Sebastian Thrun

Thrun wore his Google Glasses prototypes through his interview — as he says he does all the time — and talked about that project, Google’s self-driving cars, Google X in general, and his new online education start-up, Udacity. Dorsey talked Twitter and Square, as well as his angel investment in Instagram.

Both videos (each less than 20 minutes) are worth watching, but here are couple of comments that stuck out for me:

Of Google’s glasses, Thrun said, “People talk a lot about augmented reality — looking at objects and faces and finding information — but the compelling use case for us is the sharing experience.”

What does that mean? Taking pictures and sending them to Google+ (via the press of a button and a quick nod, as Thrun demonstrated), phone calls, notifications, email dictation and email reading.

Portrait of Charlie Rose, taken with Google Glass prototype by Sebastian Thrun

Google X has been “overhyped,” Thrun protested somewhat halfheartedly. He said it’s a research group like at any other company, with a slightly different focus — it’s “not for the sake of writing research papers, but for the sake of impacting society.”

For instance, the Glasses project was based on hiring University of Washington professor Babak Parviz and giving him all the resources and engineers he needed to build something interesting over the past two years, Thrun said.

Meanwhile, when asked to describe the next era of technology, Dorsey said it was tools that disappear from sight when they’re irrelevant and only reappear when they’re relevant — like push notifications.

He also spoke a little bit about the myth of the founder, and told Rose it’s not a bad thing that none of Twitter’s founders are the CEO anymore.

“You can have a very shallow view and you can say there were three founders, only at the beginning. But the truly great companies have multiple founding moments through their history, and the truly great companies are constantly reinventing themselves all the time with the people they bring in, with the ideas they have around the table — and with Twitter, with our users. A lot of what you see in Twitter today was invented by our users.”

Dorsey also had some interesting and telling comments on Instagram, in which he was one of the first angel investors — and which Twitter had also made moves to buy, before Facebook acquired it for $1 billion.

“It makes sense that Facebook would pick it up,” Dorsey said. “Facebook’s core competency is photos, but Facebook is known for the past tense. Photos are in the past, they’re in albums, they’re something that you have to maintain; you have to maintain relationships. Instagram represented the now, it represented the present — it represented a lot of the ideas that Twitter brought to the world. Even in the constraints — [Twitter has] a constraint of 140 characters, Instagram has the constraint of the square.”

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
I didn’t watch much TV, I preferred reading fiction. So much so that my parents would yell at me for bringing my books everywhere (even to St. Louis Cardinals football games, much to my father’s dismay).

What qualities do you like in a person?
Curiosity, cleverness and confidence.

What qualities do you dislike?
Lack of those three.

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Sail around the world.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
The increasing gap between poverty and wealth.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Walking around India with my sketchbook.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Building a company of people who love their work.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
I had the first RIM device, an email pager, the RIM 850. I was on Blackberry until the iPhone arrived.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Abraham Lincoln and Virginia Woolf.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Twitter.

What was the last thing you fixed?
I don’t believe anything is ever truly “fixed”; I’d rather be in a constant state of editing.

What was your first computer?
A 1984 Macintosh and IBM PCjr.

What was your biggest mistake?
Too many to name! I’ve learned from most of them.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
No.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
Walking.

What was the last book you read?
“Born to Run.”

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Cheez-Its.

What do you drive/ride?
The public bus (SF Muni).

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
My Aunt Sandy. She’s extremely clever, confident, grounded, and a great storyteller.

Describe an ideal day.
Waking up early, going for a run, working with a small team on the details of a big idea, dinner with friends and coworkers followed by a late walk home to sleep.

One of the least-changed parts of AllThingsD since we started this site has been our “Voices” section, which has attracted robust and ever-increasing traffic over the years.

But today Voices gets a new look as we relaunch an updated section to bring you even more writing and information from outside sources. Voices will be run by senior editor Beth Callaghan, and will offer six regular features:

Must-Reads — formerly called Voices — will be the same daily compendium of links from around the Web. These are pieces we’ve selected editorially because we think they’re worth your time. We’ve made two changes in order to clarify the nature of the content and our role in suggesting them: We’ve renamed the links “Must-Reads From Other Web Sites” and we’ve simplified them to consist merely of outbound links. The links will appear in widgets across the site and in an archive — but when you click on a headline, you’ll be taken directly to the original Web site.

