Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Evan Williams

Kevin Rose Believed To Be Joining Google To Work On Social Efforts

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:58:01 +0000

In April 2011, Kevin Rose started working full-time at a mobile development company called Milk. Milk launched a food and restaurant recommendation app called Oink, which was downloaded about 150,000 times in its first month as a free app. Rose is known for launching the social bookmarking website Digg.com and being a host of the popular podcast called Diggnation. Google has hired Kevin Rose through some sort of acqui-hire deal.

Google did not buy Oink or the technology. However it is rumored that Rose will be heavily involved in the social efforts at Google. According to TechCrunch, Milk’s investors put in about $1.7 million and the price of the acqui-hire deal was somewhere in the range of $15-$30 million. Google had to outbid Facebook for the deal too.

Google will be hiring eight of the team members from Milk. Investors in Milk include Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, and Shervin Pishevar. Milk shut down the Oink app yesterday.

Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Other Tech Company Execs Sign Petition Against SOPA

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:49:35 +0000

Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX). This Act would allow the Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement that would prevent online ad networks and payment facilitators from doing business with those websites. Opponents in this bill believe that this is Internet censorship. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang oppose the bill. Their letter will appear as a paid ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

The timing of this letter coincides with the scheduled committee vote taking place tomorrow with a revised version of the Act. The revision of SOPA will “give the U.S. government the power to censor the Web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran.” Below is the full letter from the Internet executives:

An Open Letter to Washington
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act–which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online–will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
* Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
* Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
* Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
* Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Twitter Co-Founders Hint At New Project

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:21:25 +0000

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have announced a new project called Lift. Lift is expected to be a new application that will unlock the human potential, whatever that means. This project will be under the company Obvious Corporation, which was founded by Williams several years ago.

Obvious was brought back to life by Biz Stone and former Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. “Our approach is threefold: Build, partner, and invest,” Stone said on the company blog. “We’ve started working on some ideas ourselves, we’re researching how best to create an investment vehicle, and today we’re thrilled to announce our first official partnership.”

Stone wrote that Lift has partnered with Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby. Stubblebine and Crosby will be driving the project while Obvious will provide resources to get it off the ground and running. The product is still in private alpha mode.

Stone, Williams & Goldman Leave Twitter to Bring Back The Obvious Corporation

Riley Kennysmith — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:10:54 +0000

Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, men responsible for Twitter, plan to re-start their former company The Obvious Corporation. Obvious was a company they formed prior to Twitter’s fame, and abandoned in favor of focusing on Twitter. The reborn Obvious will, in Stone’s words, “help people work together to improve the world.” What that means, exactly, is unclear, but it sounds like it will be a source of innovative products. All three have stepped back or resigned from Twitter to return focus to The Obvious Corporation. [TechCrunch]

Kevin Rose’s Milk Inc. Raises $1.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 06:04:55 +0000

Milk Inc. is a new company that was co-founded by Kevin Rose. Rose is the founder of Digg and co-founder of Revision3. Milk is essentially a company where several developers brainstorm technology and mobile ideas and works away at building them. If there isn’t any sudden traction, then the project gets shut down. Milk has raised $1.5 million in angel funding from well known investors. Investors include Mike Maples, Jr. (Floodgate), David Sze (Greylock Partners), Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Tony Hsieh, Gary Vaynerchuk, and several others. [VentureBeat]

Noah Glass Came Up With The Name Twitter And He Considers Himself A Co-Founder

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:29:22 +0000

BusinessInsider.com did a thorough interview with Noah Glass. Glass worked at Odeo before the idea for Twitter even came up at that company. Glass was fired from Odeo, the former parent company of Twitter back in 2006. Glass was a co-founder of Odeo, who had an investor that eventually became CEO Evan Williams. Odeo was a podcasting start-up company that faced immense competition from iTunes. Williams told everyone at Odeo to come up with a different idea.

Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and developer Florian Webber pitched Twitter to Williams. Glass came up with the name himself. Twitter spun out of Odeo as its own company after Williams liked the idea. Williams bought back the assets, including Twitter back from investors and renamed the company Obvious. Glass was fired shortly after.

