Amazon has expanded its trade-in program, which lets customers trade in an item in exchange for an Amazon gift card, to include electronics.
The company also launched its fifth publishing imprint, Thomas & Mercer, a mystery and thriller category that joins Amazon’s other imprints, including the newly launched Montlake Romance, AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing, and The Domino Project.
Online events and ticketing site Eventbrite raised a $50 million Series E round of funding led by Tiger Global with participation from several other firms.
Gilt Taste launched in beta as the artisan food branch of Gilt Groupe.
Sophia.com, an online social learning platform, acquired Guaranteach.com, an online math learning resource. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Jibe, a site for finding jobs based on your social connections, raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Gotham with existing investors, Polaris Venture Partners, Zelkova Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital and Stanford University Endowment participating in the round.
LinkedIn has exploded out of the gate and as of 10:53 am EDT, its share price is up 96% to over $88.
Mark Goines, famed for his angel investments in high-growth companies like Mint, BabyCenter, and Practice Fusion, joined Morgenthaler Venture’s IT team at its Menlo Park office.
Saygent, a voice response and analysis SaaS, raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, Innovation Endeavors, Juvo Capital and more.
Twitter rolled out some API changes that gives users more oversight when granting third-party applications access to their account, but it’s already proving to be a headache for developers of those apps.
Zynga acquired Casino City developer DNA Games. Founder and CEO Jonathan Lee is now General Manager at Zynga.
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
Zynga is the largest social gaming company with 8.5 million daily users and 45 million monthly users. Zynga’s games are available on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Yahoo! and the iPhone, and include Texas Hold’Em Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Vampires, Street Racing, Scramble and Word Twist. The company is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. Zynga is headquartered at the Chip Factory in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.zynga.com.
Startup/Business
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Eventbrite is the world’s largest self-service ticketing platform, and enables people all over the world to plan, promote, and sell out any event. The online event registration service has helped organizers process over 130 million tickets in 179 countries, and makes it easy for everyone to discover and share the events with people they know. In this way, Eventbrite brings communities together by encouraging people to connect through live experiences. Eventbrite's investors include DAG Ventures, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price, Tenaya Capital and Tiger Global. Learn more at www.eventbrite.com.
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.
