Jack Dorsey is looking to take Twitter to the mainstream.

The co-founder is stepping into a new full-time job as executive chairman to lead product development, all while maintaining his CEO position at his mobile payments start-up, Square.

Dorsey is also looking to bite into Facebook's dominance in advertising among social media companies, he told students in a lecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism on Tuesday.

"We have a lot of mainstream awareness, but mainstream relevancy is still a challenge," Dorsey said, according to a report on the lecture from the Wall Street Journal.

To that end, Twitter will have to become "more approachable so that people can get into it immediately and it's extremely relevant right away," he said at Columbia, according to Bloomberg.

Particularly, Twitter needs to become easier to use and navigate for those using the micro-blogging site to get information and simply tweet about what they're doing or what they're thinking, the Journal report said.

A strength of Twitter, Dorsey said, is the ability for users to follow what they're interested in, according to the Journal.

"What's happening in Egypt right now. That's the value, not the brand 'Twitter.' So we need to refocus on that value," Dorsey said. "That's my goal in the next few months."

Dorsey's return to a full-time job at Twitter follows the move of Dick Costolo to the CEO spot in October after previous chief executive Evan Williams, also a company co-founder, stepped down.

Williams had been CEO at Twitter since 2008, and before him, Dorsey was chief executive going back to the San Francisco company's founding in 2007.

Dorsey assured those in attendance at Columbia that his new full-time role at Twitter won't impede his leadership at Square, which he started in 2009.

"I live across street from Square, and Square is two blocks from Twitter," he said, according to the Journal. "I live and breathe these companies."

RELATED:

Jack Dorsey returns to Twitter full time, will remain Square CEO

Jack Dorsey, Twitter chairman, could take over product development, report says

Twitter came to life five years ago this week; creator Jack Dorsey remembers

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, listens to a question at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York on Tuesday. Credit: Jin Lee / Bloomberg

Steve Jobs is debating whether or not to attend an Apple event Wednesday that is widely expected to be the unveiling of the iPad 2, according to a report.

Jobs has been on a leave of absence since January because of health problems and has largely been avoiding major Apple events.

He didn't attend the launch event for the Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only digital news magazine last month. And Jobs didn't attend Apple's recent annual shareholder meeting either.

The Apple CEO did, however, show up for a mid-February dinner hosted by President Obama alongside other Silicon Valley tech leaders.

Apple has also said Jobs remains closely involved in all of the company's product releases and decisions despite handing most of his day-to-day responsibilities to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.

The release of the iPad 2 -- Apple's follow-up to the original iPad tablet, which has been a market-defining success -- is seen as one of the company's most important releases this year.

Some have speculated that the iPad 2 will be an incremental upgrade, with additions such as a front-facing camera for video chat and a faster processor that would put a few of its specs on par with competitors such as the slow-selling Samsung Galaxy Tab and the newly released Motorola Xoom.

Other rumors have predicted a higher-resolution screen that could be a bit more of a game changer.

The iPad 2's arrival comes less than a week after the official release of Google's Android Honeycomb operating system, which is the first build of the OS designed for use on tablets. So far, Honeycomb is  available only on the Xoom.

On Tuesday, the News Corp. website All Things Digital published a report that Jobs was contemplating showing up at Apple's Wednesday event in San Francisco. If he were to show up, it would be his first public appearance at an Apple event since announcing his medical leave and his appearance could threaten to overshadow the iPad 2 itself.

Jobs and Apple are notoriously private and secretive and have offered no details on what is the cause of the CEO's health problems. When his leave of absence was announced, Jobs said in a statement, "At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company."

Medical experts have speculated that the leave could be motivated by problems related to Jobs' recent liver transplant or a return of the pancreatic cancer that has plagued him in the past.

But at this point, everything is speculation. The one thing the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant wasn't subtle about was what the Wednesday event would be about -- with an press invite sent by e-mail featuring an image of an iCal-esque number 2 being peeled back to show the corner of an iPad.

Other than that, Apple has made no official announcement about what it will or won't show or who will or won't be onstage Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

But by about 10 a.m. Wednesday, at least a few answers regarding the iPad 2 should arrive, and  possibly some answers will arise about Steve Jobs' health too.

