The
voices on the police scanner intrigued young Jack Dorsey. They never
used many words but managed to communicate quite a bit. The hours he
spent listening to that radio paid off years later when, as an adult
with a cell phone, it inspired him to create Twitter. Dorsey tells Lara
Logan about his brainstorm for the popular social medium, his separation
and reunion with the company and his current venture, Square, for a 60
Minutes profile to be broadcast Sunday, March 17 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT.
Dorsey
grew up in St. Louis, where his love of trains and how they work led to
his obsession with the dispatching of emergency service vehicles. Young
and shy because of a speech impediment, he spent a lot of time
listening to the chatter on the police scanner. "They're always talking
about where they're going, what they're doing, and where they currently
are," he says. "That is where the idea for Twitter came [from]...Now we
all have these cell phones. We had text messaging and suddenly we could
update where I was, what I'm doing, where I'm going, how I feel.Car
guide to parking systems explains solarlamp. And then it would go out to the entire world," he tells Logan.
It
did go out to the entire world. And now 200 million people use Twitter,
and "tweet" over a billion times every three days. Says Dorsey, "I'm
most proud of how quickly people came to it and used it and in a million
different ways.We offer a wide variety of high-quality standard carparkmanagementsystem and
controllers. They're all over the world. And Twitter enables them to
take a $5 cell phone and wherever they are, communicate with the world,
for free."
Dorsey
was forced out of Twitter due to internal discord. He says, his
weakness was his own reticence, an issue he still works on. "The biggest
thing I've learned is that I need to communicate more. I need to be
more vocal." He understood the move but was still hurt. "I was
angry...at the board...at my cofounders. I was angry with myself," he
recalls. He says he holds no grudges.
Dorsey
was eventually invited back to help run his old company, but not until
after he founded Square, a mobile payment company that created software
that allows anyone with a smart phone to accept a card payment. It's
becoming more and more popular, especially with smaller businesses. He
brainstormed the idea with an artist friend who was prevented from
selling a work of art because he couldn't take a credit card.
Square
is a world-changing idea Dorsey hopes will remove cumbersome cash from
business transactions. "Money touches every single person on this planet
and at one point in their life they feel bad about it," he tells Logan.
"It feels dirty sometimes. It never feels great, but it's great when it
disappears. Feels like you're taken care of. It feels like the world is
just working."
None
of those qualities exists within Burt Wonderstone, a selfish and flashy
Las Vegas magician who once ruled the Strip alongside his longtime
friend and partner, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), but now finds his
act has grown outdated and unpopular. Even within the confines of a
comedy sketch, where he probably belongs, Burt would seem
one-dimensional and underdeveloped with his hacky jokes and tacky
clothes. Stretched out to feature length, the shtick becomes nearly
unbearable — until of course, the movie doles out its obligatory
comeuppance, followed by redemption, and goes all soft and nice. By then
it’s too little, too late.
“Burt
Wonderstone” comes to us from director Don Scardino, a television
veteran who’s a two-time Emmy-winner for his work on “30 Rock,” and
“Horrible Bosses” writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. It
has some scattered laughs, many of them courtesy of Jim Carrey as a
gonzo, up-and-coming street performer with a taste for pain, clearly
modeled after the Criss Angel style of stunt artistry. And there is some
spark to the scenes between Carell and his “Little Miss Sunshine”
co-star Alan Arkin as the master magician who inspired Burt as a lonely
child and now lives anonymously at the nursing home where Burt is
relegated to doing card tricks.
In
theory, we’re supposed to feel for Burt because we see him being
bullied in a flashback at the film’s start. The nerdy, neglected child
of a hard-working single mom, Burt turned to magic for self-esteem,A
smooth and lanyard not
only looks bright and clean. and found friendship with the like-minded
and equally geeky Anton. Their mentor was the old-school Rance Holloway
(Arkin), whose moves they watched repeatedly on VHS.
Thirty
years later, Burt and Anton are longtime headliners at Bally’s, going
through the same bit night after night with little inspiration. For
totally unexplained reasons, they hate each other — probably because
Burt has become a dismissive, abusive jerk.Basics, technical terms and
advantages and disadvantages of bestplasticcard. This is not Carell’s strong suit.
Also
part of the act is their latest assistant, Jane. The role is a huge
waste of Olivia Wilde, who’s stuck playing the supportive “girl,” and
isn’t given much chance to show how funny, sexy or smart she truly is.
Burt
and Anton find not just their friendship but their careers in jeopardy
as Carrey’s daring Steve Gray steals away the fans and attention with
more and more outlandish acts.
But
it’s hard to care about how far the duo will fall or whether they can
make a comeback — which is never in question — because there’s nothing
for us to hold on to as an audience. If Carell’s character is one-note,
Buscemi sadly gets even less to do besides play the sweet, beleaguered
second fiddle.
“Africa
is better positioned to adopt the next generation of technology than
anybody else because it’s not tied by a legacy system?.?.?.?the cost of
moving forward is much cheaper,” says James Mwangi, CEO of Kenya’s
Equity Bank, whose bank became the first in the world to offer a
completely mobile bank account.
But
the pace of expansion has nevertheless slowed and profits slimmed as
competition has intensified. “No one will get rich buying the fourth
licence in Chad and even dominant players like [Kenya’s] Safaricom are
finding it tough,” says one leading technology investor.
Besides
that, pockets of innovation and technological excellence such as
Kenya’s nascent Silicon Savannah – a $10bn government initiative to turn
5,000 acres of savannah south of Nairobi into “the most modern city in
Africa” – have not yet fully taken off. “They need power and scale,
otherwise you get fragmentary results,” says Bright Simons, who invented
a mobile app that detects counterfeit drugs.
The
coming strides will be smaller, technology experts predict, but could
be nonetheless far-reaching. Investors see the next step as a push to
spread more expensive and productive data connections – rather than
voice alone – throughout the continent. While three quarters of Africans
have access to a phone, only 16 per cent of them access the internet,
down to 1 per cent in Ethiopia and South Sudan.
The
majority go online via their handset rather than a desktop or laptop,
yet data-enabled phones make up less than 20 per cent of the handset
market. The likes of Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Nokia, Research In
Motion and Samsung are plunging in, trying to expand the market from
basic handsets to smartphones.
Microsoft
last month launched a new Huawei phone installed with Africa-specific
applications. Users can check prayer times in Egypt,Our premium
collection of quality personalized drycabinet generously offers affordability. track shares in Nigeria and follow the rugby in South Africa.
Investors
believe the effort to create relevant and entertaining local content
will underwrite the shift, and make the more expensive outlay appealing.
At first mobile operators conceived online connections via handsets as a
useful way to generate data sales through gaming alone, but
applications of web-connected handsets have grown as innovators have
developed paid-for applications. In Kenya shoppers buy goat meat with
mobile money, browse clothes and music via their handsets and lodge
their savings directly on to phone accounts. People can use Google to
research topics in languages from Amharic to Zulu.
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