AllThingsD » aggregation

Microsoft Finally Dumps Deal Provider Now Owned by Google

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:06:09 +0000

Microsoft has inked a new partnership with 8coupons to replace The Dealmap, which had been providing local offers to Bing Deals for about nine months.

The partnership understandably ended once Microsoft’s big search rival, Google, acquired The Dealmap in August.

“We can confirm that Bing is no longer partnering with The Dealmap and is now partnering with local and daily deal aggregator 8coupons,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We’re excited about the partnership with 8coupons and to be able to offer our customers access to great deals and discounts from across the Web — all in one place.”

A spokesperson for 8coupons also confirmed the partnership, adding that it started to replace The Dealmap a couple of weeks ago.

Rather than build a Groupon copycat as Google and Amazon have done, Microsoft has decided to partner with an aggregator that collects offers from various providers around the Web. Deals delivered by 8coupons come from Restaurant.com, Yelp, LivingSocial and GiltCity, among many others, as shown on the Bing Deals homepage.

Google’s purchase of The Dealmap was relatively small, especially compared to its failed $6 billion offer to buy Groupon. So far, The Dealmap is being used for the underpinnings of a pilot project that Google Offers has rolled out in the Bay Area.

In San Francisco, Google works with more than a dozen deal providers so that it can offer a variety of deals every day. It believes that in order to have relevant offers for all types of consumers, you need a lot of good deals, not just one a day.

Viral Video: Liz Gannes May (or May Not) See Hubski Now!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:34:48 +0000

At AllThingsD, we love Liz Gannes too, but not quite as endearing-creepily as Steve Clausnitzer of Hubski, a “thoughtful” social aggregation site, does.

Like a lot of start-ups, he wants our fantastic social reporter to check out his site and possibly write about it. But, unlike others, to entice Liz Clausnitzer has penned a little ditty that he posted on YouTube.

You need to watch it to experience the full oddball effort (although we all agree on her very lovely smile)– but mission accomplished on us noticing you, Steve!

I can make no promises that Liz will cover Hubski, of course.

But she is not alone in the video PR pleas — embedded below is one from June to our commerce reporter Tricia Duryee about a new online game from Sir Mix-A-Lot (who seems to do this sort of thing a lot):

Apple iPad News Reader Zite Sold to CNN for Just Over $20 Million

Kara Swisher — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:06:15 +0000

Zite, the magazine-style reading app for the Apple iPad, has been sold to news giant CNN for $20 million to $25 million.

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

The Atlantic Launches a Video Aggregator With a Twist

Peter Kafka — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:13:51 +0000

The Atlantic, which added a photo section to its brainy Web site earlier this year, has taken the next logical step: A digital nook dedicated to moving pictures.

The site’s new section joins many other sites’ video verticals which bring you clips from around the Web. But unlike some competitors — see: Gawker, Mediaite and others — the Atlantic is taking a relatively old-fashioned approach to aggregation: It’s asking permission from copyright owners to run their stuff.

TheAtlantic.com edit boss Bob Cohn says his site will get a signed licensing agreement from every owner whose stuff gets featured on TheAtlantic.com’s proprietary video player. (The Atlantic will also feature clips from other sites using their own embeddable players — in those cases, it won’t need to ask for permission.)

That doesn’t mean video makers will get paid — compensation will come in the form of links — but the olde-timey practice highlights the different tack the site is taking here. If you want clips of TV news readers saying embarrassing things, or media magnates getting a pie to the face, there are plenty of places to get those. The Atlantic will instead focus on higher-brow, higher-minded stuff that you probably haven’t seen.

Atlantic editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, a former producer at Current TV who Cohn describes as “an embed in the video-generating community,” is in charge of picking the stuff and will also interview some of the creators.

Here’s a sample of what she’s looking for: An excerpt from “California is a Place,” a slice-o-life documentary series:

Aquadettes from California is a place on Vimeo.

Ready for His Digital Close-Up: The NYT's Media Dude, David Carr, Talks About "Page One"

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:35:07 +0000

While I was in Los Angeles recently, I was invited to a private screening of a documentary about the New York Times called “Page One: Inside the New York Times.”

The film, which debuted at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, opens Friday.

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Luckily for me, one of the movie’s principal characters — and I do mean character when it comes to him — is the Times’ quirky media columnist, David Carr.

I met Carr a dog’s age ago, when he ran “The City Paper” in Washington, D.C. He has only gotten more interesting over time, especially as the Web has transformed the news business.

Actually, wrecked the news business seems more the sensibility of “Page One” and also the audience at the screening, which largely bemoaned the troubles that quality papers have gotten themselves into in the age of the Internet.

Of course, the situation at the Times is a lot more complicated than that and there are some significant benefits to readers in the new paradigm, even if it did not help traditional media.

Carr winks and nods to both sides of the debate in the film — his attack on Web bad boy Michael Wolff over aggregation is priceless, even though he clearly loves the Internet’s thrilling possibilities, too.

