Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 12

• Twitter's Dick Costolo to step down as CEO in yet another shake-up; Stock rises 3.5%. Twitter Inc Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo abruptly announced he was stepping down on Thursday amid increasing scrutiny of the company's slow user growth and inability to attract advertisers at the same rate as its competitors. Costolo will be replaced by co-founder Jack Dorsey on an interim basis. According to a source familiar with the matter, it was Costolo's decision to leave, and Costolo said he brought it up with the board last year as it began talking about succession planning. Twitter has had a number of shake-ups in its management. Co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams both served as CEOs of the company before Costolo, and Costolo has overhauled much of his management team over the past year. "Unfortunately this news isn't surprising," said Nate Elliott of management consultant Forrester Research. "The bottom line is that Twitter isn't very good right now at serving either its users or its marketers." Wall Street reacted positively to the news, as Twitter shares rose to $37.17, up 3.6 percent, after the announcement, meaning investors thought Twitter was worth $900 million more without Costolo than with him.

• Twitter to Eliminate 140-Character Limit in Direct Messages Twitter Inc., the home of 140-character messages, is removing the space limit in its private messages. The change comes next month, the San Francisco-based company said Thursday on its website for developers. Direct Messages are different from tweets in that they are only visible between individual users. “We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon,” Sachin Agarwal, Twitter’s product manager for Direct Message, wrote. “You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today.”

• Amazon’s E-Books Business Investigated by European Antitrust Regulators. European regulators announced an antitrust investigation on Thursday into whether Amazon used its dominant position in the region’s e-books market to favor its own products over those of rivals. The European Commission said it was evaluating the legality of clauses that Amazon had used with European publishers, which required them to inform the e-commerce giant of more favorable terms for books that were offered to other digital retailers. The announcement is the latest hurdle facing United States technology companies in Europe. European policy makers in recent years have pursued a series of tax, antitrust and other investigations into the businesses of Apple, Google and Facebook. The European authorities said the clauses being evaluated in the e-books investigation might have hampered competition by making it more difficult for Amazon’s rivals to offer lower prices. Amazon has been estimated to sell about eight out of every 10 e-books in Britain. In Germany, the percentage is just under half. In the United States, Amazon has an estimated two-thirds of the e-book market. The investigation is at an early stage and still could be dropped or end in a settlement without a formal finding of wrongdoing. If formal charges, known as a Statement of Objections, are eventually brought against Amazon and Amazon fails to successfully rebut those findings, the company could face a fine of as much as 10 percent of its most recent annual global sales.
• Coding Boot Camp Enrollment Soars as Students Seek Tech Jobs. Graduates of computer coding schools will more than double this year, a signal of heightened interest in high-paid technology jobs. More than 16,000 students will graduate from programming boot camps, up from 6,740 in 2014, according to data from Course Report, a website that allows students to rate the schools. The intensive training programs teach students how to create websites and mobile apps in two to six months and cost as much as $21,000. The tech boot-camp industry is less than four years old and graduated about 2,000 students two years ago, according to Course Report. Graduates don’t receive diplomas or certificates. Their credentials are the software programs that they coded while in school. About three-quarters of students are placed in coding jobs within three months of graduating, Course Report said in August. Mean boot camp tuition is $11,063, about 10 percent higher than a year earlier, and ranges to as much as $21,000, Course Report said in a statement. Total boot camp industry revenue will be about $172 million in 2015, up from about $52 million last year, the statement said.

• Beset With Failures, Google Tries to Breathe New Life Into Android One - Appoints Caesar Sengupta as New Leader. Caesar Sengupta, a VP based in Singapore who once managed Chromebook globally, now oversees Android One. He is close to Sunder Pichai and is admired within the company, largely for his work on Chromebooks. “If there’s anyone at Google who understands the hardware partner ecosystem, it’s Caesar,” said Shailesh Nalawadi, who left Google two years ago to co-found Mavin, a mobile startup focused on reducing Internet access costs in markets like India. “He’s probably the best person to be working on this.” Last September, Google inaugurated Android One, a cheap smartphone line for emerging markets, with typical Google audacity: It was billed as the fix “for the next five billion” soon to come online. The initiative, which promised low-cost devices with the latest version of the Android operating system and Google’s full software imprint, was a point of pride within Google. Started in India, one of Google’s biggest markets and the birthplace of Android chief Sundar Pichai, it was counted among the many bids to spread Internet access globally. Android One began with a bang, thanks to the tremendous marketing dollars Google put behind it. But despite its scale, it has been a disappointment, beset by reluctant consumers and manufacturing partners, as well as misfires from the search company that has never quite cracked hardware, according to multiple people familiar with the project.