In today’s Bulldog wrapup of technology news:

  • Twitter’s slow user growth hurts
  • Yelp financials trigger share drop
  • CommScope sales fall from a year ago
  • The Triangle Cleantech cluster adds a new member

The details:

  • Twitter 2Q revenue grows sharply but user growth stays slow

Twitter failed to add users at a quick enough pace for investors in the second quarter even as revenue grew sharply, feeding concerns about whether it can ever become a mass-market service like Facebook or Google.

The beleaguered company is searching for a permanent CEO to replace Dick Costolo, who stepped down at the beginning of this month. Co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey is serving as interim CEO.

Dorsey said Tuesday that while the results show “good progress in monetization,” the company is “not satisfied” with the growth of its audience.

On average, Twitter had 316 million monthly active users in the second quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year but up less than 3 percent from the first quarter of this year.

Twitter’s finance chief, Anthony Noto, said in a conference call that the company doesn’t expect to see “sustained, meaningful growth” of its user base until it reaches the mass market. He did not say when that would be, only that it would take a considerable amount of time.

While many people are familiar with Twitter, the company has not been able to convince people that they need it. Twitter also “remains too difficult to use,” Noto said in the call, which was broadcast on Twitter’s live-streaming service Periscope.

The assessment hammered Twitter’s stock in after-hours trading. After jumping in the first minutes following the release of the earnings report, the stock did an about-face and shed more than 10 percent to $32.88.

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. posted a loss of $136.7 million, or 21 cents per share, in the April-June period. That compares with a loss of $144.6 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier.

Adjusted earnings were 7 cents per share, above the 5 cents that analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research had expected.

Revenue jumped 61 percent to $502.4 million from $312.2 million. Analysts had expected lower revenue of $487.4 million.

  • Yelp’s 2Q results, outlook disappoint as stock plunges

Yelp is getting skewered by investors after the online business review service sank to a second-quarter loss and dimmed its outlook amid a slowdown in its digital advertising sales.

The developments announced Tuesday raised more doubts about Yelp’s ability to survive on its own, although CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told analysts in a conference company that he “is building the company to operate independently over the long-term.” He predicted Yelp could be generating $1 billion in annual revenue by 2017, more than doubling from a projected $545 million to $550 million this year.

Those words did little to assuage investors as Yelp’s stock plummeted $5.61, or more than 16 percent, to $27.90 in extended trading. The sell-off means Yelp’s shares are likely to fall to their lowest level in more than two years in Wednesday’s regular trading.

In that scenario, Yelp will have lost about half of its value so far this year, potentially making it more attractive to a list of suitors that analysts believe could include Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Priceline Group Inc. Based on the direction signaled in extended trading, Yelp’s market value could be hovering around $2 billion on Wednesday.

Yelp will be moving ahead without one of its earliest backers, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who is resigning as the San Francisco company’s chairman. Stoppelman attributed Levchin’s decision to a busy schedule. Besides running a lending startup called Affirm, Levchin also is a member of Yahoo’s board of directors.

“While this year hasn’t gone as anticipated, I’m as confident as ever about our future,” Stoppelman said.

Yelp’s biggest problem has been recruiting enough talent to sell ads. That shortfall is especially troublesome for Yelp because it has fewer automated advertising sales tools than the much bigger digital marketing outlets run by Google and Facebook.

  • CommScope sales drop from a year ago

Hickory-based CommScope says second-quarter 2015 revenues fell 19 percent from the second quarter of 2014 to $867 million. But the company says the same period in 2014 was “atypically robuts.”

“We delivered stronger sequential performance in all of our businesses, which was consistent with our outlook,” said Chief Executive Officer Eddie Edwards. “We executed despite slow spending by certain North American wireless operators and foreign exchange rate headwinds.

“Meanwhile, we continue to make progress toward our planned acquisition of TE Connectivity’s Telecom, Enterprise and Wireless businesses. During the quarter, we established a foundational capital structure, cleared more regulatory hurdles and completed additional integration planning. Both companies are working hard to close the acquisition, which we expect to complete within the next few months. The acquisition positions us to solve more customer challenges, deliver more innovative solutions and increase our global scale. We will become a leader in fiber-optic connectivity for wired and wireless networks.”

CommScope announced a deal to buy TE Connectivity’s Telecom, Enterprise and Wireless businesses (Broadband Network Solutions or the BNS business) in January.

Read more at:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150728005464/en/CommScope-Reports-Quarter-2015-Results-Consistent-Guidance#.VbkNNPlViko

  • ​Cleantech Cluster adds new member

Mobility and energy technology consultancy Nexus EMC has joined the Research Triangle Cleantech Cluster as an Entrepreneur member this month.

The firm is helping the U.S. Department of Defense as well as academic and corporate clients identify, evaluate 
and plan implementation for technologies that can automate logistics, operations and grounds maintenance, according to the RTCC.