Voices is now made up of exclusive op-eds and posts from outside contributors who are well-versed in AllThingsD and have unique perspectives to share. We welcome and will evaluate all such pieces, and also plan to reach out to a range of industry experts on a variety of topics. Our goal is to spur debate and also give smart and engaging content a platform on our site.

Forum is conceived as an assembly of quick opinions from four or five well-known personalities on a single issue that is in the news. Topics can range from thoughts on the possible bubble in Silicon Valley to what’s the most interesting new trend to how possible privacy regulation will impact the tech industry. We hope to elicit a lot of different opinions and insights from a wide-ranging panel of execs, academics, venture capitalists, Wall Street analysts, entrepreneurs, bloggers and more.

Eye to Eye will be even more pointed, pitting a pair of often-opposing viewpoints on a controversial topic of the week — kind of like a Spy vs. Spy, but with words. The possibilities are endless here: Was $1 billion too much for Facebook to pay for photo-sharing site Instagram? Will Yahoo’s recent restructuring work? Do you think Google Glasses is a good idea? Where will Apple’s stock be in a year?

Numbers is a weekly story told by data — sometimes scientific, sometimes irreverent, always interesting. We will be working with many top research outfits, and will also be doing a number of our own polls of readers. We love infographics, surveys and pie charts at ATD and you’re going to get a whole lot of them.

Lastly, Ten Things About Me finds answers to entertaining and informative questions aimed at prominent people in the digital realm. It’s a little like the Proust Questionnaire mixed with the kind of queries that we are well known for at our D conferences, plus a whole lot of unusual ones, so you can get to know a variety of tech and media figures in a different way. First up: Twitter and Square inventor Jack Dorsey tells us what he’d be up to if he weren’t doing what he is doing now.

The new Voices will roll out all this week. Enjoy.

If the company is successful, it will have quadrupled its worth since raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation only 10 months ago.

While that would be astonishing for a three-year-old company, it’s important to note that negotiations continue, and that investors could ultimately value the company at a slightly more modest number (hmm, like $3 billion?!).

A Square spokesman declined to comment.

Square, which was founded by Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, has quickly made accepting credit cards via a mobile phone into a mainstream and affordable concept for small merchants.

Over the past year, it has quickly expanded beyond handing out magnetic-swipe readers to offer more robust experiences for both consumers and merchants, including software on the Apple iPad that acts like a register, and software on the iPhone that is a virtual wallet.

The payments method has received a warm reception from mostly small businesses, including taxicabs, food trucks, coffee shops and even lawyers and accountants.

The rumors of Square looking to raise more capital started spreading after Owen Thomas, formerly of the Daily Dot, noticed that Dorsey and Square’s COO Keith Rabois were in Boston and Baltimore, where many institutional investors are based. Thomas called Legg Mason, which confirmed it was looking at the San Francisco company.

Previous investors in Square’s three rounds, totaling roughly $137 million, include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Visa and well-known entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The big question is whether Square will be able to demand such a hefty valuation.

To determine that, based on what is known about the company, I did some back-of-the napkin calculations to come up with its annual revenue.

Last month, the company said it is now processing $4 billion in annual transactions. Since we know that Square charges 2.75 percent per swiped transaction, and 3.5 percent plus 15 cents per keyed-in transaction, we can start to get a better picture of its finances.

Let’s assume that a quarter of the company’s transactions are keyed in — which demands the higher rate. That would mean the company’s revenue would total nearly $83 million for swiped transactions, and $35 million for keyed-in transactions. Because of the additional 15-cent fee per transaction, let’s add another $15 million (which might be generous, but would break down to 100 million transactions at $10 apiece).

In all, the company’s annual revenue would then be close to $122 million.

Most, but not all of that revenue, is then handed over to the credit card companies for processing fees.

To be sure, the company has grown quickly since its inception, and has its eyes set on the very large point-of-sales market. This year, Square said it had plans to expand internationally, and has just hired a new executive from PayPal to take the lead on the effort. In the future it could also generate revenue from advertising or other loyalty programs, although it does not today.

But, by at least one historical measure, the valuation is rich beyond belief.

PayPal, which was also looking to disrupt the banking industry by enabling peer-to-peer payments online, was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002, just months after going public at a valuation of nearly $800 million.