As I have previously written, what is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

Here’s the video of my interview with Carr — please, as I tried to, ignore his rant at the start about the Times’ failed talent raid on a defenseless little tech blog site! — as well as an exclusive clip and the trailer for the movie:

[ See post to watch video ]

At Tomorrow's AOL Investor Day, Will "Execution" Focus Mean Cylinders Firing or Heads Rolling?

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:04:17 +0000

Talking to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier this week about its investors day tomorrow, he used the word “execution” a lot.

No, not the kind evoking a firing squad if he did not succeed at turning around the New York-based Internet giant soon as he has long promised.

Instead, Armstrong was referring to reassuring big shareholders and Wall Street analysts that AOL was now in a mode of making sure all its many moves to turn around the company will finally begin to pay off.

“Basically, our point is going to be about fully operating around the strategy we’ve built,” said Armstrong in a wide-ranging interview. “It seems right for investors to ask about executing on what we have been doing for the last year and a half.”

It’s certainly the right message for the charismatic executive to be delivering, as he and other top AOL execs present their plans moving forward, especially after what has turned out to be a very hyperactive year.

After deep layoffs, a massive rejiggering of its management ranks and a number of shifts of its business focus, without much advertising increase to show for it yet, Armstrong has also pushed through a series of acquisitions.

It culminated in the high-profile and decidedly dramatic purchase of the Huffington Post in January for $350 million in cash.

Now, said Armstrong, deals will be taking a back seat to products.

“We are diligently staying on strategy and really focusing on products and services,” said Armstrong. “We have laid out the path we are on and now investors want proof of the concept.”

To Armstrong, that means the push of “branded content” and a continued focus on significant properties in key topic areas.

Tomorrow, in news that could worry investors, AOL will be noting that traffic is flat year over year, but explaining that it is due to the outsourcing of its sports and health sites.

“If you added that back in, we would have had a phenomenal year of growth,” said Armstrong. “Our main point will be that this is the right path for AOL.”

In fact, in an unusual wording, he said AOL was betting on the “urbanization” of the Web around big branded sites, which is, in many ways, exactly where the Web was a decade ago with Yahoo, Excite and others.

But Armstrong will be making the point that this retro idea is perfect for today, as marketers look for quality content that attracts big audiences, which has seen its most energetic application in the Huffington Post.

Thus, his linchpin remains the flashy news site’s even flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington, who has cut a very wide swath through AOL’s content efforts since Amstrong made her media czar of the company.

As Armstrong did, she also stressed the focus on unique visitors and ad growth, more video and a laser focus on local.

This includes shoving editorial into every AOL property, including unlikely ones such as Moviefone and MapQuest, and integrating it all to point back to the Huffington Post mothership.

“Much better editorial integration is a centerpiece of what we are doing, surfacing content in new places it was not before,” said Huffington, who used examples of local stories via its Patch unit that have gone global with a special push.

And by global, that also means the creation of new content sites in Europe and elsewhere, in order to build this unusual dream of a fully aggregating world.

“It is a big test of the HuffPo platform aggregation to do this,” said Huffington, who has clearly longed for the kind of money and staff to do this for a very long time. “It has moved a lot faster than I thought it would … but it feels good to be moving on so many fronts at once.”

Many fronts indeed, which might make investors pause. So far, those shareholders have had a continued wait-and-see attitude toward AOL, which has seen its stock decline almost 13 percent from its late 2009 IPO debut.

That’s mostly due to worries about whether the continued and expected fall-off of its lucrative access business can be met by similar increases in its ad business.

That share drop has been especially steep since the beginning of the year, but it has also not been drastic, indicating an interest in continuing to believe Armstrong’s confident — well, confidently delivered, at least — narrative.

As Citi’s Mark Mahaney wrote in a one-hand-other-hand note yesterday about the investor day:

Positives: 1) AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property; 2) In the latest quarter, AOL’s Display segment grew Y/Y for the first time in ~3 years, and this improvement seems sustainable; 3) At 4x ’11 EV/EBITDA, AOL’s valuation is among the lowest of any ’Net Stock. Negatives: 1) Deteriorating fundamentals; 2) Significant market share losses — ’Net usage, Display Advertising revenue & Search queries; 3) A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subs biz; 4) Substantial competitive risk; and 5) An unproven (@ AOL) management team.

“We all like Tim and what he says makes a lot of sense,” added one big investor, who is also attending and has many questions about the efficacy of what AOL is doing, in a common sentiment among its large shareholders. “But we also need to see real results soon.”

Exclusive: Flipboard Confirms $50 Million Funding at $200 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

Exclusive: Yahoo News Head Moves to Disney.com, Which Will Get Big Redo

Kara Swisher — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:27:57 +0000

Yesterday, BoomTown reported that Mark Walker, the head of the powerful Yahoo News site, was leaving the Internet giant for another company.

