All Things Digital

In BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh. Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and, most of all, innovative manner. To explain all this, Balogh sat down with me twice–he is clearly a glutton for punishment–to talk about where Yahoo stood as it sought to dig itself out of its long slump and reemerge as the potent Internet force it once was. Read More »

Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The notification after the jump. Read More »

Jeff Zucker runs one of the world’s leading media and entertainment content companies, which is also being caught in the throes of a major shift, due to the impact of the Internet over the last decade. In this onstage interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Zucker talks about the state of the television business; the changing advertising market; the impact of Hulu, an online premium video joint venture NBC launched with News Corp.; and precisely what he meant when he said that the Web was turning “analog dollars into digital pennies.” Read More »

Palm seems to have satiated pent-up early demand for its new Pre smartphone, constrained supplies be damned. In a pair of investor notes issued today, analysts at Pali Research and JP Morgan say that sales of the Pre have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity. Read More »

Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marriane Wolk has scoured the Internet for intelligence on Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, and come up with the conclusion that the appeal of the new service, and its staying power, is uncertain. Read More »

Microsoft’s first series of Web video ads for Internet Explorer 8 didn’t seem to garner much attention. But its latest one did: It features a married couple, an unspeakable porn site and a lot of vomit. Now Redmond says that was probably a mistake. Read More »

It took Apple and AT&T 74 days to sell the first million iPhones back in 2007. This year it took just three. No wonder AT&T is crowing about first-day sales. In an all-hands memo to employees this week, the carrier, which sold “hundreds of thousands” of iPhones during its pre-order process, said first-day sales of the 3GS were off the charts. The memo, after the jump. Read More »

About a year ago, Canadian Internet entrepreneur Justin Hartzman was planning to visit Las Vegas with some friends, and was trying to decide which shows and concerts the group should see. “After about 400 or 500 emails back and forth,” he says, he realized he needed a Web site that would aggregate all of the events in a certain area and during a specific set of dates. And thus the idea for TicketFlow was born. Read More »

A noteworthy metric in the latest mobile browser share report from StatCounter: RIM’s BlackBerry has been making some meaningful gains in the world-wide mobile browser market. According to the research house, which tracks page views by browser on mobile devices and the desktop, RIM has boosted its share of the market quite a bit since the beginning of this year. Read More »

Want access to the Washington D.C. elite? The city’s hometown paper is happy to arrange that for you provided you’re willing to pay between $25,000 and $250,000. The caveat: That fee won’t include access to the Washington Post’s editorial staff. But I bet that will change sooner than later. Read More »

TiVo shares this morning are heading lower after the company said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted a request by EchoStar to stay a contempt order imposed by a lower court pending the outcome of EchoStar’s appeal in the the patent dispute between the two companies. Read More »

The more I hear about the supposed plan for an Internet cafe company to buy the world’s best-known illegal file-sharing site, the more I think that the whole thing is a farce. So this one doesn’t even faze me: Swedish regulators are looking into insider trading charges at Global Gaming Factory X, which saw shares jump several days before it said it would buy The Pirate Bay. Read More »

Bad news for Sirius XM shareholders hoping for a change in management: Mel Karmazin’s five-year contract as CEO of the satellite radio provider has been extended through December 2012. And he’s been given a raise and new stock options to boot. Read More »

QOTD

“We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.”

– Twitter co-founder Biz Stone

Protesters on the streets of Tehran questioning the recent Iranian presidential election results have gotten support from a new breed of election watchers: Internet-enabled anomaly hounds who say the numbers don’t add up. Read More »