At the time it went public, the company was roughly doubling year over year and had generated $103.7 million in 2001, its first full year of operations — or slightly less than Square’s estimated revenues.

Much like PayPal back then, Square faces intense competition, making alliances with much larger companies or raising big war chests critically important.

Square faces stiff competition and pricing pressure from Intuit, eBay’s PayPal, Google and other upstarts, like Pay Anywhere.

Still, it has made a splash that is seeing major reverberations around the sector, which a big valuation will make larger still.

True to his word, the entrepreneur has done a lot in the past eight months.

He sold his start-up to eBay for $240 million; became PayPal’s VP of Mobile; and launched PayPal’s mobile payments service, called Here. Now, he’s been named president of PayPal. The position opened up in January, after Scott Thompson stepped down to become CEO of Yahoo.

Now, with his appointment, Marcus’s list of things to do grows a lot longer.

In an interview, eBay CEO John Donohoe emphasized that what PayPal needs more than ever is an entrepreneur at the helm, one who can take advantage of all the opportunities that lie ahead.

“It’s the right time for PayPal to combine the global scale and reach with a product guy and entrepreneur like David, who is going to take PayPal to the next level,” he said.

PayPal, which is eBay’s fastest-growing division, is pushing into two new hot areas: Mobile payment and point-of-sale.

Mobile payments are taking off as people shop online from their phones and tablets, while offline is a massive opportunity dominated by the Visas and MasterCards of the world.

It’s hard to put a dollar figure on the market opportunity, but PayPal tries putting it in perspective.

In mobile alone, it expects payment volume to hit $7 billion this year, up from $150 million in 2009. For point-of-sale, it will double PayPal’s $70 billion business if it captures 2 percent of all sales. If it captures 4 percent, it will triple it.

Before joining PayPal, Marcus was the founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payments company that was building a platform that allowed users to charge purchases to their carrier bill. Today, PayPal uses Zong’s platform for mobile payments, and is also leveraging it for its offline payments business. For instance, when using PayPal to pay at the register, users don’t need to have their wallet or phone with them. They can simply enter a phone number and PIN to pay. That technology is live today at more than 2,000 Home Depots.

Donahoe said he was impressed by Marcus when eBay was still in talks to acquire Zong.

“He really felt deeply that if he could get Zong to PayPal’s scale that we could do extraordinary things,” Donohoe said. “From the moment he joined, it’s been fun to watch an innovator who’s been recognizing that he can innovate at scale.”

Over the past seven months, Marcus has been charged with the launch of PayPal Here, which allows small-to-medium-size merchants to accept payments using a small dongle plugged into a smartphone. The service, which launched earlier this month, is nearly identical to a service offered by Square, a start-up founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Marcus said he was really impressed with how fast it was to launch such a complicated product that required encryption and compliance on a global scale. In the first 24 hours, the company signed up more than 1,000 businesses an hour for Here.

“The organization came together, and we built it really quickly,” he said. “I’m excited in this new capacity. If we innovate at scale, we can change the world in a meaningful way.”

Now it’s working on the other side of the equation: The consumer. The company is rebranding its consumer product, formerly dubbed Card Case.

Pay with Square, as the app has been renamed, now has participating merchants listed at the forefront of the free app, rather than hidden on cards in the old app’s virtual wallet. It also includes a curated list of featured merchants, a search bar, and a tilt-to-map option, which allows the user to tilt their phone to make a map appear and display a merchant’s location.

Square has also added geo-fencing capabilities to the Android app, which will allow customers to pay for an item at a participating store simply by walking in and telling the merchant their name.

Square’s move comes as mobile payments continue to heat up — and as competitors like PayPal and Intuit move into Square’s traditional territory.

Square first launched Card Case last May, but the app has gained little traction. While Square now claims $4 billion a year in mobile payments transactions, only about 75,000 of its one million merchants are accepting payments via Card Case.

Megan Quinn, director of products for Square, said that merchants that have taken payments through the app have seen a 22 percent increase in revenue.

“Square isn’t just about accepting credit cards,” Quinn said. “Our focus is the whole ecosystem, and we don’t think anyone is making the whole experience as easy and delightful as we are.”

Square’s app update comes just as online payments giant PayPal has started focusing on offline payments solutions for both big and small businesses, including PayPal-branded point-of-sale payments systems in Home Depot stores across the U.S., as well as a mobile payments dongle for iPhone that rivals Square’s small business solution. PayPal claims more than a hundred million users worldwide, whereas Square has yet to expand beyond the U.S., though it’s clearly taking steps in that direction.