That company, sources said, will be Disney, where Walker will be leading a major overhaul of its flagship Disney.com site.

The property, which has largely been a promotional and aggregation play for Disney’s many family-oriented offerings–such as its popular Disney Channel cable television shows–still sees 20 million unique visitors monthly.

Walker will report to Jimmy Pitaro, the former Yahoo media head who is now co-president of Disney’s online division with John Pleasants. Walker worked directly for Pitaro at Yahoo.

Walker’s job, said sources, will be to find a new direction for Disney.com, including adding original programming to the site, as well as more personalization for its users.

It’s a big task for Walker, since Disney’s various Web efforts have a long and often rocky history, from its disastrous purchase of Infoseek in 1998 and efforts to create the Go.com portal to its savvy acquisition of several innovative kid-focused sites such as Club Penguin in recent years.

Still, like many traditional media giants, Disney has never achieved the kind of digital success its spectacular brand has promised. The hiring of Pitaro and Pleasants by CEO Bob Iger was a sign that the company was going to make some big changes again.

BoomTown will query Iger about all this at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference this summer, where he’ll be interviewed onstage.

AOL-HuffPo Deal Officially Closes Today–More Big Media Hires Signal New Content Direction Under Arianna

Kara Swisher — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:01:55 +0000

AOL will officially close its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post today, according to several sources close to the situation.

The culmination of the deal–which has already been approved by regulators–is set to be announced by the New York-based company this morning, only one month after it was struck.

And–in a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–sources said the closing will be accompanied by the announcement of the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group unit.

Among the new reporters are some more high-profile grabs from other media giants, including The Daily’s Jon Ward. He has been the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.’s high-profile online newspaper, which only recently launched.

Also set to join AOL is Yahoo’s senior media writer Michael Calderone.

Interestingly, along with more experienced editorial staff, sources said the announcement will also include new hires via the Huffington Post’s Jefferson Program for Young Journalists.

Sources said the new hires are only the beginning of a series of them, as the impact of the leadership of Huffington becomes clearer.

Along with the news and opinion site, the well-known media personality is now in charge of all of AOL’s varied content properties, including its locally aimed Patch.

Huffington, with obviously strong support from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, has been talking a lot in a plethora of interviews since the deal was announced a few weeks ago about the importance of creating a new media organization focused on original reporting.

In a way, AOL is now competing with big news sites such as those on Yahoo, as well as smaller niche content and also mainstream entities.

Even before the deal was struck with AOL, the Huffington Post had been heading down that path of pulling in mainstream journalists. Last year, it hired former New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman and former Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, among others.

The formula? Adding the strong journalism reputation of these reporters to the eclectic mix of socializing, blogging, celebritizing and aggressive aggregating that the site has used to garner huge amounts of traffic in recent years.

As I had previously written, the AOL Way–the same for a strategy document about content on the site–is now the Arianna Way.

Here are Huffington and Armstrong talking about such issues in in an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with them just before they announced the deal on Super Bowl Sunday about a month ago:

[ See post to watch video ]

New App Helps You Decide Whether to Buy or Walk Out Empty-Handed

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:00:41 +0000

Say goodbye to impulse buys.

Smartphone applications are quickly becoming an easy way to judge a product on the spot, and figure out when to walk away if it’s not exactly what you are looking for.

SearchReviews is launching an application today that provides input on the go, by aggregating more than 36 million customer reviews from more than 1,000 sites around the Web.

Reviews come from sites like TripAdvisor, eBay, Sephora, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Zappos and QVC.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based SearchReviews was founded in September by Ankesh Kumar, who has funded the start-up with $350,000 of his own money.

SearchReviews’ applications for the iPhone and Android are launching today.

Both of them work a lot like others in the market.

A consumer scans a product’s barcode, and then receives a list of results. Other apps in the market today from Amazon, Google and eBay are similar, but SearchReviews is hoping to stand out by having the most reviews. The other apps also tend to focus on price comparison.

SearchReviews may be one way to avoid buyer’s remorse, but to be sure, mobile applications like these are disrupting the way traditional retailers have done business for years. As we’ve written in the past, retailers used to be confident that they could close a sale as long as they could get shoppers into the store, and that’s where they focused all of their attention–on customer acquisition. Now consumers have the tools to decide to leave empty-handed.

Exclusive: TMS Acquires Online Video Guide CastTV

Liz Gannes — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:37:02 +0000

Online video search start-up CastTV has been acquired by Tribune Media Services, the widely used entertainment guide metadata provider.

CastTV was founded in 2006 by a husband and wife team, and had raised $3.1 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

Though she wouldn’t comment on the terms of the deal, CastTV co-founder and President Alex Vikati said, “CastTV was profitable so we weren’t forced to make any decisions.” She, CastTV’s co-founder and CEO Edwin Ong, and their three employees will make up TMS’s Silicon Valley office, rather than moving to join TMS at its Chicago headquarters.

