Despite rumors on Monday morning that design firm NClud had been purchased by Twitter, including mention of the acquisition from NClud’s own co-founder Martin Ringlein, the social network made it clear that the company had not been purchased, instead Twitter bought out only its talent and intellectual property. Responding to tweets and various news reports regarding NClud’s buyout Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told Mashable :
“Twitter did not acquire nclud, the company, but we did acquire their IP.” while Weeks confirmed “some members of the Nclud team now work at Twitter.”
Twitter at this time has not disclosed what type of intellectual property it has purchased or any other details of the sale. The move is happening quick as Ringlein tweeted later in the day that he was already filling out Twitter employee paperwork in order to make the move over the social networking giant. Ringlein on his LinkedIn page listed his Twitter position as “Design Manager.”
Co-founder Alex Giron tweeted that he will now “be leading design efforts @twitter in the international side of things.” Nclud has had some high profile clients including Oracle and Ogilvy.
According to NClud’s co-founders the brand “lives on” although at this time they have not said how the name will survive.
Twitter has been on a buying spree in 2012, purchasing the blog platform Posterous, spam/malware company Dasient and analytics firm Hotspots.io.
With Twitter predicting revenues of $1 billion by 2014 it should not come as a surprise that the social network appears to be dabbling in all aspects of social web platforms.
