MichaelAbbott
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Isis still quiet about expansion plans: will happen 'when we're ready'
Over six months ago, a joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon called Isis launched a trial of its nascent mobile payment service in Austin and Salt Lake City. Not only was its debut already delayed, we also haven't heard more than a peep from the company since. CEO Michael Abbott, who is the keynote speaker at ETA 2013 in New Orleans, has opened the discourse but still isn't giving many specific details on the future. When we asked him about his company's expansion plans, Abbott simply told us that "when [we're] ready, we'll start putting it out in different places and see where to go from there." In essence, he views progress in the mobile payments field as a constant evolution, which often involves taking smaller steps to accomplish a greater purpose. You can find the full quote below the break.
Twitter prepares for iOS 5 launch
The launch of iOS 5 is right around the corner and Twitter is gearing up for an onslaught now that the social network will be integrated into iOS. So how is Twitter preparing to avoid a day-long fail whale when iOS launches? According to Twitter's engineering VP Michael Abbott, the social network is not panicking about the upcoming increase in traffic. It's been slowly beefing up its servers and infrastructure over the past year. "During the last nine months, there's been more infrastructure changes at Twitter than there had been in the previous five years at the company," says Abbott in an interview with GigaOM. And Twitter seems confident that iOS 5 owners will not significantly increase the number of tweets flowing through the network. Even if it does, Twitter can handle the load as it is already processing over 230 million tweets per day, up from 60 million last year. Abbott also confirms that, even with mounting pressure from Facebook and Google +, it's not going to change the premise of its network anytime soon. Twitter will remain focused on the "simplified experience" we all know and love.
