Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Kara Visits GigaOm's Structure 08

With all the Yahoo (YHOO) reorganization noise this past week–full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, if you want to go all literary!–BoomTown had little time to post our video on GigaOm‘s Om Malik’s Structure 08 conference on Wednesday.

Held at the spanking new Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it was high-wonk, packed with CTOs and those involved in building the guts of the Internet and its infrastructure, whose jobs are becoming more complicated than ever as Internet usage booms.

Malik thinks this unprecedented growth is putting a lot of stress on the system, akin to the physical wear-and-tear our nation’s roads and bridges are under.

As he wrote: “The platforms on which we have done business for over a decade are starting to provide diminishing returns; the smart money, meanwhile, is seeking new platform structures.”

Thus, lots of talk about how to manage the potential crisis, such as the move toward cloud computing, databases in the sky and other stuff that is way, way over BoomTown’s head.

Nonetheless, we press on, because it is our solemn duty to understand dark fiber someday soon.

Here’s the video, including interviews with Malik, WordPress’s Raanan Bar-Cohen and NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson:

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus