Onstage at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York City Monday, Xiaomi co-founder and president Bin Lin discussed the company’s driving philosophy: Building a business on services by selling mid- to high-end smartphones at cost.

“We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” Lin said. “Cellphones are really just like PCs were 20 years ago. They generated big profit margins in the beginning. But those margins are in the single digits now. The same thing is beginning to happen to smartphones. So rather than focus on devices where margins will decline, we’re focusing on services.”

But to build a business on services, you need volume. How does a startup that’s essentially just three years old do that? By selling high-spec smartphones at low-spec smartphone prices.

“Our flagship phone (the Xiaomi MI-2) has a lot of the same specs you’d see in high-end Samsung and HTC phones,” Lin said. “It’s got the same processor that Samsung uses in the Galaxy S4. But it costs about half as much. … We essentially price our phones at bill-of-materials.”

That’s a compelling value proposition, and one that Xiaomi is getting a lot of mileage out of. Lin said the batches of 300,000 handsets that Xiaomi sells directly to consumers on its website routinely sell out within five minutes.

But when exactly does the company plan to launch it? And where? During his appearance at the opening of our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Monday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said the company is planning a first-wave rollout of the OS that will begin in just a few months.

“We plan to launch in five countries in June and 11 more by the end of the year,” Kovacs said. “We plan to hit Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. … We’ll hit the U.S. in 2014.”

Why target those markets and not bigger ones like the United States?

“In Silicon Valley we tend to see the world through high-end devices,” Kovacs said. “But that’s not true in the rest of the world. So in the short term, we’re launching in emerging markets where Firefox is particularly strong. … It didn’t make sense for us to launch a version-one device around the world.”

A few weeks ago, we posted our initial list of speakers for the 11th D: All Things Digital conference, which takes place May 28 to 30 in Palos Verdes, Calif.

Already, we have an amazing gathering onstage, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, GE’s Jeff Immelt and many more.

And, today, we’re adding more names to the already action-packed list of top media and tech names — although we’re still not done unveiling all of them yet, with some big ones yet to come.

But the latest group should continue to provide some news-packed interviews onstage, given their varied careers at some of the most important tech and media companies around.

First off, Walt Mossberg and I are thrilled to bring back Steven Sinofsky, who left Microsoft earlier this year after runnings its flagship Windows franchise. (In fact, he demoed Windows 8 onstage in 2011.) As one of the software giant’s most high-profile and voluble execs (his numerous internal blog posts at the company were riveting), Sinofsky has always had a keen view of the entire tech landscape beyond Redmond, Wash. Thus, Sinofsky Unplugged is sure to be a lively thing to watch.

Also interesting will be another returnee, Sundar Pichai of Google. Already head of its Chrome efforts, he has quite recently been thrust onto a bigger stage after the sudden departure of Andy Rubin as head of the search giant’s Android unit. Now, taking over the key mobile unit, the affable Pichai is charged with making sure Google stays strong in the sector.

Among the most important parts of the entire mobile ecosystem is voice, which is why we wanted to get the leader of the most powerful company in the sector — Nuance Communications chairman and CEO Paul Ricci — onstage to talk about where it’s all headed. Nuance powers Apple’s Siri (allegedly) and also owns Dragon NaturallySpeaking, making it a dominant force in the efforts to make devices interact with us all more effortlessly and hands-free.

We’re also convinced that Hollywood is really starting to grok the importance of digital in reaching consumers of its entertainment products. That’s especially true in the television market, which has had to try to figure out how to attract viewers in more innovative ways. None has been more immersive in this effort than ABC Family’s hit teen-aimed show, “Pretty Little Liars,” which has used Twitter, Facebook and much more to keep itself on top in the ratings. We’ll have Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and PLL creator and executive producer I. Marlene King onstage to talk about the ups and downs and ins and outs of it all.

Lastly, also from Disney, we’re adding Tom Staggs, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, whose job it is run what is perhaps one of the most logistically challenging efforts in the world. He’ll be discussing how the parks use technology and innovation to take the entire “guest” experience to a new level. That includes showing off its latest effort, MyMagic+ and the Magic Band, which is aimed at creating a more personalized and customized visit and is being rolled out in the next few months.

That’s a lot of speakers, but we are still not done — so watch this space for more to come soon. (FYI: D11 has been sold out since late last year, but we will be posting lots of videos on the proceedings and perhaps even streaming some sessions.)

Until then, here is a different kind of video of the PLL cast doing the Harlem Shake, um, their way:

Harlem shake PLL style @ashbenzo @shaymitch Tyler Blackburn, Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario

Apr 1, 2013| Source: Keek.com

Carlos Domingo

While it was heartbreaking to have to postpone the conference due to Hurricane Sandy, we’ve been using the extra time to add a number of additional speakers and demos to cover even more ground for the rescheduled event, set for April 15 and 16 in New York.

Continuing our pledge to make this the global edition of the conference, we’re adding executives from two international carriers: Carlos Domingo of Telefonica and Michael Hecker of Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the largest carrier in Russia.

Michael Hecker

Domingo has been spearheading a number of initiatives for the Spain-based carrier, most recently leading its efforts around Firefox OS. Hecker, as vice president of strategy, M&A and corporate development, has overseen an aggressive acquisition spree that has helped MTS grow beyond just providing mobile access and become one of the leading telecommunications companies in the region.

Hecker and Domingo join executives from Brazil, China and Israel, among other locales, as well as top executives from Microsoft, Intel, Google, Facebook and Twitter — all part of a jam-packed lineup for the conference.

Mollie Spilman

Of course, what good is all this mobile stuff if you can’t make some money? So we’re also adding two prominent figures in mobile advertising: Google’s Jason Spero and Milllennial Media’s Mollie Spilman.

Jason Spero

Spero came to the search giant via AdMob and is now Google’s head of global mobile solutions (which means mobile ads). Spilman is Millennial’s EVP of North America, where she is responsible for leading the sales and operations, marketing and business development efforts; previously, she was CMO of Yahoo.

We’ll also have a new lineup of demos, as well as a revamped array of Global Voices — tales from around the world about people whose lives are being transformed through mobile technology.

Of course, we will have lots of coverage on AllThingsD, but if you want to be there in person you should hurry. The conference was sold out for October, and is likely to sell out again soon as just a handful of seats remain.

One of the best parts of planning the next D: All Things Digital conference — which is in its 11th iteration this year — is trying to figure out what group of top tech and media players will make the very best combination to bring real insight, news and forward thinking to our amazing audience, at the event and also online.

Some interviews one knows with certainty are going to be epic — such as our joint one with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates at D5 in 2007. Others, like our terrific session with Oracle’s Larry Ellison last year at D10, gave the attendees a new look at someone they thought they already knew well. Some are just plain funny — such as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s famous “death stare” in 2011 at D9.

What’s most clear throughout them all is that Walt Mossberg and I have been lucky in getting high-caliber and engaging speakers who are willing and able to sit in our signature red Steelcase chairs and answer our sometimes thorny questions.

This year’s D11 is no exception. While there are many more speakers we can’t announce quite yet, here’s the start of the list for the 2013 conference, which has been sold out since last fall:

As we did last year, we’ll be having Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker walk the audience through her famous annual Internet report, giving both her observations and prognostications about where the digital space has been and where it is headed next. Meeker’s slides come fast and furious, and often set some of the themes that will doubtless be raised by other speakers.

One speaker who has dominated many key memes this year has been Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whom we last had at D6 in 2008, when she appeared with CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, a lot has happened at the social networking giant — including a tumultuous IPO and a need to quickly develop its mobile business — so there’s plenty to discuss related to Facebook. Of course, there is also a lot to talk about related to her recent book on women in the workplace, titled “Lean In,” which has garnered just a little bit of attention of late.

Another very voluble speaker will surely be Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We felt it was important to bring him back onstage, given all the change at the social communications company over the last year, from its aggressive efforts to build out its advertising business to its tangles with Facebook to its expected IPO in 2014. Twitter has emerged as a key company on the global stage — and it is Costolo’s job to keep it there.