CastTV had stayed relatively under the radar compared to newcomers like Clicker.com, but it still has four million monthly uniques. Unlike Clicker, which has focused on curation and personalization, CastTV takes more of a pure search and aggregation approach. It historically did not exclude unauthorized content streams (though when I checked this morning, this no longer seemed to be the case). CastTV has also focused on detail-oriented features such as device awareness, so it will filter video results to only the formats playable on a certain device.

TMS will combine CastTV’s databases with its metadata service, and operate CastTV.com in conjunction with its own entertainment guide Zap2it.com, which has about double the audience.

TMS counts just about every content provider and guide service as a customer, including Microsoft, Google, TiVo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, IMDb and the New York Times.

Yahoo Announces a Bunch of Stuff It Already Announced (Except Local Deals, Which Everyone Else Has Already Announced)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:35:39 +0000

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, Yahoo announced a bunch of new features, most of which the Silicon Valley Internet giant had already unveiled.

(Yes, this is the riveting life of BoomTown.)

Delivered by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and other execs, the presentation included Sketch-a-Search, quick apps in search and Search Assist, as well as integration of Zynga social games and Twitter into the site and more about its Yahoo Contributor Network.

But there was news: A local offers program, similar to offerings recently made by Facebook and others.

There are 20 partners in this iteration, including Groupon, which Yahoo has tried to buy outright for many billions of dollars.

It seems to have saved some dough with this deal, which is being tested nationwide.

Yahoo’s approach to the discounted daily local deal boom is integration, of course, as well as aggregation, which is its best quality.

Of course, like all the updates, what Yahoo was announcing was essentially table stakes to keep up with what has been going on across the Internet at companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

In fact, one question at the press event this morning focused on the incremental nature of Yahoo’s changes in comparison to others, and whether it can innovate as quickly.

Irving, who is certainly a lively character and knows about those issues from his many years at Microsoft, said he is trying to force a culture where Yahoos can “quickly iterate [products] and “it is safe to innovate fast.”

Let’s hope!

Until then, here are the official press releases on the updates, as well as local offers.

Yahoo_Web 2 0 Announcement_FINAL

Yahoo_ Local Offers Release

New York Times Backs News-Aggregation Software Company

Russell Adams — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:00:15 +0000

The New York Times Co. (NYT) is joining a group of news organizations in backing the maker of software that helps publishers aggregate news, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company, called Ongo, filed a trademark registration in April. In the filing, Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.”

The reason for the Times’s investment in Ongo was unclear. As news organizations have grappled with how to deliver their content to digital devices and make money off of those readers, there have emerged a number of efforts to collaborate on packaging and selling content. News Corp. (NWS), which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Will Facebook Debut a Foursquare-Lite Location Feature or a Real Competitor–or What?

Kara Swisher — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:11:14 +0000

Later today, as BoomTown previously reported, Facebook is likely to show off what it has been working on for a while now in the geo-location arena.

We’ll see whassup at 4:30 pm PT, when Facebook will hold a “news event” at the social-networking powerhouse’s HQ in Silicon Valley. (I will be liveblogging from it, natch.)

While most agree that the unveiling of the powerful social-networking site’s geo-location plans will have big impact, it will be much more interesting to see precisely what Facebook will do and how it innovates.

The company has certainly been talking about some sort of location feature for a long time–even as start-ups such as Foursquare and Booyah have grown like gangbusters–so much so that it has become a mini-waiting game in Silicon Valley.

But how Facebook integrates the hot trend into what it has built rather than bought–Facebook considered buying the New York-based Foursquare–is full of all kinds of complexities and possible sand traps.

Here is what I think it might–and should–show off:

NO PLAYING GAMES

There is plenty of that kind of silliness offered by others, and the badge, mayorships and general gaming is not really Facebook’s style.

In fact, gimmickry, which eventually becomes tiresome, is not really one of the tools in Facebook’s arsenal. Creating features–such as the Wall–that have become daily helpers is the ticket here.

In fact, it would be great if Facebook could go radically useful with a check-in feature, which would be for the rest of us who are not interested in broadcasting our presence at New York clubs into the wee hours.

Still, it would be nice to get all kinds of offers and freebies for using the service and giving up even more personal information to the hungry maw of this–still–Mark Zuckerberg production.

SEAMLESS THIRD-PARTY AGGREGATION

A must, given Facebook is all about integration and coordination for its users. It has already easily welcomed in all kinds of third-party services, and it must give developers on its platform geo-location capabilities.

So, any Facebook offering would need to integrate all the current location services, both on the Web site and in its mobile app.

That said, it is also important that Facebook also has a strong and effective offering of its own.

PLEASE MARK, I WANT SOME MORE

Location-sharing needs to be more than location-sharing, IMHO.

That’s because check-ins can become as inane as some Twitter posts.

In my bedroom! Now, in my bathroom! Now, in my kitchen. Hey from the 7-11! Aaaaaagh!