The company, which is backed by North American Bancard, a privately held credit card processing company, launched its service about a year ago and is arguably less-known than others, such as Square, run by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and backed by Visa, Intuit’s GoPayment, or PayPal.

In order to try and change that, Pay Anywhere plans to announce today a price drop to make its rates one of the lowest in the sector — by a very slim margin.

It will now charge 2.69 percent of each transaction; in other words, $2.69 for every $100 charged.

In comparison, eBay-owned PayPal, which unveiled its PayPal Here service on Friday, is charging merchants 2.7 percent of each transaction. Intuit also charges 2.7 percent; Square charges a slightly higher 2.75 percent.

Before today’s cut, Pay Anywhere was charging 2.69 percent, plus a flat rate of 19 cents per transaction, making it one of the most expensive. (A spokeswoman said the Pay Anywhere app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since it launched. Pay Anywhere and North American Bancard does a combined $12 billion in business annually, but she declined to say how much Pay Anywhere processes alone.)

The practice of charging a flat rate and a percentage was common around a year ago, but the payment structures have changed drastically as the competition heated up. For instance, it also used to be common for providers to charge for the credit-card readers, which plug into smartphones. Those are now free, too.

But it’s unclear whether merchants will be attracted to lower interchange rates alone.

Other considerations to take into account are additional features, such as security or software. A good analytics program on the phone can track a store’s inventory; Intuit offers integration with its commonly used QuickBooks software. Square offers cash-register-like services, and PayPal says it will offer the ability to accept checks by snapping a picture of the check using a phone’s camera.

Likewise, Pay Anywhere touts many of these features, including a “built-in Heat Map” to locate sales trends.

While all of these providers are competing against traditional credit card processors and integrators that typically sell both hardware and services, they are also largely going after a different market — the massive offline business that is conducted in cash or by check.

Many merchants, from farmers to taxicab drivers, have been reluctant to pay the high rates that traditional card-processing services charge today, and only accept cash — or visibly cringe whenever a customer pulls out plastic.

It’s not just the photos of my dog as a puppy and parties I’ve forgotten I attended; it’s also the time capsules of what I thought was interesting at the time.

And, how meta: For me, that was often social media itself.

For instance, here are some of the pings I’ve gotten from Timehop and Memolane this week:

• Five years ago today, I tweeted a link to a Facebook company blog post noting a measurable and predictable decline in Facebook usage on Thursday night when “Grey’s Anatomy” aired. At the time, Facebook had only just recently opened up beyond students, and it was seeing peaks of one million users logged into the site at once. “When something occupies a big portion of the population’s attention, we notice,” wrote co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who since left the company and is now co-founder of Asana). Now that Facebook is so much more global, it’s hard to imagine a single TV program having that kind of regular effect.
  

  Facebook usage plummeted during Grey's Anatomy airings in 2007.

• This week in 2010, I posted a link to an article citing a Google engineer saying Google personalized up to 20 percent of users’ Web searches. That might have seemed like a lot at the time, but Google has gotten massively more personalized since then, with logged-in searchers by default now seeing “Search Plus Your World” results and Google+ content promoted.
• Almost five years ago, just after the 2007 edition of SXSW, The Wall Street Journal posted a story examining the emerging phenomenons of Twitter and Dodgeball. Jack Dorsey was quoted as saying, “You find a lot of connection in just the simplest, most mundane updates from your friends.” I recently reposted the link to the article on Twitter after finding it on my Memolane, and got to see people’s reactions to it five years later. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley replied to my tweet, “In high school/1994 I made a bet w my Dad over who could get their name in WSJ first. This article won me $100 :).”

These memories seem particularly precious because they’ve traditionally been hard, if not nearly impossible, for us to find. Facebook only recently introduced its Timeline layout, which makes old posts accessible. Twitter is just barely starting to make historical tweets available, through reseller deals with Gnip and DataSift.

I realize not all memories are happy, or wanted. The European Union, for instance, is trying to legislate an online “right to be forgotten.” But I have to say, I’m kind of excited to some day get a notification about what I tweeted 20 years ago.

For a blast from the slightly more recent past, here are our previous stories about the companies behind Timehop and Memolane.

