dicks

Consumers unhappy about the prospect of paying more to shop online aren't alone.

Online retailers are objecting to a proposed federal law to levy sales taxes on Internet shoppers, saying it's unreasonable to expect small businesses to comply with the detailed -- and sometimes conflicting -- regulations of nearly 10,000 government tax collectors.

The U.S. Senate began debate on the tax measure, S.743, Monday afternoon, capping years of lobbying by the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represent big box stores including including Walmart, Target, AutoZone, Best Buy, Home Depot, OfficeMax, … Read more

The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly today to endorse levying Internet sales taxes on American shoppers, despite warnings from a handful of senators that the proposal is antibusiness, harmful to taxpayers, and will be a "bureaucratic nightmare."

By a vote of 75 to 24, senators adopted an amendment to a Democratic budget resolution that, by allowing states to "collect taxes on remote sales," is intended to eventually usher in the first national Internet sales tax.

The vote follows a week of fierce lobbying from the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represent … Read more

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the social-networking giant won't "make the kind of sacrifices" necessary to be allowed to work in China and Iran.

In an interview with the The Wall Street Journal published today, Costolo addressed the question of whether Twitter would like to be available in China and Iran by replying that the company is not willing to filter out the kind of politically sensitive material that government officials in those two countries would require in order to be allowed to function there.

Costolo also said a Twitter IPO is "not necessarily inevitable&… Read more

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I'll admit it, I misjudged Vine. Here's why.

One of the first things I read about Vine, Twitter's new stand-alone video app for iPhone and iPod Touch, was Jack Dorsey's gushing tweet about the service.

"Vine is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while," Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder (and also founder of Square), tweeted yesterday morning. "Not just because of the team, because it brings an entirely new art form to the world."

I … Read more

Twitter's CEO may have teased the company's own hosted video service in a tweet this morning.

As Twitter has aimed to take more control over the services its users rely on, it has consolidated access to photo-sharing, restricted third-party clients, and clamped down on developers. It has also made acquisitions aimed at bolstering its own offerings. Among them have been those that have led to Twitter's official search tool, its purchase of TweetDeck, and others.

One recent acquisition, according to AllthingsD, was Vine, a video clip service that never launched.

Today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo posted a tweet (… Read more

If there was one thing you could say about Twitter's 2012, it was that it wasn't boring. Over the course of the year, the service became bigger than ever, hosted major events like a Q&A with President Obama and another with Pope Benedict XVI, and became an essential tool for those looking for information about everything from Hurricane Sandy to the civil war in Syria.

But 2012 was also contentious for Twitter. The microblogging service put new restrictions on what it would allow third-party developers to do, and then had to deal with a rebellion by … Read more

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told a London audience earlier this week that the microblogging service is now processing half a billion tweets a day, according to a published report.

According to V3, Costolo, speaking at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference in the U.K. capital, revealed the half-billion number, which is up from 400 million daily tweets, the last official number Twitter had publicized.

In the same talk, Costolo also confirmed recent reports that Twitter is testing out "like" and star buttons to potentially replace the "favorite" tool the service has used for years. … Read more

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey struck back at a New York Times report that he'd lost his operational role at the company after Twitter employees had found Dorsey "difficult to work with."

In a post on his personal Tumblr, Dorsey wrote that while he'd taken an operational role overseeing product, brand and design in the spring of 2011 at the request of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the two executives had always intended to shift those functions back to Costolo "as soon as possible." This past January, "[w]e moved all my reports back to … Read more

Twitter isn't interested in selling out, the company has no plans to go public, nor does it feel any pressure from its investors to get ready for an IPO.

That was the word from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, whose recent interview with CNBC was aired this morning.

"Nothing external to the company has had any bearing on how I think about when to take Twitter public or not to," Costolo told CNBC, adding that he's not interested in selling the company. "We have every hope and belief that we will be a successful -- independent … Read more