Twitter plans on completing its $800 million round of funding within the next two weeks, according to AllThingsDigital.
Half of the funding is intended to help investors and employees cash out in an "organized and legal manner."
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Montreal's Father Thomas Dowd is only 40 years old—but the tech-savvy "Facebooking Father" is poised to become Canada's youngest Catholic bishop and the second youngest in the world.
Thomas will be ordained in early september. His age makes him stand out from other bishops, no doubt—or should I say "no dowd"?—but just as differentiating is his tech background.
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1. Harry Potter.
The eighth and final movie in this epic fantasy saga launched at midnight this morning. Twitter users in Canada—and everywhere else, really—have been going nuts talking about the end of this decade-long movie series (they're books, too, by the way). "Gryffindor," "Albus Severus Potter," and "Neville Longbottom" are just some of the HP-related TTs that have been swirling about the Twittersphere these past couple days.
2. Rupert Murdoch and co.
Talk about controversy. Rupert Murdoch gained massive Twitter fame (and not the good kind) this week after he axed major British newspaper News of the World in a bid to take over television channel British Sky Broadcasting, a deal that ended up flopping anyway. NotW editor Rebekah Brooks has now quit amid allegations that the paper was involved in big-time phone hacking scandals. This story is only just beginning.
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Twitter was by no means a lightning bolt out of the gate. The peculiar, 140-character-based "real-time information network" was a niche on a good day and a straight-up outcast on a bad one.
It took Twitter 16 months, or nearly 500 days, to reach its first 600,000 users. And now? It signed up 600,000 people yesterday alone.
Twitter, who is celebrating its fifth birthday today, also revealed that on July 15th, 2006—its launch day—224 tweets were sent. Today, that many tweets are occurring more often than every tenth of a second, for a total of nearly 300,000,000 per day.
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Twitter's constant flow of real-time conversations and news has got people hooked: Twitter users in Canada average over 33 hours a week online, while their non-Twitter counterparts clock in just 17 hours online weekly, according to a CBC/Radio-Canada and BBM Analytics joint study.
Time spent accessing the internet has tripled for even the casual users: in 1997, weekly online time was less than 5 hours, the study notes.
read moreGoogle+ is blazing up the charts, racking up 10 million users in just two weeks, despite being invite-only and despite launching with out a lot of marketing and hype-up beforehand.
Google's social network is growing at a truly staggering pace. The company has not gone public with any user base numbers, but Ancestry.com's Paul Allen devised a methodology to calculate an estimate. It involves using surname data from the U.S. Census Bureau to hazard an educated guess as to how many American users there are, and a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate numbers globally.
His result is an approximate 9.5 million users worldwide. And with more than 2 million having joined in the past day and a half, the 10 million mark is just around the bend—if not already here.
Google+ wouldn't have to keep up this pace very long to become a serious contender in the social networking space. And considering that, out of the gate, social network numbers are generally slow and tend to pick up momentum after a year or three (think Twitter and Facebook), this could be the beginning of a tremendous surge. In a year, Google+ could have over 250 million users based on its current pace, or much more if it gained momentum—which would mark for a growth rate simply out of this world.
Twitter blogged today that it has achieved a milestone: there are now one million apps in the Twitter ecosystem.
The real-time social information network, which is an app unto itself when on platforms like the iOS, has seen 750,000 developers craft a total of one million registered third-party apps, 150,000 more than a year prior. Analytics, curation, and publisher tools are surging future growth, currently pegged at 40 new apps being registered per second—again, all for Twitter.
The company has also launched a new developer site.
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The Advenures of Tom Sawyer is a novel by Mark Twain. Published on 1876, the tale is remains a popular classic to this day.
In the book, Tom Sawyer is a mischievous young boy. One day he is caught skipping school and fighting another boy. As punishment, Tom's Aunt Polly orders him to whitewash the picket fence that surrounds their property.
Tom doesn't want to do it, naturally. There are things he'd much rather do instead. When a fellow schoolboy taunts him, Tom gets an idea: he pretends to enjoy his chore. In fact, he pretends to enjoy it so much that his friends want in on the fun. Tom plays hard to get, insisting only he deserves to enjoy such a task as painting the fence. Finally, he relents—but only on the condition that his friends pay him for the honour of whitewashing.
The common extraction of meaning from this Mississippi River parable is that in life, there are no absolutes; Mark Twain's mordant point is that humans can be manipulated to do things that fall out of line with the curiously rare "common" sense we all talk about.
It can be argued that Tom Sawyer is a forefather of Web 2.0.
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BackType announced this morning on their blog that they have been acquired by Twitter.
We’re thrilled to announce that BackType has been acquired by Twitter! We’ll be bringing our team and technology to Twitter’s platform team, where our focus will be developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners.
Our vision at BackType has always been to help our customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. We also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed the BackType team will be relocating to the Twitter office.
BackType, which is based in San Francisco, has raised $1.3 million in venture capital since launching out of Y-Combinator in 2008.
Techvibes readers will recognize BackType as we've been covering them since University of Toronto grads Christopher Golda and Mike Montano pledged their summer to startup incubator Y-Combinator and in three months fleshed out the app.
The iTunes 2011 Festival kicks off at the Roundhouse in London today and will run to the end of the month. For those that can't afford the round trip ticket across the Atlantic, music fans can watch the show through iTunes on their computer or download the iTunes Festival app for iPhone, iPod, or iPod Touch.
With the Festival app, users can read up on festival news and information -- as well as see updated photos from the shows. As for the performances, users can watch them live or download later -- all for free!
This year's featured artists include Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Adele, Linkin Park, Paul Simon and many more. Follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #itunesfestival to take part in concert-related tweets.