also makes angel investments in other social media based start ups and focuses on the relational and community aspects of online social network. Phil is a contributor to Real Money, a paid service owned by TheStreet.com and blogs at philpearlman.com.
Gregory Galant
Greg is the CEO of Sawhorse Media, which runs a network of properties that make short content useful including The Shorty Awards, Muck Rack and Musebin. The Shorty Awards recognize the best producers of short form content on Twitter based on votes from tens of thousands of Twitter users. Muck Rack makes it easy to follow what journalists are tweeting about. Musebin is a one line music review site that allows anyone to give their opinion on any album in 140 characters or less. Greg also hosts Venture Voice, the leading podcast about entrepreneurship and was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by The Suffolk Nassau Chamber of Commerce in 2003.
