Twitter

Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter. MIT's Technology Review named him as an outstanding innovator under the age of 35. Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and by age 14, he had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the... open source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by taxicab companies. He went to high school at Bishop DuBourg High School, and attended Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University, where he first conceived the idea for Twitter. While working on dispatching as a programmer he later moved to California. In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market". In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for the realtime status communication.
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Fred Wilson is a New York-based venture capitalist and a prominent blogger. Through his well-known blog and his investment in some of New York's... notable start-up companies over the past decade, he is recognized as a leading voice of the venture capital finance community in New York. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a smaller , newly formed, New York City based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, Covestor, del.icio.us, Etsy, FeedBurner, Heyzap, Indeed.com, Tacoda, Oddcast, Disqus, Zemanta and Clickable. In 1996, Wilson co-founded Flatiron Partners with his partner Jerry Colonna. Flatiron, named after the Flatiron District, became a successful, primarily follow-on investment fund in the New York City area, with investments in notable Dot-com bubble successes and failures including Alacra, comScore Networks, Yoyodyne, Geocities, Kozmo.com, New York Times Digital, PlanetOut, Return Path, Scout electromedia, Standard Media International, Starmedia, and VitaminShoppe.com.
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