AllThingsD » D10

Apple's Tim Cook Returns to D Stage to Open 11th Annual Conference

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:36:08 +0000

Although we are only about a month out from our 11th D: All Things Digital conference, we still have a few big speakers to announce, not the least of which is Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Cook, who made his debut at D10 last year in his first major interview as the new leader of the iconic and powerful tech giant, will be kicking off the proceedings with an interview with us on the opening night of the conference.

There’s lots to talk about, from the explosive growth of the mobile market to intense competition from a range of rivals, most especially Google’s Android, as well as innovative offerings from Korea’s Samsung. It will also be interesting to talk about the changes at Apple under the leadership of Cook, who took over from the late co-founder and industry legend Steve Jobs, as well inquiring about what new products are in the pipeline and how the company is faring in an increasingly high-pressure market.

Cook joins a long list of stellar speakers slated to appear onstage at D11 from May 28 to 30, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Jeff Immelt of GE, new Android chief Sundar Pichai, Sony’s Kaz Hirai, ABC’s Anne Sweeney and more.

But we are not quite done yet, so stay tuned for announcements of out final speakers. And, while we never reveal them before the event, our D11 demos are among our best ever. (Special note: D11 has been sold out for months, but we provide coverage and videos from it throughout the conference.)

Until we get them all in person, here’s the full Cook interview from D10 to peruse:

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True&Co Co-Founder Ramamurthy Joins Battery as EIR

Kara Swisher — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 05:26:14 +0000

Aarthi Ramamurthy, who co-founded personalized intimate apparel online retailer True&Co, has joined Battery Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence to “pursue disruptive e-commerce initiatives.” Ramamurthy was most recently head of product of True&Co, which launched at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year. She has also worked at both Netflix and Microsoft, and was the co-creator of Bubblegum, a photo-sharing application.

Gaming the Clouds: Here Are the D Demos of Otoy (Still Standing) and OnLive (Who Knows?)

Kara Swisher — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:27:55 +0000

At our D: All Things Digital conferences, we’ve taken an interest in the cloud, including showing off two of the leading game streaming services — Otoy and OnLive.

(That’s OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman in the photo, demoing the service at D: Dive Into Mobile in 2010.)

Earlier today, in an epic fail of communication by Perlman, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based OnLive drastically reformed itself — mysteriously laying off its staff and then saying a new company had bought the pioneering start-up’s assets and could be hiring an unknown number of employees who had just been dinged.

Said OnLive, in perhaps one of the most ridonkulous statements I have ever seen:

“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services. We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.”

Forgive us if we can’t begin to understand the pointless machinations that went on.

On the other side of the coin is Otoy, an innovative Los Angeles-based software provider, which demoed its cloud-based 3-D rendering service called Octane Reader at D10 this summer, along with its game-streaming offering.

Otoy was founded in 2008 by Jules Urbach, Alissa Grainger and Malcolm Taylor — and they seem to be doing just fine as an independent start-up in the space.

Here’s the Otoy demo, as well as the two times OnLive came to D:

Otoy at D10 in 2012:

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OnLive at D8 in summer of 2010:

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OnLive at D: Dive Into Mobile in late 2010

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Hey Internet Girl: Aaron Sorkin's TV News 2.0 Show Gets a Second Season (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:05:10 +0000

Hollywood super-writer Aaron Sorkin has already gotten his new show on the struggles of creating a new television news show in the Internet age renewed for another season.

The successful Sorkin made light of the struggles to attract a big audience for the HBO program in a recent onstage interview at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

Not so hard, as it turns out for the voluble scribe, whose “The Newsroom” got 2.1 million viewers in its opening two weeks ago, which is just behind HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and “Game of Thrones.”

Sorkin did manage to attract some controversy recently when he said in a tense interview with Sarah Nicole Pickett of Canada’s Globe and Mail:

“Listen here, Internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”

The fab line did result in an even funnier Tumblr on the kerfuffle.

Here’s the full video of Sorkin’s interview with Walt Mossberg at D10, as well as another very funny recent viral video, titled “Sorkinisms,” in which the writer uses his best lines over and over, compiled from a variety of his shows.

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Google's Wojcicki and Pichai on Ads and Chrome: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:14:19 +0000

The last interview of the 10th D: All Things Digital conference was a key one, since it featured perhaps Google’s two most important execs: Susan Wojcicki and Sundar Pichai.

Longtime exec Wojcicki — the search giant was literally founded in her garage — runs advertising products at Google, its money-gushing flagship division; Pichai’s charge is making the company’s products ubiquitous via its Chrome unit.

The pair talked about a wide range of things, from the progress of Chrome and its Android mobile offering to how it dominates the online ad market to accusations by Hollywood’s Ari Emanuel that Google is a content thief.