In fact, what is most useful about Foursquare is a part the service seems to give little attention to–user-generated info about various places.

Facebook could give truly helpful on-the-go info if it did a good job here, letting me know–for example–that I need to avoid the shrimp-puff appetizer at all costs or alerting me to the joys of some esoteric spa service.

Best of all, it would be nice if this info were not generated just by my friends, but by everyone. Because my friends are really boring.

WHAT HAPPENS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN, STAYS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN

Facebook has a long-running and much-deserved reputation for not treating privacy issues with enough concern and care.

While it is one thing to have a status update that you are enjoying 43 cold ones by the Jersey Shore with Snooki, it is quite another to geo-locate your trashy sojourn without a terrific level of control.

And, of course, controls that are comprehensible and easy to use.

Thus, some rules:

Any location service must be opt-in only.

Any location service must be set to private to start and allow users to change settings with each update.

Check-ins must be verified, so people cannot lie and manipulate the system.

The entire Facebook community of 500 million users must know exactly where Mark Zuckerberg is at every moment–wait, that’s just my secret wish.

Well, not a wish: All Facebook execs should publicly and actively be using the check-in services to let us all know that everyone is on the exact same page.

Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth "Social Magazine" Start-Up That Just Nabbed $10.5 Million in Funding

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

[ See post to watch video ]

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Waxman to Wolff: Unhand My Content!

Peter Kafka — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:41:59 +0000

More shots fired in the great Web aggregation war. Or at least in the war between Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff. The Wrap, the Hollywood news site Waxman runs, has demanded that Newser, the aggregation site Wolff founded, give her site better credit for its stories or stop using them altogether.

Waxman’s volley comes via a cease-and-desist note her site sent to Newser today, embedded below. It comes after a series of back and forths between the two sites, which you can follow here, here and here. Very short version: Waxman says Wolff’s site steals her stuff without attribution; Wolff says his company does attribute the stuff, in some form.

The bigger picture is that the debate about “content creation” and “aggregation,” both of which are pretty ugly and imprecise terms, is just getting started. Even though we’re either 15 years or 40 years into the Internet era, depending on how you want to count. (Probably best to go with 15).

This isn’t the first time Wolff has gotten legal notes from publishers. In February 2009, the New York Times (NYT) complained about Newser’s use of the Times’s iconic “T,” as well as the use of its photos.

Waxman’s argument with Wolff is that Newser either doesn’t link to her site or does it in a way that makes it unlikely that a reader will end up on one of her pages. She’s fine with aggregation in practice, she says, noting that her site repurposes other people’s stories. And it’s worth noting that she’s not firing off an angry letter at the Huffington Post, an aggregator that also uses her stuff extensively.

“There’s a principle here,” she says. “And if everybody who aggregated aggregated the way they do it, we’d all be in a bunch of trouble.”

So what does she expect Wolff and company to do now? “I don’t know,” she says. But “we’re serious… I hope they take it seriously.”

Wolff’s response, via email: “This is a joke letter about a joke allegation based on a joke premise from a joke law firm (in Cleveland at that). Waxman is just looking for press to help her raise a new round of financing. Nothing here is serious.”

Cease and Desist letter from TheWrap to Newser

[Image credit: barnabus]

Yahoo Snags Citizen Sports

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:39:00 +0000

BoomTown was right: Yahoo is indeed buying online sports site Citizen Sports, a developer of sports-related apps and games for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and for social networking sites like Facebook. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as BoomTown noted on Monday, estimates put Citizen’s selling price at about $40 to $50 million.

The acquisition is a savvy one for Yahoo (YHOO), which already has a strong sports content business and stands to benefit from the additional social networking and mobile integration that Citizen Sports offers.

Below, the official announcement:

Yahoo! to Acquire Citizen Sports

Strengthens Social Strategy by Combining the Power of the No. 1 Online Sports Destination with the Web’s Most Popular Social Sports Company

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar 17, 2010 –As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (http://www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!‘s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket. Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming. Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace (NYSE: NWS), hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004. Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Yet Another Media Aggregation Site? Yup. And You'll Read It: Techmeme Unveils Mediagazer.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:01:41 +0000

Does the Web need yet another outlet dedicated to media coverage? Nope. How about another aggregation site? Plenty of those to go around too.

So what if you combined the two? Exactly.

But here’s a not-very brave prediction: Mediagazer, which launches today, is going to do pretty well. For two reasons:

Like porn or Apple (AAPL) news, there’s always going to be an appetite for this stuff, at least as long as there’s a media business. Because media folks–like me–love to read about themselves.
The people behind the site are the same ones behind Techmeme, and they’ve got the aggregation formula down cold: Build your site using other people’s work, automate as much as you can, and keep your human interaction to a minimum.

In this case, the human touch comes from Megan McCarthy, who joined Gabe Rivera’s outfit late in 2008 to help run his flagship site. The new one will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s seen the original ’meme. Or the site Jim Romenesko runs, for that matter.