(Scrapbook image via Flickr user meglet127.)

The new app, Square Register, comes with a free, detailed analytics system for business owners, and more integration with Card Case, Square’s consumer-facing app that allows people to pay with their smartphones just by being in the vicinity of a Square-using business.

Square, which utilizes a small plastic dongle that fits into the audio jack of a smartphone or tablet to process credit card payments, first introduced an iPad app last May. In November, the company rolled out Square 2.2 for iPad, iPhone and Android phones, allowing merchants using the technology to offer rewards to customers who make repeat purchases. Square has said it has no plans at this time to launch a version of its app for Android tablets.

The San Francisco-based start-up is now processing $4 billion in payments annually, double the rate it said it was processing in the fourth quarter of last year.

Square’s new iPad app arrives as companies both small and large are racing to develop systems to replace traditional point-of-sale systems — amid plenty of sniping about security, as well.

Last week, online payments giant PayPal rolled out its “offline” point-of-sale system in 2,000 Home Depot stores across the U.S., which will allow customers to pay for items using a PayPal card or mobile phone number and PIN combination. A Visa executive has criticized PayPal’s in-store system, saying that data thieves could easily see a PayPal-paying customer enter their private data at a terminal. PayPal responded by reiterating its commitment to payments innovation, saying a user’s data is more secure in the cloud than it is in their pocket.

Visa, meanwhile, has been working on its own digital wallet service, called V.me.

There’s also Isis, the mobile payments joint venture led by Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, which will compete directly with Google Wallet, the payments app developed by Google for Android phones.

And now some two dozen retailers, including Walmart and Target, are working to develop in-store mobile payments systems that would compete with the current systems available, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. According to the story, the merchants say that they’re concerned about potential security and privacy risks in the existing services.

But unlike some of these services, Square has been focused on small, “mom-and-pop” businesses and contractors, who may not want to invest in bulky credit card systems with higher transaction and interchange fees. In December of last year, the company announced that it has more than one million merchants that can accept credit cards.

On March 1, a proposal to test Square in 30 New York City taxicabs was approved, as the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission explores new technology that could enhance the process and possibly lower credit card transaction fees. The contracts for credit card payments in cabs right now are held by Creative Mobile Technologies, LLC, and VeriFone, Inc. — which has previously alleged that Square has a “serious security flaw.”

The experiment, should it become a reality, would involve a special Square-built payment terminal on tablets in the back of 50 taxicabs to start, as well as a Square application that would process riders’ credit card payments. And the swap-out — and the stakes — would go beyond just hardware.

If tablets running Square were to supplant some of the existing technology in the back of New York City cabs — currently supplied by Creative Mobile Technologies LLC and VeriFone Systems Inc., one of the world’s largest electronic payment companies — fee structure and revenue from “Taxi TV” content would also come into question. (It’s important to note that the New York TLC hasn’t formally submitted the Square proposal to its board of commissioners yet; it plans to do so on March 1.)

Of the 13,237 official taxicabs currently on the road in New York City, VeriFone processes the credit card payments in approximately half of them; CMT handles the other half. The two companies were awarded the contracts in the summer of 2007, after the Commission had put out a challenge seeking innovative tech and electronic data tracking for taxicabs; by November 2008, the technology had been fully implemented in all cabs.

The systems currently use cellular data to power the transactions, which is also technically possible through an iPad or another type of tablet device. In addition to the payments technology, current systems provide automated dispatch capabilities, GPS, computerized trip logging and text messaging — also functions that a tablet could likely provide.

So hardware aside, consider the content on the Taxi TV’s. Those loops of news updates, late-night talk show clips and dining guides that cab riders see on the backseat TVs are the result of a partnerships that VeriFone and CMT have forged with TV networks (though the TLC commands 20 percent of the screen time on the primary channel for public service announcements). VeriFone has rolled out NBC content in 12,000 cabs across the U.S.

While we know that content can stream quite nicely on tablet devices, too — and likely provide an even slicker viewing experience — the companies are making money off of back-of-cab media and would lose that if they lost control of the screen. At the same time, more gaming and social networking options are being proposed for the back of cabs, which would provide potential ad revenue streams.

But ultimately the real sticking point could be fees. It’s unclear what a new payment structure would look like, but David S. Yassky, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has been quoted as saying he hopes credit card transaction fees could be lowered.