RELATED:

Apple's Tim Cook: Steve Jobs' possible successor runs shareholders meeting

Apple sends out iPad 2 invite for March 2: 'Come see what 2011 will be the year of'

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Steve Jobs announces an Apple product update in September 2009 in San Francisco. Credit: Monica M. Davey / European Pressphoto Agency

Online coupon distributor Groupon announced that it has reached its goal of raising $950 million in financing.

The daily-deals company, which recently spurned a takeover bid from Google rumored to be as high as $6 billion, released a statement Monday with the tongue-in-cheek heading “Groupon raises, like, a billion dollars.”

According to Groupon’s statement, the financing came from venture firms and late-stage investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures. Previous funding rounds were led by New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, and Mail.ru Group (formerly DST).

The company, founded in 2008 in Chicago, operates in 35 countries and has more than 50 million subscribers. Its revenue comes from taking a cut from each discount coupon it sells through its website.

RELATED:

Groupon hopes to raise up to $950 million

LinkedIn may be the first social networking company to launch IPO

Groupon raises $500 million in financing

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: Groupon signage outside the company's headquarters in Chicago. Credit: Tim Boyle / Bloomberg

Intel Corp. has agreed to pay $1.5 billion in licensing fees to Nvidia, ending a two-year legal battle between the two companies.

The companies announced Monday that they have signed a new six-year cross-licensing agreement, which gives them rights to each other's patents, subject to certain terms.

Intel sued Nvidia, a maker of graphics chips,  in February 2009 alleging that the license agreement the companies had signed did not extend to Intel's future generation of processors; Nvidia countersued.

"This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design," said Doug Melamed, Intel senior vice president and general counsel, in a written statement. "It also enables the companies to focus their efforts on innovation and the development of new, innovative products."

Intel will pay the licensing fees in annual installments over five years. The existing licensing agreement between the companies ends March 31.

Nvidia shares closed up 3.83% at $20.63 and jumped another 4.2% to $21.50 in after-hours trading.

RELATED:

Intel-Nvidia battle is part of federal probe

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: A custom-made computer/beer dispenser is on display at the Nvidia booth at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images.

Google Goggles is now faster, can read newspaper ads, and, more important, will solve that stubborn Sudoku puzzle.

The new version of the visual search application, released Monday, has a couple of features geared toward shoppers: improved bar-code scanning and the ability to recognize print ads in major U.S. newspapers and magazines to return information about the products (this feature is similar to a marketing experiment Google announced in November).

There's another new feature aimed at the Sunday-morning-newspaper crowd: If you get stuck on a particularly knotty Sudoku, the app can now analyze and provide the answer to the popular number puzzle -- useful perhaps in a situation in which someone spilled coffee on the answer key.

A video on Google's blog shows a phone with Google Goggles beating the time of 2009 national Sudoku champion Tammy McLeod at a Sudoku fest.

However, the phone was disqualified from formally competing because it's, well, a phone.

RELATED:

Consumer Electronics Show: Sphero, a baseball-sized toy driven by smart phone or tablet

CES: Lenovo's Android LePad tablet morphs into a Windows machine

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: Tammy McLeod of Los Angeles, who won the first-place title, smiles while standing beside her puzzle at the Sudoku tournament in Philadelphia on Oct. 24, 2009. Credit: Joseph Kaczmarek / Associated Press

Britain's national library is marrying high-brow culture with popular technology with the release of a smart-phone app that will allow consumers to browse images of a Gutenberg Bible or Jane Austen's teenage writings on their morning train ride.

The Treasures app, launched Monday for Apple and Android devices, offers a guided tour of 100 literary, musical, scientific and historical pieces in the British Library's collection. An HD version is available for the iPad.

Among the pieces included in the collection are a handwritten draft of Charles Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby," manuscript scores from Mozart, an original Magna Carta from 1215, and manuscripts documenting the scientific work of Copernicus and Galileo.

The app also include sound and video recordings of interviews with curators and experts.

Frances Brindle, the library's director of marketing, said in a statement: "We are delighted to be able to make our unique collection items available to a wider audience via this interactive app in such a dynamic format."