Glass strongly believes that he should be considered a co-founder in Twitter, but he is never acknowledged in the origin. When working at Odeo, Glass found out that Dorsey was not interested in the project he was working on either. Both became obsessed with Twitter after they came up with the idea.

“We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. There was a moment where it all fit together for me,” stated Glass in the interview. “We went back to Odeo and put together a team. A very separate working team, mostly it was myself, Jack, and Florian [Webber], a contractor. [Florian] was working from Germany at the time.”

When asked about whether he has equity in Obvious, Glass said that he didn’t walk away with anything initially. At a later time, he received a certain amount of equity in Twitter. And he received a small amount of cash during the buyback.

How Mark Zuckerberg Made An Acquisition Offer To The Twitter Team

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:44:25 +0000

Biz Stone recently did an interview with Howard Stern. During the interview, Stone discussed how Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed a buy-out for Twitter back in 2008.

Facebook offered Twitter $500 million to acquire them in 2008. Stone told Stern that one day he showed up to work and Twitter employee Jason Goldman told him that Evan Williams was waiting in a car downstairs.

After Stone got into the car, he did not know that the Dorsey and Williams had a meeting scheduled with Zuckerberg to talk about the acquisition. After casually talking about a price, Stone thought of $500 million.

After entering a meeting room, Mark Zuckerberg took the only single chair in the room. Biz Stone and Evan Williams had to share a small love seat to discuss the price with Zuckerberg. Biz attempted to tell a few jokes, but they did not really work. “It seemed like he had twelve people in his head,” said Biz in the interview, “He was prepared for every scenario.”

Zuckerberg said that he did not like to talk numbers but said he would say “yes” or “no” to a specific number that they asked for. After they said $500 million, Zuckerberg said “that’s a big number.” There eventually was an offer in cash and stock, but Williams decided to tell him no thanks.

You can hear the whole interview here: http://matthewkeys.net/sterntwitter.mp3

[TechCrunch]

Jack Dorsey Back At Twitter As Head Of Product Development, While Remaining Square CEO

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:45:16 +0000

Jack Dorsey is returning to Twitter as the head of product development. Evan Williams will no longer be overseeing the product development, but he will remain on the board of directors. Twitter has been looking for another exec to lead the product design of the company since Jason Goldman left.

Williams had replaced Dorsey as the CEO in 2008. Over the last 3 years, Dorsey has been focused on creating a mobile payment company called Square. Apparently Williams has been spending long periods of time in Tahoe to come up with a new start-up idea.

Dorsey’s title will be executive chairman. “Twitter’s three co-founders — Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jack — have unselfishly played whatever role was most needed at the time to nurture the company and help the product reach its full potential,” said a Twitter company statement. Dorsey confirmed that he will remain as the CEO Of Square.

[NYT]

Twitter Surpasses 200 Million Accounts and 110 Million Tweets Per Day

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 07:32:54 +0000

Twitter has hit 200 million registered accounts. Of these 200 million accounts, about 110 million tweets are being sent out per day. This is up from 160 million users from September 2010. In December, Twitter was hitting about 95 million tweets per day.

Twitter recently launched in the Korean language and they have partnered with two Korean companies. They partnered with LG Uplus to allow users to tweet using SMS in Korea. Twitter had also made a partnership with local Korean search engine Daum. Daum users will also be able to log in to Twitter simultaneously and post tweets. In 2010, Twitter saw 3,400% growth in Korean language tweets. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was in Korea when he made the announcement.

Google Fires About 2 People Per Month For Leaking Secrets To The Media

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:45:02 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is now firing about 2 people per month for leaking information to the media. It is known as the “NYT effect” in reference to a New York Times article that criticizes how bloated and bureaucratic Google has become. Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, has complained publicly about how Google handled the acquisition of Blogger before Google had their IPO. Blogger was a company that Williams founded and he was told that he would have a lot of power to hire people for the Blogger team. Hiring people on the Blogger team became a nightmare for him when Google had their IPO. [TechCrunch]