Here’s the video of the full interview with Walt Mossberg:

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Skype's Tony Bates Talks About Talking Online: The Full D10 Interview

Kara Swisher — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:02:38 +0000

When Microsoft bought the global Internet communications company Skype for $8.5 billion eight months ago, there was some worry about it being well-integrated into the software giant.

But, as Tony Bates — the former Skype CEO who now runs the Microsoft division — said onstage at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, the service now has 250 million monthly connected users, up from 170 million then.

Among the many topics he covered in this interview with me: Mobile efforts with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, prospects for video and, of course, how integration is going with Microsoft’s slew of products, such as Windows 8 and its mobile platform.

“We’re on that journey,” he said. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

Until then, here is the full video of the interview at D10:

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Sal Khan and John Hennessy on Online Education: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:27:51 +0000

One of the more important of the interviews at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference was the pairing of Khan Academy’s Salman Khan and Stanford University’s President John Hennessy to talk about the state of online education.

And we have a lot to learn, as it turns out, to make digital education really start to have an impact globally.

Hennessy (who runs one of the world’s most influential educational institutions and a huge engine of Silicon Valley growth) and Khan (whose online site teaches thousands of people in math, science and other subjects daily, and has delivered 150 million Web lessons) are the ones who would know.

Here’s the video of the interview that Walt Mossberg did with the pair:

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FTC's Jon Leibowitz Takes Your Privacy Very Seriously: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:00:18 +0000

It’s clear — especially from this interview with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference — that the federal government is going to spend more time scrutinizing Internet companies and their behavior.

“The more protection these consumers have, the more they trust it, and the more commerce they do,” Leibowitz said in a wide-ranging interview that focused a lot on “privacy by design” and transparency in the face of ever-growing power by digital-data-sucking companies like Facebook and Google.

Leibowitz could not say much about an ongoing antitrust investigation of Google, except to note that he had just hired his own outside big legal gun to keep up with the search giant’s, in case of, well, you know.

Here’s the video of the full interview with Walt Mossberg:

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Mayor Bloomberg Wants You to Supersize Your Health: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:34:38 +0000

It was fortuitous for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference that the larger-than-life New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had just banned giant servings of sugary and high-calorie supersized sodas in the city.

Because of duties back in the Big Apple, the electronic news entrepreneur was broadcast to D10 via satellite, but he managed to strongly defend his latest effort to fight bad health practices by his constituents — whether they like it or not.

Even remotely, the interview was lively and covered a wide variety of topics, including Bloomberg’s thoughts about technology in the classroom, and the reasons he’s not going to run for president.

Among the reasons — he backs gay rights and, “I believe in science.”

Don’t miss this great interview with me and Walt Mossberg:

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Hollywood's Ari Emanuel Has Strong Opinions About Content: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:55:16 +0000

Without further ado, here’s one of the more controversial interviews of the 10th D: All Things Digital conference — Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel unplugged.

Actually, he is usually a very live wire, which the crowd at the event did not get to see burning hot until the very end, in a testy exchange with The Verge’s Josh Topolsky.

This exchange caused some level of debate online over Emanuel’s brusque manner, including some cursing. But — however riveting it is to watch their argument devolve from initially like a funny wrestling match to really pissed-off — there’s a lot more to the interview to pay mind to.

Emanuel — who co-heads William Morris Endeavor, one of Hollywood’s most important talent agencies — talked about a range of issues, from a recent investment by private equity firm Silver Lake to spur more digital initiatives, to the state of the entertainment industry, to crowdfunding movies.

But it was the topic of intellectual property piracy that got Emanuel’s content-loving juices flowing, taking particular aim at Google for not doing enough to filter out stolen copyright-protected material.

Here’s the video of the full interview:

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Catmull and Ellison Pay Tribute to Steve Jobs: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:30:16 +0000

Without a doubt, some of the key interviews at the D: All Things Digital conference over the decade have been with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Which is why Walt Mossberg and I felt it important to have a session honoring Jobs and his legacy.

So we called on his close friends and colleagues to reflect on Jobs’s impact on tech and innovation. And, of course, to tell some great stories about the legendary icon of Silicon Valley.

Here’s Ed Catmull of Disney-owned Pixar and Oracle’s Larry Ellison doing just that:

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Larry Ellison Tells It Like It Is: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16:04 +0000

Perhaps more than any other tech figure in Silicon Valley, Larry Ellison — now also trying to become the proud owner of Hawaii’s Lanai — is, for lack of a better word, the man.

It’s a bit about endurance (he’s been at it since 1978, when he founded Oracle), a bit about success (the database giant still remains a very powerful force in the industry), a bit about spoiling for a fight (Hewlett-Packard, SAP, any small cloud company that irks him) and a lot about style (America’s Cup sailing, his gazillionaire Ironman persona and, for goodness sake, he is planning on buying an entire Hawaiian island, presumably for a lair). Ellison has the kind of long-term and powerful perspective that is rare in the app-happy Web 2.0 era of small ideas and too-big valuations.

