An ice cream maker, a newspaper publisher, food trucks, pop-up shops, and numerous farmers’ market vendors are among the thousands of small businesses in Detroit using mobile apps invented by Jack Dorsey—namely Twitter and Square—to win customers, manage sales, and save time. In fact, Square has already helped to power $174 million in transactions for 5,500 Detroit businesses, the company claims. And at Techonomy Detroit this week Dorsey said entrepreneurs can expect more developments targeted to their businesses from him in the future. More
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Techonomy and Jack Dorsey Return to Detroit
Techonomy Media proudly announces it is bringing its one-day public conference, Techonomy Detroit, back for a second straight year. A diverse group of business, tech, government, and policy leaders will join in a spirited discussion of how technology is changing everything for the United States and its cities. National and local leaders will converge at Wayne State University on September 17, 2013 for a series of conversations and workshops to focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by headlong tech-driven change. More
A16Z’s Chris Dixon on the Internet of Locks, Cars, New York, and Everything Else
Chris Dixon is a New York guy with a degree in philosophy from Columbia University. He’s also, as of last fall, a partner at hot Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (which shortens its name to A16Z—16 is the number of letters between the A and the Z). All in all, that gives him a pretty interesting point of view on the big technology shift that’s being labeled the Internet of Everything (IoE). Dixon already has quite a track record as an investor and entrepreneur. He co-founded Hunch, which eBay bought for $80 million in 2011, and then started Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture fund. Alone or with a fund, he’s been an early-stage investor in Kickstarter, Pinterest, Foursquare, Dropbox, and Warby Parker. More
Mining Big Data for Programming Talent
Finding and recruiting top programmers remains a huge challenge for fast-growth companies like Square, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Will Big Data come to their rescue? They’re willing to give it a try. These companies—along with other big names like Twitter and Walmart—are all customers of Gild, a startup that leverages information technology to find hidden talent. Gild was developed to tap self-motivated achievers—a cohort rife with what co-founder Dr. Vivienne Ming calls "wasted talent"—who are largely unknown compared to the smaller pool of much-wooed Ivy League graduates. More
How to Fake an Internet Phenom in Five Easy Steps
True story: Kevin Ashton, general manager of consumer electronics firm, Belkin, offers a remarkable step-by-step tutorial in Quartz on how to create the next big household name using social media. It’s easier than you’d think. Using some ingenuity and a little cash ($68, to be exact), Ashton created “Santiago Swallow,” a modern-day Internet celebrity with a verified Twitter account and more than 90,000 followers—who is entirely fake. More
Girls Who Code Aims to Bridge Tech-Sector Gender Gap
Girls Who Code is a Manhattan-based nonprofit aimed at teaching high school girls software programming, public speaking, product development, and other skills that prepare them to launch careers in the tech sector. It's one of a number of recent initiatives designed to encourage young women to set their sights on jobs in the often male-dominated world of tech. Programs like Hackbright Academy, Girl Develop It, Black Girls Code, and Girls Teaching Girls Code seek to bridge the gender gap in tech by offering hands-on computer science instruction for students on the verge of making decisions about their future studies. More
A SimCity for Analyzing Urban Efficiency
New York University's new Center for Urban Science and Progress is launching an initiative to develop sensor and data-crunching technologies aimed at creating a smarter, more efficient city. With partners including I.B.M., Cisco, Xerox, and the New York City government, the center will research and deploy the kind of smart-city technologies already being implemented in cities like Stockhom and Singapore to better manage urban infrastructure, with an emphasis on quality-of-life improvements like noise reduction and traffic abatement. More
Square Launches Gift Card Service
Just in time for the holiday season, Square has launched a new service that lets anyone receive gift cards that can be used at one of the more than 200,000 businesses in Square’s mobile payments system. More
Why Revolution Can’t Come to North Korea
If you woke up tomorrow morning with the desire to, say, overthrow your government, you couldn't have picked a better day. Before you left the house, you could tag some inspirational photos of homemade signs on Facebook; Tweet out a few patriotic blasts with locations of the day's protest spots; email friends, family, and sympathetic bloggers with firsthand reports and mission statements; Skype with a foreign journalist in one of those romantic grainy interviews you see on CNN; and, if you had a few extra minutes, create a Freedom Playlist to rock out to, because every revolution needs a soundtrack. This is the golden age of grassroots regime change. Unless, of course, you woke up in North Korea. More
Instagram Offers Powerful Views of Storm
When I checked my email this morning, my mother, who lives in France, had sent me links to two Instagram photos of the blackout and flooding in lower Manhattan. Some of the most visually stunning impressions of Sandy's impact have been shared via Instagram. According to Forbes.com's Steve Bertoni, even before the storm made landfall, there were 300,026 photos shared on the mobile site under #sandy; 183,003 tagged #hurricanesandy, and 27,564 under #frankenstorm (along with 1,467 photos tagged #huricanesandy, for those whose spelling gets shaky when the wind blows). As power remains out and cell networks stay up, Bertoni predicts Instagram, along with Twitter and Facebook, may prove "one of the key links to the outside world to millions of stranded people." More
Dick Costolo on How Twitter Redefines the Role of News Media
In an interview with WNYC's Jeremy Hobson, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo elaborates on the heightened role that Twitter now plays in society—particularly relevant given the explosion of tweets surrounding the presidential and vice-presidential debates. "We used to have a filtered, one-way view of events in the world from the media," says Costolo. "America's perspective of it, or the world's perspective of that event, would be seen through the lens of the way that the media described it to them." More
Instagram Beats Twitter in Daily Mobile Users
A picture says 1000 words—or at least more than 140 characters. Instagram has beaten Twitter in daily mobile users for the first time, according toAllThingsD via an unpublished comScore report. More
Young Detroit Entrepreneurs Need Mentorship, Says Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, talked to MLive.com about the future of Detroit after speaking at last week’s Techonomy Detroit conference. Dorsey said that Detroit has reached a turning point, and mentorship is essential for the city’s burgeoning tech scene. While Detroit doesn’t have the experience level of Silicon Valley, local leaders like Dan Gilbert should spend time with young entrepreneurs because it “passes along the torch in ways nothing else can,” Dorsey said. “I think this conference is a start.… Actually seeing someone in the flesh, seeing them on stage and seeing them talk about what they did well, what they did poorly, and what they’re trying to do better at.” Although Detroit has seen an increase in homegrown tech startups, if the city is to truly overcome its formidable economic and structural challenges it needs strong entrepreneurial leadership. Perhaps it will come from someone like Dorsey—who doesn't hide his aspiration to one day transition from tech entrepreneur to mayor of New York City. More
Why Techonomy Detroit?
People keep asking, "Why are you doing a Techonomy conference in Detroit?" We're known for our invite-only annual retreat in the desert near Tucson. So why, you may wonder, is our first one-day event in a gritty, depressed, financially-troubled city that seems well past its glory? More
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