Bing announced Thursday morning that it will be fully integrating Facebook Likes into search results for all users.
American Idol will now, for the first time, allow viewers to vote via Facebook.
Social fundraising startup Fundly closed a $2 million seed funding round led by several Silicon Valley investors.
Future Simple, developer of software for small businesses, closed a $1.1 million round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors.
Oodle, a marketplace for Facebook users (akin to a classifieds section), launched an attack ad campaign against Craigslist, calling the site a "cesspool of crime."
Popular Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment announced Thursday the launch of its latest endeavor: the first-ever Facebook Shopping Mall
Cloud storage system provider Scality secured a $7 million Series B round of funding led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity).
Mobile gaming startup TinyCo raised $18 million from Andreessen Horowitz.
Facebook and Twitter are just now experiencing a slowdown in growth, though Twitter has a couple more years of double-digit growth.
Today's featured entrepreneur is Nicholas Gammel, founder and CEO of GAIN Fitness.
Vocus, provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, acquired North Social, a software company that provides Facebook applications that enable businesses to create, manage and promote their business on Facebook
Advances in technology, like in vitro and microfluidics, have helped advance research
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Steven Loeb
Robots are taking over the heavy lifting work inside warehouses
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Anna Vod
The company also expanded access to 12 different provider types for male fertility care
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
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Startup/Business
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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.
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