Two other quick notes:

If you’re the kind of person who notices these things–and there’s a good chance you are–you may note there’s no onanistic “Leaderboard” on Mediagazer yet. There will be, McCarthy promises–the site just needs 30 days of data to get it going.
Given that Techmeme is as heavy on media stories as it is, there’s going to be some serious crossover between it and Mediagazer. Note, um, the Apple stories on both sites today. That’s not an immediate worry, McCarthy says, though over time, she imagines that some of Techmeme’s media stuff will move completely over to her new site.

What if Facebook Ever Got Serious About Becoming a News Aggregation Vampire? Well, It Would Be a Sparkly One!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:11:42 +0000

Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.

First, perpetual apple-cart-upsetter Mark Cuban raised everyone’s hackles this week by taking aim at online sites that aggregate news from other sources, especially Google (GOOG).

Among other colorful things Cuban said during a keynote speech:

“Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google….You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies….You’ve got to realize they’re vampires and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck.”

Then, yesterday, in a fourth-quarter earnings call, AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong, answering a question about the renewal status of its search deal with Google, talked about how other outlets, especially Facebook, are now more important than ever to getting traffic for his company’s content.

“Our strategy on distribution is not relying on search,” said Armstrong. “Fragmentation is our friend.”

It was a curious way of putting it, but the message was clear and correct–it will be increasingly obvious that consumers are inevitably moving away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.

Of course, this puts a site like Facebook in the catbird seat, given that vast seas of rich data flow through it all the time.

In fact, Facebook is already one of the bigger sources of traffic to media sites, behind just Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO).

That’s because, at any given moment, Facebook users are trading bazillions of links to articles, blogs, videos, photo images and more, pointing the way to their friends in a giant did-you-see-this mosh pit.

While this is dispersed widely all over the social networking service–on the Wall, on fan pages, in email, in comments–one has to wonder what would happen if Facebook ever decides to start corralling the information with some kind of aggregation method.

Could it pick the most linked and emailed stories of the day? Could it select the most popular photos? Could it tell you accurately what its little slice of humanity was buzzing about on a minute-by-minute basis?

Of course it could, but as more of a new sparkly “Twilight” vampire than the scary old-time one Cuban described.

Not that it will. I once queried Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about the idea that Facebook could make some sort of newfangled competitor to the still-powerful Yahoo News.

No, she replied pretty flatly, noting that the whole service was already about people sharing all kinds of news and information with their friends.

But, it is clear to me, that–much as Google moved into the automated new business–Facebook could do the same anytime it wants to and create what would probably be one of the top aggregation sites for any topic on the Web.

The Silicon Valley phenom certainly could not be as easily de-indexed as Google by worried media companies, because the skeins of information are so enmeshed that separating them is impossible. And why would you?

In his speech, Cuban urged traditional media creators to stop the aggregation madness.

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

In a deeply socially connected world though, it’s a very different story. And in that world, vampires really do live forever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

BusinessWeek's Future Is Cloudy, but Better Than It Could Have Been: The Grim Non-Bloomberg Scenario

Peter Kafka — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:12:05 +0000

BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. “Either you’ll get an offer or you won’t,” is the conventional wisdom among the 400 staffers, an employee tells me.

That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort: The worst-case scenario the employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia, which was also bidding for the publication.

The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.

Here’s the longer version of the plan, provided to me by a person familiar with ZelnickMedia’s bid. It sounds like a plausible idea for a PE group that specializes in turning around distressed assets–and a chilling one for anybody who draws a paycheck at BusinessWeek:

Wind down BusinessWeek’s print business “as profitably as possible”–the company would have to honor existing subscriptions and could still sell ads in the magazine. But the focus would be on building up BusinessWeek’s Web site, which has a decent-sized footprint, though not a huge one.
Dump almost all of the company’s newsgathering staff and outsource most of that work to Thomson Reuters (TRI).
Employ a small handful of editorial employees–perhaps 20, down from the 200-plus who are there now. Some of them would run a Huffington Post-style aggregation site that produces no original content, and some more expensive hires would produce a smattering of high-quality reporting and writing designed to burnish/sustain the BusinessWeek brand. “Just to give it uniqueness and sizzle,” my source tells me.
Dump most of the existing business side, as well, but overhaul and bulk up the sales force.

The insult-to-injury kicker: Under ZelnickMedia’s proposal, the buyer wouldn’t pay a dime for the publication it intended to rebuild. Instead, McGraw-Hill would pay the fund to take the publication off its hands. If that sounds implausible, consider that McGraw-Hill just announced that it will save up to $25 million next year by not owning the title.

Given the above terms, it’s easy enough to see why McGraw-Hill ended up going with Bloomberg. For starters, the winning bidder actually paid cash for the magazine, and McGraw-Hill will end up netting a $5.9 million gain, after taxes, on the deal.