One of the most explosive startups on the scene recently has, of course, been scrapbooking phenom Pinterest, whose steady CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann will appear at our conference for the first time. Unlike many attention-seeking entrepreneurs, Silbermann has quietly pushed the young company to the forefront of e-commerce and other key digital arenas by creating a unique and elegant way for people to share interests of all kinds. Despite its recent huge valuation, Pinterest has an unusual heft and influence in tech and beyond that few other such companies can claim.

Also of interest is the new leader of Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker that is owned by Google but is being run separately by CEO Dennis Woodside. A longtime exec at the search giant, Woodside is charged with creating world-class hardware for the Android platform that can attract consumers and compete with a spate of rivals — while still maintaining a certain distance from the mothership.

Such an effort will require a lot of innovation, which is why Woodside is bringing along someone well known to D — Regina Dugan. The charismatic exec first appeared at D9 when she was director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and she riveted the crowd with stories of Mach 10 airplanes and other cloak-and-dagger tech. Now she’s an SVP at Motorola Mobility, where she leads the Advanced Technology & Projects group.

How big companies are reacting to the Internet revolution has always been an important topic at our conference over the years, and there is no bigger conglomerate to ask about it than GE and its chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. While the company operates across many segments, from energy to technology infrastructure to capital finance, the changes and impact of digital have been paramount for GE. In fact, Immelt recently wrote a provocative editorial on the “Industrial Internet” and the rise of intelligent machines about leveraging “the power of the cloud to connect machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software to other machines (and to us) so we can extract data, make sense of it and find meaning where it did not exist before.” Heavier stuff than your basic jet engine (which GE makes, by the way).

Change has not been easy for Web-centric companies, either, including Cisco, whose CEO John Chambers has led the networking giant through the growth of the Internet since the very beginning. Still, Cisco has struggled with a number of recent consumer efforts, even as it has been aggressively shifting its focus to the cloud to continue to dominate in the network space and to push the idea of the “Internet of Everything,” where it plays a central role.

To ratchet up the conversation, we decided to pair Chambers with one of the enterprise’s most clever and fast-moving entrepreneurs, Aaron Levie of Box. The cloud services company just raised a mega round of funding and is headed for an IPO next year, but we also invited Levie because he is very, very funny and manages to explain the massive changes moving through the sector in a very, very funny way. We look forward to his take on how smaller upstarts like Box, Dropbox and many others are managing to best the big companies with innovation and chutzpah.

Speaking of that, there is no better tell-it-like-it-is exec in digital media than Barry Diller of IAC. We have had the razor-sharp Diller onstage at D before, but we thought it was time to bring him back because of his aggressive investment in Aereo, the Web TV service that mainstream TV networks abhor. Diller, who has run such a media operation before, is perhaps the perfect person to be disrupting them now, and to talk about the state of the media industry today. He’s also still owner of a lot of key Internet franchises that have had to react to the shift in consumer tastes and desires.

In another pairing, Jeff Zucker will join Diller onstage to debate how media is faring. It’s an important issue for him, since he was just hired by Time Warner to reinvigorate its CNN cable news brand in a fast-changing environment. Zucker has worked everywhere in the TV sector, but rethinking how it creates and delivers its offering in the future — while making more than digital dimes — is a massive task.

Also huge is the uphill battle new Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai faces in turning around the fortunes of the Japanese consumer electronics giant. As he overhauls the once-dominant company, he also must push forward on a number of fronts that include mobile, digital imaging, videogames and network services. There is also the upcoming debut of the PlayStation 4 console, which has yet to be unveiled, all of which has added pressure to Hirai’s quick-moving efforts at turnaround at Sony.

Hirai will be appearing with Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, who is in the midst of building a digitally tricked-out new stadium for the storied football franchise, which is being described as a “large data center.” And more — including addressing the importance of technology in delivering the modern sports entertainment experience. The issue is one that every sports owner on the planet thinks about these days, as fans expect more and more ways to share, communicate and interact.

Using a sports metaphor, it’s a pretty good line-up so far, but the D11 speaker list is far from complete, with more very big names to be announced in the coming weeks. And, especially since we have no more tickets to sell, it’s important to remember that we will be using AllThingsD to bring you the news, videos and more that will allow everyone to experience it all, no matter where they are.

