Dick Costolo, ceo at Twitter

D ick is CEO at Twitter. Previously, as Chief Operating Officer, he was responsible for monetization and the day to day operations of the business. Before joining Twitter, he was cofounder and CEO of Feed Burner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in the summer of 2007. At Google, Dick was Group Product Manager on the Ads team responsible for social media ads.

Costolo spent most of the 90’s in Chicago founding and running two other digital media companies: SpyOnIt, a web page monitoring service of which he was CEO, and Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company. Dick also performed in multiple productions with the acclaimed Annoyance Theater. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Computer Science. In May 2011 it was announced that President Obama had appointed Dick Costolo to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee along with Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group Scott Charney and McAfee President of Security David DeWalt.

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, the Twitter website has become one of the top 10 most visited on the Internet, and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.” Unregistered users can read the tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices.

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Eric Schmidt, the ict Business Leader

E ric Schmidt is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google. Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the software program analysis for the Unix computer operating system. According to Google’s website, Schmidt also focuses on “building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum.”

Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors on August 28, 2006. On August 3, 2009, it was announced that Schmidt would resign from the board of directors at Apple due to conflict of interests amid the growing competition between Google and Apple.

S chmidt was a campaign advisor and major donor to Barack Obama and Obama even has considered him for Commerce Secretary. Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the chief technology officer position which Obama created in his administration. After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama’s transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the problems of the United States at once, at least in the domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. He has since become a new member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology PCAST.

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