RELATED:

Consumer Electronics Show: I Am T-Pain Mic makes you sound like, who else, T-Pain

Rdio, Bookworm top blog editor's most-used iPhone apps for 2010

 -- Abby Sewell

Photo: Words from a page written and printed in Latin from a Gutenberg Bible produced in the 15th century. Credit: Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times

A new report from online research company comScore  gives a new indication that Android is overtaking Apple in popularity among U.S. consumers.

Blackberry-maker Research In Motion continues to lead in market share, with 33.5% of U.S. smart phone subscribers for the three months ending in November 2010. But it lost market share to Google's Android platform, which was up from 19.6% to 26% in the period.

Google narrowly beat Apple for second place. Apple took 25% of the market.

According to comScore, 61.5 million people in the U.S. owned smart phones during the period.

RELATED:

Consumer Electronics Show: T-Mobile bets on tablets with Dell's Streak 7 and LG's G-Slate

Google Android newsstand could challenge Apple magazine sales on iPad, iPhone

HTC files for trademark on tablet

RIM's BlackBerry and OS lose ground to iPhone and Android

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: Samsung Elecronics Co.'s Nexus S smar tphone, which runs on Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg

It must be the amp.

At least, that's what British music-equipment maker Orange Amps is hoping music geeks will conclude when they see a Brazilian guitarist's potentially record-breaking rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee" on their new all-in-one amp and personal computer at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Tiago Alberto de Quadros, a.k.a. Tiago Della Vega, an Orange Amps endorsee, has held the Guinness World Record as fastest guitar player since May 7, 2008, when he successfully played "Flight of the Bumblebee" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at 320 beats per minute.

He shredded the same song at 340 BPM on the Intel stand at the CES in Las Vegas on Friday, according to a news release sent out by Orange Amps. (That’s nearly 4 beats per second).

Although it may not have hastened his fingers, Della Vega was playing through the Orange Amps OPC, a new amp that doubles as a recording studio, with playing, recording, editing and computing capabilities.

The amp goes on sale in the first quarter of 2011 at a recommended retail price of $1,499.

A Guinness World Records representative said in an e-mail that the organization cannot verify that Della Vega broke his own record as there was no Guinness adjudicator on site.

"He will need to submit evidence/documentation for our team to verify," she wrote.

RELATED:

Consumer Electronics Show: Soul by Ludacris and Sleek by 50 Cent, the latest headphones brought to you by a musician

Consumer Electronics Show: Blue Microphone's New Yeti Pro and Mikey for Flip sound off

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: Tiago Della Vega at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Credit: Orange Amps

A tabloid story threw some Facebook users into a panic over the weekend by suggesting that the popular social networking site's days are numbered.

Facebook, in turn, has assured users that it's not going anywhere.

The story on the Weekly World News site quoted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as saying, "Facebook has gotten out of control and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness."

The story pegged the site's shutdown date at March 15. Many of the more than 10,000 commenters on the story were skeptical, while some expressed concern and others said they wished Facebook would just go away.

Facebook assured users in a wall post that rumors of its demise were greatly exaggerated: "We didn't get the memo about shutting down, so we'll keep working away like always."

Other stories up on the Weekly World News site Monday declared "Glenn Beck moving to China!" and "Alien spaceships to attack Earth in 2011."

RELATED:

Facebook may be planning IPO in 2012

Facebook's cash infusion whets appetite of investors

-- Abby Sewell

Photo:  Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press

The iPad may have some competition coming from HTC, the Taiwan company that makes mobile phones using Google's Android operating system.

On Dec. 26, HTC filed an application for a trademark on a product called the HTC Scribe, described as a "handheld wireless device, namely, a tablet computer," with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The company has made no official announcement yet regarding a tablet.

Bloomberg News reported based on a statement by Richard Ko, an analyst at KGI Research, that HTC may launch a tablet during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week or during February’s Mobile World Congress.

Apple sold 4.19 million iPads in the last quarter, which ended Sept. 25.

RELATED:

Apple, Android help smartphone sales double over last year, report says

Sales of Google's Android beating iPhone in 2010, Nielsen says

Magazine sales on Apple's iPad plummet

-- Abby Sewell

Photo: HTC Corp. CEO Peter Chou speaks during the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong in November. Credit: Ym Yik/EPA