What you need to know - Wednesday 12/15/10
Zipcar raises $21M; RiseSmart raises $3M; Yahoo lays off 4% of staff
Zipcar, a car-sharing service announced that it has raised $21 million. This is the series g round of funding, which was led by Meritech Capital Partners. Meritech gave $20 million of the funding. The rest came from Pinnacle Ventures.
The CEO and founder of Facebook CEO was named Time Magazine’s person of the year. Mark Zuckerberg will be on the cover of the magazines special edition. 
Truphone, an international roaming and app company for mobile devices, is rebranding as “Tru”. No word on weither or not the company will migrate to Tru.com or remain at its current URL.
DeNA, the biggest mobile social-gaming platform in Japan, will have one of its social game platforms, called Mobage, carried on Samsung's Android-based smartphones. This update applies to phones sold outside Japan.
Twitter has launched an updated guide for businesses that are interested in making the micro-sharing service. The guide will include both posting and advertising information.
Sega has announced that it will be developing a social game themed around its Yakuza games. The project will most likely run on Gree, a social network available in Japan for mobile users.
Gmail now supports full email delegation. This feature will let another Google account holder access your email account and respond to them. Access to this feature can be found in the Gmail settings.
Yahoo has confirmed that it will be letting go roughly 4% of its global workforce, which is about 560 employees. These layoffs come just two weeks before Christmas.
RiseSmart, an outplacement and recruitment process outsourcing solutions company, announced Tuesday that it has raised $3 million. The round included Norwest Venture Partners, Storm Ventures and other angel investors.
TekTrak, a smartphone security company, has raised a seed round of funding. The amount was not disclosed, but investors included Cyan and Scott Banister, Kima Ventures, Sergey Grishin, Wasabi Ventures, PBWorks, BCITL Ventures, Barney Pell, and Yoni Saban.
Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs
Truphone
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Truphone is a free piece of software that lets you make free and low cost mobile calls via the internet. We don't do roaming charges, so as long as you have a compatible phone and are connected to Wi-Fi, prices are simple and low from anywhere on the planet.RiseSmart
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
RiseSmart is a leader in enterprise career management solutions that drive employee engagement, improve retention, and burnish employer brands.
Through its employee-centric career-management platform, RiseSmart Compass, and its results-oriented outplacement solution, RiseSmart Transition, RiseSmart helps high-performing organizations successfully cultivate passionate, engaged employees and loyal alumni ambassadors.
RiseSmart's innovative approach to human capital management has earned the company a wide range of awards and recognition from organizations including Bersin by Deloitte, the Best in Biz, Gartner Inc., the Golden Bridge Awards, LAROCQUE, the Momentum Index, Red Herring, the San Francisco Business Times, SiliconIndia, the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, the Stevie Awards and TIE.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
What is Twitter?
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.
Where did the idea for Twitter come from?
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.
How is Twitter built?
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.
How do you make money from Twitter?
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.
Related News
July 20, 2008
Are you using Twitter for your startup?
November 11, 2010