Apple announced several significant new features and products for both consumers and developers at WWDC, pertaining to Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and its iCloud service.
The company also revealed that its next generation of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches would be deeply integrated with Twitter's single sign-on service, a huge win for the microblogging site.
EDITD, provider of automated retail monitoring and analytics for the fashion industry, raised a $1.6 million seed round led by Index Ventures.
eWise, a global payments and online financial management solutions provider, closed a $14 million financing round, led by venture capital firm Wellington Partners. Previous investors also participated in this round, including Balderton Capital, TTV Capital and Patagorang.
Facebook accounts for 38 percent of links clicked on the social Web, more than the combined 34 percent from email and Twitter.
Concur, provider of integrated travel and expense management, agreed to acquire GlobalExpense, provider of end-to-end expense management, for 12 million pounds Sterling, plus a possible earn-out of up to 2 million pounds Sterling.
Groupon has teamed up with grocery store chain Big Y Foods, marketing company HaloEffect, and consumer behavior analytics company Incentive Targeting to introduce deals for grocery retail items and consumer packaged goods using customer loyalty cards.
Rich media applications company Intertainment Media agreed to acquire DealFrenzy.com, a Groupon-style collective buying site for $500,000 in cash and $200,000 in Intertainment common stock.
Prosper.com, a social lending marketplace that brings together creditworthy borrowers with individual and institutional investors, raised over $17 million in funding from new investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Crosslink Capital and others.
Violin Memory, provider fast and scalable memory arrays, raised a $40 million Series C funding round which includes existing strategic investors and new cross-over public market investors.
Salesforce invested "multiple millions of dollars" in VSee, provider of video collaboration software.
Stealth startup WayIn raised $6.4 million.
Social news site XYDO raised a $1.25 million round of seed funding led by EPIC Ventures, with contributions from several angel investors.
Just a week after releasing Empires & Allies on Facebook, Zynga started to push out Hanging With Friends, the company’s latest game for iOS devices.
The agency also published draft guidance on the use of AI in drug development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.
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.