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:

OnLive at D8 in summer of 2010:

OnLive at D: Dive Into Mobile in late 2010

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120818/gaming-the-clouds-heres-the-d-demos-of-otoy-still-standing-and-onlive-who-knows/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120817/boxes-and-a-bar-onlive-employees-pack-up-after-gaming-company-obfuscates-about-fate/ http://allthingsd.com/20120817/boxes-and-a-bar-onlive-employees-pack-up-after-gaming-company-obfuscates-about-fate/#comments Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:24:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=242751

According to multiple reports I have received, some employees of OnLive have been walking out of their Palo Alto, Calif. offices over the last few hours laden with boxes.

And some, no surprise, are headed to a nearby bar — The Patio — presumably to drown their sorrows.

The departures from the online cloud-gaming service came after a meeting this morning in which its top execs told staff that it would be letting almost the entire staff go, but without a lot of explanation of what that meant.

While founder and CEO Steve Perlman runs a number of other digital efforts — via his own Rearden Labs — at its Silicon Valley HQ, sources said only fraction of staffers will be left to keep the servers running until a resolution for the assets is found. Kotaku reported that OnLive would be filing an “alternative to bankruptcy called an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, or ABC, in the state of California.”

It is not clear who actually owns the pricey technology and patents for OnLive, which has raised $56 million in funding from investors such as Maverick Capital, Time Warner and HTC. HTC, the Taiwanese telecom giant, invested $40 million of the total in early 2011.

That’s a lot of dough, so it is not clear what has happened or if Perlman is poised to sell off the entity.

Sony recently bought one of OnLive’s rivals in the space — Gaikai — for $380 million to turbocharge its cloud-gaming service efforts.

One thing is entirely clear: While egregiously denying it was doing so, the gaming and virtual desktop software start-up is effectively shutting down OnLive as it has been previously run.

Earlier today, an OnLive spokesperson denied the obvious situation.

“We don’t respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down,” OnLive said, while also bizarrely flacking their games.

Last week, I heard a rumor of just this thing happening and asked a spokesperson last Friday via email: “I hear via very good sources it is closing down or cutting back.”

This was the disingenuous response: “The latest rumors have been around acquisitions — this is a new one! Not the case, but officially we never comment on rumors.”

No need for comment, as you can see from the photo above and also here that was just sent to me.

OnLive launched in 2010 as a Web portal for streaming games, which it demoed here, from the D: All Things Digital conference in 2010.

As Lauren Goode wrote earlier: “In addition to its cloud-based gaming platform, which runs on PCs, tablets and now Google TV products, OnLive also offers [Microsoft] Office-based, virtual desktop software for [Apple] iPads and [Google] Android tablets, which got the Palo-Alto-based start up in some hot water with Microsoft earlier this year.”

Mashable first reported on the possible layoffs earlier. Let’s upgrade that to actual.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120817/boxes-and-a-bar-onlive-employees-pack-up-after-gaming-company-obfuscates-about-fate/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120704/hey-internet-girl-aaron-sorkins-tv-news-2-0-show-gets-a-second-season-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120704/hey-internet-girl-aaron-sorkins-tv-news-2-0-show-gets-a-second-season-video/#comments Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:05:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=227426

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120704/hey-internet-girl-aaron-sorkins-tv-news-2-0-show-gets-a-second-season-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-pichai-on-the-full-d10-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-pichai-on-the-full-d10-interview-video/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:14:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=226603

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:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-pichai-on-the-full-d10-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120629/skypes-tony-bates-talks-about-talking-online-the-full-d10-interview/ http://allthingsd.com/20120629/skypes-tony-bates-talks-about-talking-online-the-full-d10-interview/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:02:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=226083

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:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120629/skypes-tony-bates-talks-about-talking-online-the-full-d10-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120628/sal-kahn-and-john-hennessy-on-online-education-the-full-d10-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120628/sal-kahn-and-john-hennessy-on-online-education-the-full-d10-interview-video/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:27:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=225687

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:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120628/sal-kahn-and-john-hennessy-on-online-education-the-full-d10-interview-video/feed/ 0