Sunday, June 16, 2013

Tristan O’Tierney, Square’s Co-Founder And Early iOS Engineer, Leaves For Destinations Unknown

  Tristan O’Tierney, a co-founder at payment company Square, announced via tweet that yesterday was his last day at the company.
  O’Tierney is less well-known than his co-founders, particularly the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, but according to his LinkedIn profile (where he describes himself as an iOS engineer), his accomplishments include building the original iPhone app, as well as being a “large contributor” to its first iPad app, the first Pay with Square product, and the Register app.
  In a Quora post (answering the question, “Why does Square have so many co-founders?”) O’Tierney writes that he joined with Dorsey and co-founder Jim McKelvey in January 2009. (His prior experience includes working as an iPhone programmer at Tapulous.) Apparently, in those early days the trio worked on Square in Dorsey’s apartment, and Dorsey had to flip up his Murphy bed every morning to make room for his co-founders.
  In his tweet, O’Tierney says he’s not sure what’s next, “except for a bit of traveling!” In a tweet directed at The Next Web’s Jon Russell, he added, “I left on good terms. I just want to do something different. Square’s still in a lot of brilliant hands!”
  I’ve emailed O’Tierney and Square for comment, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
  Update: Square declined to comment.

Microsoft is not doing something new

  In truth, you shouldn't be at-all surprised from the apply. Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance enable slip within an post this past week that Microsoft is paying out builders "$100,000 or more" to construct apps for its Home windows Cellphone platform ¨C a beautiful incentive, confident, for anyone whose budgets are far too constrained or engineering staff members is too busy to port a preferred app above to Windows telephones.

  However, it's crucial to clarify that Microsoft is not doing something new, as Vance's report ¨C and also the subsequent follow-ups prepared by other journalistic entities ¨C may reveal. Microsoft continues to be paying builders for his or her consideration, talent, and app-creation skills for quite a while now, along with the figure goes a lot increased than $100,000.
  In an short article printed in April of previous yr, the new York Times' Jenna Wortham and Nick Wingfield mentioned that, "Microsoft is so established to possess lots of brand-name applications for its Windows Mobile phone application retailer that it's ready to buy them." The incentive, explained even more down from the post, can involve a payment of between $60,000 to $600,000 "depending on the complexity with the app."
  While this sounds just like a subtle kind of bribery, Microsoft's incentives have managed to attain noteworthy results that benefit builders and consumers alike. Choose Foursquare, the instance identified as out in the Times' short article from past 12 months. Without the economic enhance ¨C in this case, paying for an out of doors firm to port Foursquare's application in excess of into the Home windows Phone system ¨C Foursquare would probable not exist on Home windows telephones, period of time.
  Because then, the Microsoft Shop has ballooned up from all over 70,000 applications and games to a hundred forty five,000. And maybe that number has also been boosted a little by Microsoft's second marketing method to motivate developer curiosity: A bounty software that gave builders a $100 Visa present card for each application they published towards the Microsoft Retail store, nearly $2,000 well worth of total benefits, between March 9 and June thirty of the calendar year.
  Obviously, Microsoft is not the only producer that is sought to woo builders with all the promises of cold, tricky cash. RIM doubled the reward pool to $2 million for those participating in its closing "Port-A-Thon" application in January of the 12 months ?a that is following the company saw much more than 15,000 applications submitted over a one-and-a-half-day period of time in its former "Port-A-Thon" occasion. All those building or porting apps have been qualified to generate $100 for every, around a utmost of $2,000, for each app which was accepted into your BlackBerry World application shop.