Also important: McGraw-Hill won’t have to anguish as it watches one of its flagship properties get dismantled.

So what will happen to BusinessWeek now that Bloomberg owns it? Nothing nearly so drastic, at least in the short term. For now, Bloomberg is talking about bulking up the title, not shredding it, so that’s a good sign for both employees and readers.

Alas, Bloomberg can’t take on all of the magazine employees looking for jobs, and that pool is only going to get bigger.

Forbes slashed deep into its staff this week, and next week Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. will lay out some of its layoff goals. I’ve heard Time Inc. employees refer to layoff plans as “tree-trimming” or “surgical,” but I think the trimming will feel much blunter to the folks who lose their jobs. The publisher’s cost-cutting plans include hundreds of layoffs–something likely similar to the cuts the publisher went through last year, I’m told.

The New York Post’s Keith Kelly reports today that Time’s News and Finance unit, which includes Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, will be particularly hard hit, and I’ve confirmed that myself.

UPDATE: No surprise here: BusinessWeek President Keith Fox is stepping down. Mild surprise: He’s staying on at McGraw-Hill. Here’s his memo:

When we announced that McGraw-Hill was exploring strategic options for BusinessWeek, I promised to communicate with you as openly and often as I could. In this spirit, I wanted each of you to know that I will be remaining with McGraw-Hill after the deal with Bloomberg is closed. I will continue to play a role in the integration post-close and plan to take on a new role at McGraw-Hill in 2010.

During this process, our collective goal was to find the best buyer for BusinessWeek. I am proud that I played a role in ensuring that BusinessWeek has a new home at Bloomberg, where it will thrive under the leadership of Norman Pearlstine. I am committed to the transition and helping in any way that I can.

It’s been a privilege to be the President of BusinessWeek. I thank Terry McGraw for his confidence and trust in me and Glenn Goldberg for his support, direction, clarity, and sense of humor. I’ve also been a member of an amazing team which has navigated the transformation of the media environment with agility, focus, passion, and integrity.

The team–Steve Adler, Jessica Sibley, Tania Secor, Linda Brennan, Roger Neal, and Carl Fischer–is the best in the industry. Like BusinessWeek, they have bright futures ahead of them. I will miss the daily interaction, but I am wiser (and a little grayer) because of their collaborative spirit and desire to make BusinessWeek the global leader in business that it is today.

I also have a special thanks to Patricia Hipplewith, my assistant, who juggled my calendar, protected me from solicitors, and kept me on schedule and well fed! She is the personification of commitment and integrity.

I am humbled by BusinessWeek’s 80-year history. Thank you for allowing me to play a small part in it.

Keith

Yahoo Renovates Its Home Page

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:02 +0000

Makeovers are always fun to watch. Someone swoops in on an unsuspecting fashion “don’t,” improves him or her with a new hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe, and presents the finished product to overjoyed friends and family.

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

[ See post to watch video ]

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth: The Full D7 Interview

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:23:06 +0000

It’s an opportune time to see this interview, in which Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington talked about the future of the news media.

The pair were interviewed at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, only a month before Weymouth landed in hot water for trying to organize an off-the-record gathering of D.C. power players and journalists at her house, underwritten by sponsors.

In the interview, Weymouth discussed the struggles the Post–one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers–has had of late, as the Internet pummels its business model.

One of those hammers has been Huffington, whose site has grown like gangbusters, led by its political blogs and aggregation. Though not regularly profitable, it recently got a huge slug of funding to keep up the competition.

The pressure was apparent last week when Weymouth got in trouble for offering the exclusive sessions–although the controversial marketing flyer about it went out by mistake, before her approval or that of the Post newsroom.

Here’s the video of the full D7 interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth: The Full D7 Session

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:20:24 +0000

It’s an opportune time to see this interview, in which Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington talked about the future of the news media.

The pair were interviewed at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference only a month before Weymouth landed in hot water for trying to organize an off-the-record gathering of D.C. power players and journalists at her house, underwritten by sponsors.

In the interview, Weymouth discussed the struggles the Post–one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers–has had of late as the Internet pummels its business model.

Here’s the video of the full D7 interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Meet Maureen Dowd's Favorite Writer: Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall

Peter Kafka — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:05:56 +0000

Today’s life lesson: Procrastination does pay off!

A few weeks ago I sat down with Josh Marshall, the journalist/entrepreneur behind Talking Points Memo, and had a great chat about news, new media and the business of running a self-funded Web site. But my notes and video have sat on my hard drive since then, for no other reason than I never got around to publishing them.

Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the kick in the pants I needed: Over the weekend, the New York Times (NYT) columnist has given Marshall a huge, if unintended, endorsement by borrowing his work and then getting caught.

After an initial attempt by Dowd to explain away the similarity between her work and his, the Times is now running a correction on Dowd’s Sunday column, noting that she “failed to attribute a paragraph” to Marshall.

