By Kelly Faircloth 5/16 3:30pm

Fresh Capital

They'll also STING YOUR FACE OFF. (Photo: Flickr, Garrett Rooney)

You Jelly? Jack Dorsey, Al Gore, Bono Invest in Biz Stone’s Stealth Startup

Biz Stone’s mysterious new startup, Jelly, has just closed a Series A.

An announcement on the company’s Tumblr didn’t disclose the total amount raise, but revealed that Spark Capital raised the round, with SV Angel piling on, as well.

Also participating are several individual investors who, we can only assume, were rounded up in the parking lot of last year’s TED conference: Jack Dorsey, Bono, Al Gore, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Where Good Ideas Come From author Steven Johnson, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, House (?!) director Greg Yaitanes, and Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob. Read More

By Jessica Roy 7/25/12 12:15pm

Faux Followers

It's meeeeee. (Photo: Straight From the A)

Which Twitter Founder Has the Most Fake Followers?

We wrote about the sketchy world of fake Facebook fans back in May, but the phenomenon is apparently just as rampant and shady on Twitter. To shed some light on the truth about fake Twitter followers, social media management startup Status People developed a tool that studies a sample set of 500 followers to determine what percentage of them are fake, inactive and good.

Fake followers are suspected spam bots; inactive are followers that haven’t tweeted in a while; and good are followers that are actively engaged.

Naturally, our first inclination was to plug in the cofounders of Twitter to see what their percentages looked like. Turns out they have some pretty inflated follower numbers. Read More

By Jessica Roy 5/02/12 11:06am

Commenting Wars

Mr. Miller (joshm.co)

Branching Out: How Josh Miller Went From Princeton Dropout to Alley Darling in Just Nine Months

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Josh Miller, the precocious 21-year-old Princeton dropout behind Branch, one of tech’s most buzzed-about new startups, took The Observer on a tour of the Obvious Corporation, a growing operation helmed by the cofounders of Twitter that advises and invests in an elite set of fledgling tech companies, Branch among them.

The San Francisco office radiated industrial California coziness, with tall windows and exposed pipes, dark grey walls and a fridge overflowing with Vitamin Water. Mr. Miller, who is tall and insouciant, with the laid-back linguistic tenor of one who spent his childhood in Santa Monica, bustled about the office, seemingly unthreatened by the fact that he is both much younger and less experienced than the majority of Obvious employees.

“Check this out!” he called from a breezy conference room with a panoramic view of downtown San Francisco. He pointed to a wet bar fully stocked with top-shelf bottles. “You know, I’m just out of college, so sometimes I’m, like, afraid to drink any of this because it’s so expensive! It’s like, where’s the Franzia?” he joked, referring to the cheap boxed wine favored by destitute college students. Read More

By Jessica Roy 2:27pm

Office Space

6 Photos

The view from one of the conference rooms.

Inside the Super Secret Obvious Corporation HQ

Not much is known about the Obvious Corporation, the new-ish, incubator-ish company that’s the brainchild of Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone. Their website is sparse and coy: the only companies that they are publicly known to be working with are Lift, a social network for human potential, and dialogue platform Branch. They also announced this week that they’d invested in Neighborland, a site that seeks to create meaningful connections between neighbors.

The Obvious Offices are located in downtown San Francisco, near the Powell St. BART stop, just around the corner from the Apple store, which is convenient because everyone at Obvious uses Apple products. Macbook Airs, iPads, Magic Mice and Apple wireless keyboards: Tim Cook would not be disappointed. Read More