AngelPad is now accepting applications for its fall 2011 program.
Currensee, an alternative investment service that gives investors unique access to the world currency markets, secured $4 million as Series C financing from North Bridge Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital and Vernon & Park Capital.
Flud, a personalized mobile news reader for iPhone and iPad, raised $1 million in seed funding from several notable angel investors.
Groupon is looking for 100 technologists to work out of its Palo Alto, Calif. office.
Companies that went public in the first quarter of 2011 generated 166% more capital than they did in Q1 2010, according to Hoovers, a Dun & Bradstreet company and a provider of key insights and information on U.S. companies
Online advertising revenues generated a record $26 billion in 2010, representing an increase of 15% over 2009, which saw $22.7 billion in total online ad revenue. The fourth quarter alone raked in $7.45 billion, a 16% increase over the third quarter and a full 19% increase over the same quarter in 2009.
MarketShare, a cross-media analytics company that enables global marketers to optimize their marketing resource allocations, raised a $32 million follow-on investment by Elevation Partners.
KupiVIP.ru, a Russian-based private online shopping club, raised $55 million from new and old investors.
One month after AOL cut 900 employees, it’s now hiring as many as 800 more to beef up its hyperlocal news network, Patch.com.
Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1 just launched with updates for location, push notifications and much more that bring it up to speed with official offerings on iOS and Android.
UberMedia, developer of several Twitter-based applications and services for both Web and mobile, may be working on a brand new microblogging site to rival the 800-pound gorilla in the space.
In the post-Covid drive for live events, ticket platforms are jumping at the opportune market time
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Anna Vod
EveryCure will leverage BioLogicAI, BioPhy’s predictive AI engine, to assess drug-disease matches
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Steven Loeb
The contract will make it easier for state agencies to evaluate and implement Fusion's technology
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