In other words, he’s the real deal.

So please pull up a chair and enjoy what turned out to be one of the highlight interviews of the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, which is essentially Ellison very, very unplugged:

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Pixar's Ed Catmull on How to Be "Brave" in Today's Hollywood: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:15:46 +0000

With Pixar’s latest animated movie — “Brave” — about to open, using new technology, there’s a lot riding on the outcome for Ed Catmull.

As the president and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney Animation Studio, he was key to the debut of the first-ever computer-generated feature film, “Toy Story,” which ushered in a new way of thinking about animation.

But the need for showstopping innovation in entertainment never ends, as the celebrity computer scientist and bona fide five-time Oscar winner discussed in this D10 interview with me.

Here’s the whole session:

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Spotify's Sean Parker and Daniel Ek Make Music -- And Some Noise: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:55:07 +0000

At the 10th D: All Things Digital earlier this month, we paired online music’s best known entrepreneurs — Daniel Ek and Sean Parker.

They now work together at Spotify — Ek as CEO and Parker as investor/adviser (he played a similar role in the early days at Facebook).

While they discussed a lot — from the importance of social on the sector to the virtues of playlists on the service — Parker also got off the best zinger against Apple, noting that it might have kept Spotify from landing on U.S. shores for two years.

“There was a sense in which Apple was threatened by what we were doing,” he said.

Here’s the full video of the interview:

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LinkedIn's Weiner and Hoffman Talk Social Innovation: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:00:56 +0000

One of the more stable of the Web 2.0 companies that have gone public has turned out to be LinkedIn.

Unlike several other recent IPOs, the business networking site’s stock is strong, and investors seem to like what Chairman Reid Hoffman and CEO Jeff Weiner have been doing.

In an interview with me at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, the pair laid out a vision of “making every professional more effective,” and said that social innovation is not over.

Here’s the full video:

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Aaron Sorkin on Jobs Movie, Zuckerberg as Antihero and More: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:43:09 +0000

One of the most engaging interviews at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference was with well-known Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

Best known for television hits such as “The West Wing” and movies like “A Few Good Men” — and, of course, the controversial film about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called “The Social Network” — he is now about to launch a new HBO show called “The Newsroom.”

But most intriguing to the crowd gathered was his work on an upcoming project: To turn Walter Isaacson’s book about Apple’s Steve Jobs into a movie.

Sorkin had a lot to say about that, and also about the way his digitally distracted audience watches all his work, in this talk with Walt Mossberg.

Here it is:

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Nathan Myhrvold Will Not Apologize for Patent Trolling: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:55:46 +0000

At the 10th D: All Things Digital conference earlier this month, well-known tech exec Nathan Myhrvold wasn’t taking any guff about his controversial patent-portfolio company, Intellectual Ventures.

“I never was a popular kid in class,” the former Microsoft executive told the audience of tech players. “I’m not going to be popular in this class.”

No, indeed, but he is very smart about the issue that has pitted digital companies against each other at an ever-increasing rate.

Here’s the video of the onstage interview Walt Mossberg did with Myhrvold:

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Zynga's Mark Pincus on Facebook Conundrum and More: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:55:17 +0000

Yesterday, stock in the online gaming site Zynga dropped to new lows, in part caught in the downdraft after the troubled Facebook IPO.

In this interview at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, CEO Mark Pincus talked about that key relationship with the social networking giant upon which Zynga’s success was built; he also discussed its mobile aspirations and how the company is doing since its own public offering late last year.

Here’s the video:

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Mary Meeker Explains Internet 2012 in 17 Minutes: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:55:19 +0000

Walt Mossberg and I have a longstanding rule against PowerPoint presentations at the D: All Things Digital conference — mostly because they usually bore the bejesus out of us and the audience.

So, letting longtime Wall Street analyst turned venture capitalist Mary Meeker loose onstage with a clicker and a mess of slides with to debut her annual Internet Trends report means that we think what she had to say was pretty entertaining and very informative.

And, indeed it was, with a lot of focus on important trends in social, commerce, media and, most especially, mobile monetization — or lack thereof.

But there’s more than that, as well as a quick interview we did with the Kleiner Perkins VC about where the digital industry has been in the last decade, and where is it going.

Here’s Meeker at D10, as well as the slides to follow along:

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Apple's Tim Cook Says Hello: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:55:00 +0000

As promised, we will begin the posting of all the videos from the 10th D: All Things Digital conference today, starting out with the opening night speaker: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Aside from a few short interviews and an investor conference, Cook’s session with Walt Mossberg and me was his first extended public talk as the newish leader of perhaps the most important and definitely most influential company in tech.