The TLC Web site currently says that cab owners can expect credit card and debit fees to average 3.5 to 4 percent, whereas Square charges its small-business users 2.75 percent per transaction without additional interchange fees. If Square offers taxi cab medallion owners — who also pay for the installation of the technology up front — a lower fee option on credit card transactions, the way it does for small businesses that shy away from investing in bulkier credit card systems, Square could have a leg up on its rivals.

And those rivals are unlikely to remain quiet.

Verifone has previously taken direct aim at San Francisco-based Square for what it alleged was a security flaw, saying that Square lacked the ability to properly encrypt data. (Square’s Dorsey quickly responded by saying that credit cards are inherently not secure, but that Square continually reviews, verifies, and stands behind the protections that it has put into place in its credit card reading device.)

For now, the San Jose-based payments giant isn’t offering a formal response to the new taxi cab proposal. A spokesman for VeriFone would say only that the company is not going to comment on a proposal nobody has seen yet.

According to the New York Times, Creative Mobile Technologies has also raised concerns about the security of Square’s technology and has previously requested that the vote on the proposal be delayed.

But if the proposal were approved next month, the pilot program using Square on tablets could kick off “within a month or two,” according to Allan Fromberg, a spokesperson for the TLC.

And that’s when things will get interesting in the back of taxicabs.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/JosiSilva)

I do wonder if his talents are wasted running two companies.

– Richard Branson, Virgin Group founder, speaking to Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt about Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey at AsiaD

What about “social”? Not so much, Dorsey said. Twitter is a way to learn about what your friends are doing, but more than that it’s a way to learn about what other people who are relevant to you, from all over the world, are doing.

“We definitely see social as just one part of what people do on Twitter,” Dorsey said. “We think of it as an information utility and a communications network.”

Twitter also beats players like Google+ and Facebook by being more accessible, Dorsey argued. You don’t have to tweet to get value out of Twitter. Twitter is both a destination and a distribution channel. And the service “works on every single device on the planet today,” he said.

(Correction/quibble: Twitter works on every networked device! It’s not currently working on my cellphone, which is in airplane mode while I’m traveling in Germany.)

Even in the post-SOPA glow of U.S. Congresspeople reversing themselves on anti-piracy bills after Internet protests and dissent last week, Dorsey was less committed to describing Twitter as a tool of democracy.

Dorsey did say he sees feedback and opinions surfacing more directly than ever before. So during the SOPA debate, congresspeople could see what their constituents are saying about the legislation from their phones, in real time.

“The question is what do we do with that,” Dorsey said.

Though Dorsey was also representing himself at DLD in his second full-time role as CEO of the payments company Square, he got fewer questions about that — probably because Square is not yet available outside the United States.

Dorsey said Square is looking closely at Asia, including China. It seems like a natural fit because many people in Asia have already stopped carrying cash, he said.

Of Square, Dorsey said, “We’re going to work very, very hard this year to go outside the United States.”

So Twitter.com’s new overhaul may indeed make it easier and faster for users, as Liz Gannes reported this afternoon. But it’s also much more inviting to advertisers — the logical next step as the company tries to make Twitter more of a “consumption environment.”

There are two different things going on here: Twitter is making its basic site more attractive and engaging by making it easier to view things like embedded videos. And it has created “brand pages” for advertisers, where they can have a lot more control over what users see.

Both of these are very simple ideas, but they’re essential if the company is going to convince marketers that Twitter is more than a novelty.

A sticky site has an obvious upside for advertisers, because it gives them a better chance to get their messages — sold, right now, via “Promoted Tweets” — in front of more eyeballs. And the brand pages solve a basic problem that Twitter advertisers have had so far: They haven’t had a home page to deliver messages that might take longer than 140 characters.

Twitter isn’t charging for the brand pages, and it says they will open them up to everyone eventually. But it’s not a coincidence that it’s launching with big-budgeted marketers like American Express, Pepsi, Disney and Dell.

This is the kind of value-add product that sales boss Adam Bain and his team want to offer to big spenders, at the same time they’re rolling out a Google-like self-serve platform for small buyers.

