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Twitter co-creator arrives in Australia to launch latest entrepreneurial venture

Xinhua, April 12, 2016 Adjust font size:

U.S. tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey has touched down in Australia to promote his latest business venture, Square.

Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, arrived in Melbourne for the Australian launch of Square, a new streamlined electronic payment system at a local cafe.

Square released its first device, a three-centimeter piece of plastic that converts smartphones and tablets into a portable credit card processor, in the U.S. six years ago.

However, the Australian launch was initially delayed after one of Australia's biggest banks, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), voiced concerns about the security of smartphone pins when using the new design.

Dorsey, who has a net worth of 2.3 billion U.S. dollars according to Forbes, said the "sexy" technology was safe and he wanted to work with Australia's banks not against them.

"I don't believe it is important to be the first in the market, I believe it is important to be the best," the 39-year-old said in comments published by Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

"If you think back to a company like Apple, the iPod certainly wasn't the first MP3 player, but it was the best and it won out."

"We believe the best experience is really a cohesive experience, which ties in one ecosystem of services for sellers."

"We want to continue winning the hearts of small business (in Australia)."

Last week, Twitter made history by becoming the first social media platform to purchase the digital broadcast rights for a major sports competition, the National Football League (NFL).

Under the landmark 10-million-U.S.-dollar deal, Twitter will stream 10 "Thursday Night Football' games to its global network of 800 million registered and non-registered users in 2016.

Dorsey said it was important the microblogging site, which sport fans often use to voice their opinions, continued to grow after the organizations 10th anniversary last month.

"Twitter is 10 years old now, and for 10 years we have seen this massively great experience when people watch a game with Twitter," Dorsey told reporters in Melbourne."

"We want to do it everywhere with sports like soccer. Latin American football is really big on Twitter, a lot of the players are on Twitter and we have a lot of fans on Twitter."

"Every game around the world has pretty heavy tweeting, so we want to make sure we can provide a great experience everywhere."

After sleeping in a tent on Monday night, the "hipster" tech genius will visit Australia's Twitter office in Sydney and meet with members of the Federal government to discuss the current technological environment over the course of his trip Down Under. Endit