So, getting to see Cook in action is probably the most important part of this interview. While clearly playing it close to the vest, he ranged over a wide number of topics, from secrecy at Apple (it’s now apparently been doubled!) to the iPhone to controversies in China to a possibly more social partnership with Facebook to more television efforts to, of course, the legacy of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last year.

Cook will be onstage again later today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco — which the crack AllThingsD team will be covering — where he will be unveiling product updates and perhaps more in a keynote speech at 10 am PT.

And here’s a very good primer for that:

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(Over the next two to three weeks, we’ll be posting the full videos of D10 interviews in the order that they were presented at the conference.)

Backstage With Aaron Sorkin, Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker: The KatieCam Highlight Reel

Katherine Boehret — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:44:36 +0000

After three days of in-depth interviews at the D10 conference, you might think you know all about the speakers and demonstrators who graced the stage. But what are these people like when they’re not in public?

I caught up with 15 D10 guests and asked them. The results: Aaron Sorkin told me about the music he listens to when he writes, Nathan Myhrvold talked about cooking with a centrifuge, and Sean Parker told me about the book he’s reading.

Susan Wojcicki and Sundar Pichai

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Tony Bates

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Jon Leibowitz

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John Hennessy

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Quri

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Ed Catmull

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Jeff Weiner and Reid Hoffman

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Aaron Sorkin

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Nathan Myhrvold

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True and Co.

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Daniel Ek and Sean Parker

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Designed by Apple in California -- Assembled in the U.S.?

John Paczkowski — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 19:20:21 +0000

Apple once operated a factory in the United States. Will it ever open another one? Will we ever see an Apple device labeled “Designed by Apple in California -– Assembled in the United States”? Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t sure, but he’s certainly open to the idea, though it’s not an easy one to execute.

“I want there to be [another U.S.-manufactured Apple product],” Cook said onstage at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference earlier this week, adding that some important pieces of a few of Apple’s devices are currently made in the States.

“This is not well known, but the engines for the iPhone and iPad are built in the U.S., in Austin,” Cook said. “The glass on the iPhone is made at a plant in Kentucky — and not just for the U.S., but for other markets outside the U.S. as well.”

But those are just a few components. And the bulk of them are not only manufactured outside the U.S., but assembled into Apple devices there as well.

Could assembly ever be done in the U.S.?

Said Cook, “I hope so, one day.”

But in order for that to ever happen, the U.S. really needs to up its game.

“The truth is the tool-and-die-maker skill in the U.S. began to go down in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Cook said. “How many tool-and-die makers do you know in the U.S. now? I could call a meeting and invite every tool-and-die maker in the United States and we wouldn’t fill this room.”

Not so in China, though. Said Cook, “In China you could fill a city with tool-and-die makers.”

So there’s significant work to be done if we’re ever to reach that “Designed by Apple in California -– Assembled in the United States” dream.

“There has to be some fundamental changes in the education system and the tool-and-die business in the United States to really bring consumer electronics assembly back to the U.S. But there are things that we can do, and that’s what we’re working on doing, and you can bet that we will use the whole of our influence to do it.”

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz Backstage With Katie Boehret

Drake Martinet — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:30:05 +0000

Self-described Washington bureaucrat Jon Leibowitz spent some time talking with Walt Mossberg on the D conference stage about privacy and digital property. Once he stepped off the stage, though, he shared a different kind of scoop with Katie Boehret — what are his can’t-miss stops on a visit to Washington, D.C.

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Google VPs Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki Talk Ads, Chrome and YouTube (Video)

Mike Isaac — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:21:04 +0000

It’s a rich time for Google: Ad revenue is up, the Chrome division will soon launch a new version of its Chromebook, and YouTube still receives hundreds of hours of video every single day. Check out Google SVPs Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki in conversation with Walt Mossberg at D: All Things Digital conference.

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Full D10 Conference Coverage

Tony Bates on Skype Becoming the Virtual Kitchen Table (Video)

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:00:57 +0000

Microsoft closed the acquisition of Skype eight months ago for a whopping $8.5 billion.

And today at D10, Skype boss Tony Bates said that the integration of the two companies is going well, and that he’s busy coming up with ways to serve billions of monthly users.

Bates talked a lot about how he was investing in mobile, including phones and tablets, to reach his aggressive growth targets, as well as about solutions for the living room.

During the interview and following Q&A session, Bates repeatedly answered questions about how Skype hasn’t — or has — changed since the merger.

One thing he said won’t change is that he’ll still have the opportunity to build the service on non-Microsoft products, such as Android and iOS. But he was clear about what he wasn’t open to — creating it so users could access Skype with people using different video-calling services.

“It’s critical to what we do,” he said.

Watch those highlights and others in this video:

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