Meerkat, a new app that rose out of their recent company pivot, has achieved tons of buzz over the past three weeks.  The timing around the success of Meerkat and the recent Twitter acquisition of a similar app called Periscope.

Twitter’s User Base

The main question is about opportunity recognition vs innovation with respect to software entrepreneurship.   One interesting conspiracy theory or question is:  if you know that Twitter is buying a company (video streaming app using Twitter social graph) and then in 21 days built that same app (a prototype quality) using Twitter’s own resources then pump it up hard (with big time PR)…Is that modern day extortion or just good entrepreneurial hustle?

Twitter’s Kevin Weil tweeted the announcement as reported by Josh Constine at Techcrunch:

Excited to officially welcome @periscopeco to the Twitter team. Can’t wait for everyone to see what they’ve built! https://t.co/6eAJjpXmaS

— Kevin Weil (@kevinweil) March 13, 2015

TechCrunch first reported the connection between Periscope and Twitter on March 4th, saying the companies were in acquisition talks and the deal might have already been done.

With the timing of how long it takes to close an merger and/or acquisition, it begs the question of arbitrage around replicating a application for a business deal in the works.

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