You can see quite clearly how this will work for the big guys, once they figure out the best way to use it. Click on over to the new brand page for “Ghost Protocol,” the newest Mission: Impossible movie from Paramount, to see a good example. And if you can’t see, or just want to watch a video, I can help you out, too — here’s the key element of the new page:

[Shutterstock: Andrey Eremin]

The new layout puts additional content and context inline within tweets, rather than off to the side. It’s also supposed to be 500 percent faster than Twitter was three or four months ago. And it looks different and sleeker; for instance, the navigation bar is now on the left instead of the right.

Nope, this is not a new product or feature — which by now seems to be Twitter’s least favorite thing! — but rather a conceptual and visual redesign.

Twitter contains four key functions, said the company’s co-leaders Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, addressing a gaggle of media from Twitter’s new industrial chic, uninsulated and barely renovated new headquarters in San Francisco.

The functions are tabs across the top bar in the new design: “home” — that’s the timeline of tweets, which you can click to expand; “connect,” signified by the @ sign, as in a user name; “discover,” a.k.a. emerging and relevant topics and activities, signified by a hash sign; and “me,” which are profile pages.

“Discover” is actually something new — it’s a tab dedicated to links and media that Twitter has determined are globally interesting as well as personally relevant to a user’s interests. It’s a lightweight algorithmically curated news aggregator, with snippets of text from linked stories and content embedded inline.

Also, select brands — 21 at launch — have access to “enhanced” profile pages, which have wide banners at the top and the ability to feature a single tweet above the regular timeline. Here’s one for Pepsi.

Dorsey said the design is meant to make Twitter more approachable and accessible. Early active users created the @ and # conventions, which have become key to the way Twitter works, but many users have no idea what they mean.

“Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” Dorsey said.

Users can “unlock” the new experience by downloading the newest versions of Twitter’s mobile apps for iPhone and Android, or they can get it through Twitter’s Web site over the next couple months, Costolo said.

Here’s an info page about the launch, which Twitter is calling “Fly.”

Here’s what my new Twitter.com homepage looks like:

And here’s a before (today) and an after (architectural rendering) of what the new Twitter office cafeteria looks like.

Does that mean new products? Probably — but with this company, you never know.

Let’s face it, Twitter has what’s probably an unprecedented world-changing to product-innovating ratio. It’s still a small set of simple tools to send short messages out to a network.

But hey, there’s a reason people joke about the perils of reinventing the wheel.

In fact, at least part of seeing what Twitter is building is likely to be a tour of ongoing renovation of an actual physical building, not a revamped site or app or relevancy filtering features. The event is being held at Twitter’s planned new headquarters at San Francisco’s historic Market Square building. This is the one in the middle of the rundown neighborhood that Twitter is being given tax benefits to help revitalize.

The new office isn’t set to house Twitter’s staff until mid-2012. Renovations started a few months ago. (Maybe we’ll get to wear hard hats!)

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey are both scheduled to speak. We’ll update you when we know more.

The fund will be managed from the New York company’s newly opened office in Palo Alto, Calif., where it will be led by Harshul Sanghi. Sanghi previously ran Motorola Mobility Ventures.

In an interview, American Express Enterprise Growth President Dan Schulman said the company is interested in start-ups in the digital commerce space, including those focused on loyalty and rewards programs, personalized offers, location-based services, security issues, analytics and online and mobile payments.

Schulman said the goal is to acquire a minority stake in the companies and form a strategic partnership with them, so that they can take advantage of American Express’s 94 million customers. Companies may also have access to its other assets, such as consumer data, as long as privacy is maintained.

American Express has already made a number of investments in the space. Those companies will not be part of the fund. Earlier this year, it invested in Payfone, a mobile payments technology company; it has also formed a joint partnership with Vente-Privee, a French-owned flash sales site.

Among the opportunities that American Express may have potentially missed out on is Square, a mobile payments company led by Twitter exec Jack Dorsey, which raised capital from investors including Visa.

“This is a demonstration of our very serious committment toward moving to a digital landscape,” Schulman said. “This is one of many initiatives that we are doing to get ready for the future and hopefully being a leader in digital payments.”

We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.

Over the next week or so, we’re going to follow the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Twitter and Square inventor Jack Dorsey.

The busy entrepreneur has a lot going on, working both to change the online payments space and also to make money from his social communications service.

One of Dorsey’s major inspirations was the late Steve Jobs of Apple, especially in his knack for simplifying products to an essential minimalism.

He talked about this in an onstage interview with Walt Mossberg, as well as the challenges Twitter faces in China and more: