biz

Twitter Music founder leaves to join Jelly, a new startup

The man responsible for helping lead the team that built Twitter's music app has reportedly stepped down.

According to AllThingsD, Kevin Thau is leaving Twitter to join a startup launched by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone called Jelly. Thau is said to be the new chief operating officer of the startup.

Last month, news first appeared that Stone was preparing to add Jelly to his line of startups. It's said to be a company that will most likely produce a product to be featured on smartphones and tablets.

Twitter hired Thau in 2009 to be a director of mobile … Read more

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said to launch mobile startup

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is rumored to be adding a new mobile company to his line of startups, according to AllThingsD.

Apparently the name of the new company is Jelly and it will most likely be a product featured on smartphones and tablets. According to AllThingsD, Stone has already hired a handful of people to work on the Jelly team.

After leaving Twitter, Stone partnered with another Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and former Twitter product chief Jason Goldman to work on an incubator called The Obvious Corporation. Using Obvious funding the trio has launched other startups, including Lift, Branch, and … Read more

Scan and store business cards on your tablet with ScanBizCards Lite

No matter what technology we develop, business cards are still a standard in networking circles. They are the first thing you see when you meet someone. But increasingly our lives are managed by the electronic devices we carry, and business cards get lost so easily. So an app like ScanBizCards Lite is perfect to quickly take a photo, scan the contents of the business card and store it for later on your iPad or iPhone.

To start, the app asks if you'd like to register to share your scans with a universal account between devices and your desktop. This … Read more

Twitter scores a patent for Twitter

If you're thinking about copying the way Twitter works, you might want to get a good lawyer: the technology at the core of the social network is officially patented.

As first reported by The Verge, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Twitter a patent today for what it termed a "Device independent message distribution platform:"

A system (and method) for device-independent point to multipoint communication is disclosed. The system is configured to receive a message addressed to one or more destination users, the message type being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), … Read more

Jack Dorsey: Twitter was built in two weeks

Rome may not have been built in a day, but Twitter was built in just two weeks.

During an onstage interview at a Twitter off-site meeting today, co-founder Jack Dorsey (who is also the founder of the mobile payments company, Square) recalled how long it took him to build the first version of the microblogging service: two weeks, according to a tweet from Guy Yalif, a member of Twitter's product marketing team who was present at the event.

.@jack: The first version of @twitter was built in two weeks and was SMS only #MakingHistory twitter.com/gyalif/status/...

— Guy … Read more

Biz Stone, Ron Howard oversee a tweeted movie

They've made so many movies inspired by eating. They've made movies inspired by dancing dirty.

Surely there had to come a time when there'd be a movie inspired by twittering.

Oh, joy, that time has come.

For soon we will witness a tweet-based movie directed by that Hollywood legend Oliver Stone.

No, wait. I have left a stone unturned there. The director is Biz Stone. Yes, that sweet man in glasses who co-founded Twitter.

Those of cynical mind and dubious heart will wonder what on earth Stone knows about directing.

Well, it seems that he will be … Read more

Twitter's first obscenity (and other 6th birthday memories)

It took just 18 minutes for Twitter to go from family-friendly to potty-mouth.

At 12:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006, then-Odeo employee Jack Dorsey upended publishing forever when he posted these fateful words: "just setting up my twttr."

Political movements would never be the same. Local news would forever be scooped on earthquakes. Cat videos would speed around the world at lightspeed. Serious forward progress had been made.

And at 1:08 p.m., it all went downhill with this (probably NSFW) tweet from @jeremy: "Oh, s--t, I just twittered a little."

In all … Read more

It was six years ago today that twttr began to play

If you go to one of the sites that tell you how long a Twitter account has existed, and ask about @jack, @ev, and @biz, you'll find something interesting: All three accounts were registered on March 21, 2006.

For those keeping score at home, that's exactly six years ago. And that makes a lot of sense since those three accounts belong to Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone.

Indeed, today is Twitter's sixth birthday, a number that seems impossibly large. Could it really be that long since then-Odeo employee (and now Square founder and … Read more

Twitter co-founders partner with new startup, Branch

Twitter's co-founders, who now head an incubator site called the Obvious Corporation, announced their involvement in a second project today--Branch. This new Web site will be focused on creating a discussion platform that will "turn the Internet's monologues into dialogues."

"The prototype, called Branch (formerly Roundtable), enables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse," Twitter and Obvious Corporation co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post today. "Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable."

The Branch project is a partnership between … Read more