9781422287231 Twitter®: How Jack Dorsey Changed the Way We Communicate

CHAPTER ONE

Childhood Fascination

J ack Dorsey is more than just a successful entrepreneur ; he is an innovator. Innovative people find ways to make something new and useful using tools that already exist. As a master programmer and dispatch enthusiast , Jack combined his two interests to invent something new: a way to communicate online using short strings of text. Twitter posts only allow users to write up to 140 characters, or letters, per post. Later on, Jack thought about other ways to make the world a better place. While people had been using credit cards online and in large retail stores for years, there was no way for small merchants to charge customers on the go. Jack came up with the idea that led to Square, an application for smartphones that allows merchants to swipe credit cards using a piece