Oct 18

Twitter co-founder’s ‘Square’ comes into focus

By jason IT News World No Comments »

 

Well, we finally have a glimpse at "Square," the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it’s a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the "Square iPhone Payments Venture" first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.

Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO almost exactly a year ago, is headquartering the company in New York, though we hear he already has employees in both Gotham and San Francisco. Its Web site will likely be located at SquareUp.com. Currently, that site is a collection of links to a smattering of businesses, including Sightglass Coffee, a new San Francisco coffee shop in which Dorsey has invested. (Wanna bet they’re testing Square out there?)

From Coolhunting:

The innovation is in a small, plastic card reader that fits in to the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. After the employee enters the amount to charge, the customer confirms by scrawling their signature with their finger and then either one enters the customer’s email address to send the receipt to. The payment is processed by Square for a small percentage plus a fixed fee; the funds are transferred directly to the store’s bank account, cutting both time and complexity on the processing side. The customer’s receipt includes a map showing the location of the transaction which is handy for those who record, sort and file such things.

We heard that the venture is being called Square rather than "Squirrel," its originally reported name (according to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, this is because it looks kind of like an acorn) due to some unclear legal-copyright-licensing-whatnot issue. CNET News first reported the name change along with the news that Dorsey had been an angel investor in location-based mobile navigation start-up Foursquare.

Funding a hardware venture is typically more expensive than a Web-based one for obvious reasons: the up-front cost of production and manufacturing.

But two sources with knowledge of Square’s logistics said that Dorsey believes he can keep production costs extremely low, possibly manufacturing a "square" at a cost of about 40 cents apiece. The company may then even give the devices away for free, making money instead on transaction fees. That’s the old Gillette razor business model–make the razors cheap or even free, but replacement blades more expensive.

Regardless, we hear Dorsey has been working on a funding round.

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Sep 26

Twitter confirms new round of funding

By jason IT News World 1 Comment »

Yes, Twitter’s megacash infusion is real. CEO Evan Williams confirmed on the company blog Friday that Twitter has raised a new round of investment from Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital.

Williams says it’s "a significant round." He didn’t say just how close it was to the roughly $100 million that The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Nor did he say whether this values Twitter at $1 billion.

"It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value," Williams wrote in the blog post. "Twitter’s journey has just begun, and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I’m proud of the team we’ve built so far, and I’m confident in the future we’ll build together."

Before the end of the year, Twitter is expected to start rolling out paid corporate accounts to businesses that use the service for marketing, promotion, and customer service.

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Aug 22

The real Facebook-Twitter turf war: Marketers

By jason IT News World 2 Comments »

On Thursday night, Facebook announced that it’s launched its first official Twitter app–sort of. In a post on the company blog, Facebook announced that updates to "fan pages," public profiles for celebrities, brands, organizations, and what-have-you, can now be sent out through Twitter.

"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time."

This is basically something that many blogging and publishing services already do: offer a way to automatically syndicate a short blurb and a link onto Twitter. It’s a no-brainer. But Facebook and Twitter have a complicated history. Facebook attempted to acquire Twitter last year, and Twitter turned the offer down. Then, earlier this summer, Facebook did acquire FriendFeed, a social-network aggregator that failed to gain mainstream traction but pioneered many of the real-time, streaming features that are now central to both Facebook and Twitter.

Relations between the two companies still seem to be a bit shaky. Facebook continues to roll out Twitter-inspired features like a souped-up search engine, a revamped "publisher" tool that can make status updates selectively public, and soon a stripped down "Facebook Lite" site that looks quite a bit like the ultra-basic Twitter.

Much has been said about Facebook and Twitter as the two forces vying for control of the real-time social Web, but little light has been shed on just how central a role the marketing industry has. The fact that Facebook’s first Twitter app is exclusively for its brand-marketing "fan pages" highlights this. In the digital marketing world, the buzzworthy place for brands to be right now is Twitter–especially since this week Twitter started to elaborate plans for the paid accounts it’s going to offer to businesses by the end of the year. If Facebook is going to continue to court brands effectively, it has to offer a quick and easy way to plug into that all-important "Twitter strategy."

What’s less clear is whether Facebook will let ordinary users syndicate their profile updates to Twitter. Currently, they can bring in plenty of data from elsewhere thanks to Facebook’s third-party developer API. You can import a Twitter feed into Facebook status updates or use third-party clients like TweetDeck to update Twitter status and Facebook status simultaneously, but you still can’t opt to publish your Facebook profile updates elsewhere.

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Jun 18

Microsoft veteran launches Twitter search engine

By jason IT News World No Comments »

The former head of Microsoft’s search unit may have left Redmond, but he is still very much in the search game.

Ken Moss, who led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years, has spent the last months building CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that aims to allow users to better mine Twitter to get a pulse on hot topics.

The service, which is going into public beta on Thursday, offers up not only the latest tweets on a topic, but also a list of the most popular links on a topic and a tag cloud of associated terms.

I think that real-time search is the next big thing in search," Moss said in a telephone interview. "It’s an area that has been underexploited to date."

Searching Twitter is good for news, he said, but also for things such as finding the latest viral video or a solution to a new software bug.

Of course, Moss is not alone in this thinking. Twitter has its own search engine, while others such as Topsy and OneRiot, are also mining the twitterverse.

Among its features, CrowdEye has a historical view that allows one to see how the discussion on a topic has evolved. Although, for now, that historical period is only three days.

"Right now that’s all we support, but its definitely something I’d anticipate growing over time," Moss said.

Moss has been working on CrowdEye for about nine months. For now, his only other co-worker is his wife, Becca Moss, also a former ‘softie.

"Right now it is still the two of us for now, but we hope to expand that soon," Moss said.

Moss said he looks forward to listening to feedback once the product goes public and already has a long to-do list of things he would like to add, things such as adding more real-time sources beyond twitter.

"I think there’s a very long list of exciting improvements that will take us a long while," he said.

The plan to launch CrowdEye was noted earlier by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley and on Seattle-area news site TechFlash.

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Jun 15

Twitter affects Mac, iPhone apps

By jason IT News World No Comments »

The surging popularity of the Twitter messaging service has broken at least one Twitter client application and affected another as a part of what is being called “the Twitpocalypse.”

Each message on Twitter is assigned a unique identification number. On Friday evening, the number of tweets exceeded 2,147,483,6471. While that doesn’t seem like a round number, it’s the largest number that can be stored as the data type known as a “signed integer.” Once that number was exceeded, some versions of some Twitter client apps could break in a fashion similar to what was expected during the Y2K “millennium bug” era.

The first apparent victim of the Twitpocalypse was The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific for iPhone, which stopped working immediately following the event. Though The Iconfactory released a version of the app that the company felt addressed the Twitpocalypse, apparently that assumption was incorrect. Twitterrific users on the iPhone and iPod touch who attempt to contact the service will receive a “YAJL error 3” indication.

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