communicate quite a bit. The hours he spent listening to that radio paid off years later when, as an adult
with a cell phone, it inspired him to create Twitter. Dorsey tells Lara Logan about his brainstorm for the
popular social medium, his separation and reunion with the company and his current venture, Square, for a 60
Minutes profile to be broadcast Sunday, March 17 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT.
Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, where his love of trains and how they work led to his obsession with the
dispatching of emergency service vehicles. Young and shy because of a speech impediment, he spent a lot of
time listening to the chatter on the police scanner. "They're always talking about where they're going, what
they're doing, and where they currently are," he says. "That is where the idea for Twitter came [from]...Now
we all have these cell phones. We had text messaging and suddenly we could update where I was, what I'm doing,
where I'm going, how I feel. And then it would go out to the entire world," he tells Logan.
It did go out to the entire world. And now 200 million people use Twitter, and "tweet" over a billion times
every three days. Says Dorsey, "I'm most proud of how quickly people came to it and used it and in a million
different ways. They're all over the world. And Twitter enables them to take a $5 cell phone and wherever they
are, communicate with the world, for free."
Dorsey was forced out of Twitter due to internal discord. He says, his weakness was his own reticence, an
issue he still works on. "The biggest thing I've learned is that I need to communicate more. I need to be more
vocal." He understood the move but was still hurt. "I was angry...at the board...at my cofounders. I was angry
with myself," he recalls. He says he holds no grudges.
Dorsey was eventually invited back to help run his old company, but not until after he founded Square, a
mobile payment company that created software that allows anyone with a smart phone to accept a card payment.
It's becoming more and more popular, especially with smaller businesses. He brainstormed the idea with an
artist friend who was prevented from selling a work of art because he couldn't take a credit card.
Square is a world-changing idea Dorsey hopes will remove cumbersome cash from business transactions. "Money
touches every single person on this planet and at one point in their life they feel bad about it," he tells
Logan. "It feels dirty sometimes. It never feels great, but it's great when it disappears. Feels like you're
taken care of. It feels like the world is just working."
None of those qualities exists within Burt Wonderstone, a selfish and flashy Las Vegas magician who once ruled
the Strip alongside his longtime friend and partner, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), but now finds his act
has grown outdated and unpopular. Even within the confines of a comedy sketch, where he probably belongs, Burt
would seem one-dimensional and underdeveloped with his hacky jokes and tacky clothes. Stretched out to feature
length, the shtick becomes nearly unbearable — until of course, the movie doles out its obligatory
comeuppance, followed by redemption, and goes all soft and nice. By then it’s too little, too late.
“Burt Wonderstone” comes to us from director Don Scardino, a television veteran who’s a two-time Emmy-
winner for his work on “30 Rock,” and “Horrible Bosses” writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
It has some scattered laughs, many of them courtesy of Jim Carrey as a gonzo, up-and-coming street performer
with a taste for pain, clearly modeled after the Criss Angel style of stunt artistry. And there is some spark
to the scenes between Carell and his “Little Miss Sunshine” co-star Alan Arkin as the master magician who
inspired Burt as a lonely child and now lives anonymously at the nursing home where Burt is relegated to doing
card tricks.
In theory, we’re supposed to feel for Burt because we see him being bullied in a flashback at the film’s
start. The nerdy, neglected child of a hard-working single mom, Burt turned to magic for self-esteem, and
found friendship with the like-minded and equally geeky Anton. Their mentor was the old-school Rance Holloway
(Arkin), whose moves they watched repeatedly on VHS.
Thirty years later, Burt and Anton are longtime headliners at Bally’s, going through the same bit night after
night with little inspiration. For totally unexplained reasons, they hate each other — probably because Burt
has become a dismissive, abusive jerk. This is not Carell’s strong suit.
Also part of the act is their latest assistant, Jane. The role is a huge waste of Olivia Wilde, who’s stuck
playing the supportive “girl,” and isn’t given much chance to show how funny, sexy or smart she truly is.
Burt and Anton find not just their friendship but their careers in jeopardy as Carrey’s daring Steve Gray
steals away the fans and attention with more and more outlandish acts.
But it’s hard to care about how far the duo will fall or whether they can make a comeback — which is never
in question — because there’s nothing for us to hold on to as an audience. If Carell’s character is one-
note, Buscemi sadly gets even less to do besides play the sweet, beleaguered second fiddle.
“Africa is better positioned to adopt the next generation of technology than anybody else because it’s not
tied by a legacy system?.?.?.?the cost of moving forward is much cheaper,” says James Mwangi, CEO of Kenya’s
Equity Bank, whose bank became the first in the world to offer a completely mobile bank account.
But the pace of expansion has nevertheless slowed and profits slimmed as competition has intensified. “No one
will get rich buying the fourth licence in Chad and even dominant players like [Kenya’s] Safaricom are
finding it tough,” says one leading technology investor.
Besides that, pockets of innovation and technological excellence such as Kenya’s nascent Silicon Savannah –
a $10bn government initiative to turn 5,000 acres of savannah south of Nairobi into “the most modern city in
Africa” – have not yet fully taken off. “They need power and scale, otherwise you get fragmentary results,
” says Bright Simons, who invented a mobile app that detects counterfeit drugs.
The coming strides will be smaller, technology experts predict, but could be nonetheless far-reaching.
Investors see the next step as a push to spread more expensive and productive data connections – rather than
voice alone – throughout the continent. While three quarters of Africans have access to a phone, only 16 per
cent of them access the internet, down to 1 per cent in Ethiopia and South Sudan.
The majority go online via their handset rather than a desktop or laptop, yet data-enabled phones make up less
than 20 per cent of the handset market. The likes of Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Nokia, Research In Motion and
Samsung are plunging in, trying to expand the market from basic handsets to smartphones.
Microsoft last month launched a new Huawei phone installed with Africa-specific applications. Users can check prayer times in Egypt, track shares in Nigeria and follow the rugby in South Africa.
Investors believe the effort to create relevant and entertaining local content will underwrite the shift, and
make the more expensive outlay appealing. At first mobile operators conceived online connections via handsets
as a useful way to generate data sales through gaming alone, but applications of web-connected handsets have
grown as innovators have developed paid-for applications. In Kenya shoppers buy goat meat with mobile money,
browse clothes and music via their handsets and lodge their savings directly on to phone accounts. People can
use Google to research topics in languages from Amharic to Zulu.
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