Investment bank Caris & Co. estimates that, in 2011, Kindle revenues will reach $5.42 billion, and by 2012, they’ll reach nearly $8 billion.
Out of all check-in users, just 12.7 million used the services on a smartphone, representing 17.6 percent of the smartphone population.
Facebook tried to smear Google by calling out its privacy practices with a service called Social Circle, but it did so by handing the dirty work external PR firm Burston-Marsteller. Read how the story unfolded here.
Morgan Missen, formerly a Twitter recruiter, is now serving as Head of Talent at Foursquare West, the company's rapidly expanding San Francisco division.
VatorNews' Faith Merino chats with Lightbank’s newest addition, Paul Lee, who joins the investment firm as its first outside partner.
In a study of 3,001 U.S. adults, the Pew Research Center found that a full 80% of Internet users have looked online for health information pertaining to diseases, treatments, medications, and more.
Social media marketing company Buddy Media acquired Spinback, creator of a social plugin and analytics dashboard for online retailers.
The Taliban now has its on Twitter account, @alemarahweb, which tweets about violent jihad operations against the "US-NATO invaders."
Also: Twitter has updated its mobile website and its Mac desktop client.
Also also: NTT DOCOMO has reached an agreement with Twitter, under which DOCOMO will leverage its mobile expertise, with support from Twitter, to develop innovative applications and services incorporating Twitter features for DOCOMO feature phones and smartphones.
Online games publisher We R Interactive raised $5 million in second round funding from private investors.
The agency also published draft guidance on the use of AI in drug development
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Steven Loeb
The biggest focus areas for AI investing are healthcare and biotech
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Steven Loeb
It will complete and submit forms, and integrate with state benefit systems
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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.