You’ll read plenty more about this on the Web over the next few days, if you’re inclined. But it would be a shame if that’s the only thing you know about Marshall’s site, which is an interesting hybrid of politically focused reporting, commentary, and aggregation/blogging.

And I do mean a mix: If you just glimpse quickly at his site, you might think it’s the same grouping of links and headlines that you can find anywhere else on the Web. But Marshall was a real reporter prior to starting the site and his 12-person staff does real reporting. Its best work, to date, was uncovering the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007, which led to prestigious Polk Award in 2008.

Just as interesting: It’s a profitable business that has never taken outside investment and until recently, has made almost all of its money by relying on ad networks. The most effective ad network, says Marshall: Google’s AdSense. See! Google (GOOG) really does support content!

More recently, Marshall has hired Yahoo (YHOO) vet Diane Rinaldo to serve as the company’s first real ad rep, trying to translate the site’s one million (give or take) monthly unique readers into more significant revenue. That’s alleged to be a real challenge since advertisers are supposedly loath to touch political content. But then again, start-up blogs aren’t supposed to do real journalism–or act as unattributed contributors to the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

[ See post to watch video ]

No Tech Tapeworms Here! We Update Voices Policies on All Things Digital.

Kara Swisher — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:20:54 +0000

As of today, we have made important changes to the All Things Digital Voices section, which should be of interest to some (and not at all to others).

Why? Well, a few weeks ago, ATD was caught up in a bit of the controversy that broke out due to louder-than-usual complaints by several traditional media companies about how their content is treated on the Web.

Without going into a long explanation: They expressed displeasure that some sites were misusing their content via aggregation.

In fact, Robert Thomson, Dow Jones editor-in-chief and also The Wall Street Journal managing editor, was widely quoted in an interview in The Australian saying, “There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.”

That sounds very painful, digitally speaking.

Many on the Web were incensed by that remark and then quickly pointed to the fact that ATD–which is owned by Dow Jones–has a section called Voices that publishes original columns done for our site and posts from other Dow Jones properties, but also points to third-party posts we admire and want our readers to be aware of.

Instead of using simple blue links, we feature these three kinds of content in a marked section on the front page and also in the Voices section itself, using their original headlines and short excerpts from the posts directly. We do not change the text we use, nor do we synopsize it.

We also identify the authors by title and picture (until now, we used a D icon if we could not get a picture, but have changed that going forward), and provide links to the original sites so readers can read the entire piece there.

But what we have been doing in Voices was not perfect or as clear as it should have been, which was written about by many, including Andy Baio of Waxy.org’s thoughtful piece on the issue.

In it, Baio talked to both bloggers and writers who were unhappy about being featured in Voices, as well as those who liked it.

While we did not agree with all the complaints in the story, the debate did make us realize we needed to be a lot clearer and more explicit about what we are doing, and to make those policies–which we had not posted in as much detail as we have, for example, about our ethics statements (you can see mine here, for example)–more prominent and transparent.

Some will disagree with the changes we have made and some will not think they go far enough.

But we hope we have addressed the key issues, including making it clearer that these posts are not ours, posting our policy prominently to avoid confusion about exactly what Voices is and removing all comments and sharing icons from posts that are not original to our site.

We are also now linking directly to original sites from the front page excerpt, without forcing anyone into the Voices section, where we also link to original sites.

We made a number of other changes, described below in their entirety, and are also now easy to find on both the front page and on the Voices page.

Let us be clear: We have always aimed for our Voices section to point to other posts around the Web that we find laudable, interesting or provocative in ways we think our readers should be aware, and we want readers to read them in full on their original site.

The myriad of issues around aggregation and linking is clearly likely going to result in a long and difficult debate, as the ways in which media are discovered by and delivered to consumers changes in the digital age.

Our site obviously believes deeply that linking and pointing and sharing are all an important part of the new media landscape and we remain open to trying to create a system that all players think is fair and equitable.

And, most of all, we hope no one will get too nauseous in the process.

Here’s the new explanation of what Voices is, which is permanently and prominently posted on the site:

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes “from other Web sites.”

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating are done on the Web, and we in no way are attempting to “scrape” original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire, and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions–Look, Mom, no algorithm!–of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don’t expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do:

We link directly to the post’s original site from the headline on the front page of All Things Digital and use the smallest amount of text possible to give readers a sense of the topic of the post.

Instead of using simple blue links, we feature these three kinds of content in Voices in a marked section on the front page and also in the Voices section itself, using their original headlines and short excerpts from the posts directly. We do not change the text we use, nor do we synopsize it.

We fully identify the site the author is writing for, to make sure readers are aware that this is not written for our site. We take attributions from the originating site, but if we have made an error or it is incomplete, we will make sure it is corrected as soon as we are informed of any problems.

We use pictures of the authors from their sites and, if one is not available, we now will be using generic male and female icons going forward, to minimize any confusion that the piece was written for our site.

You can also see the posts when you visit the Voices section, where we feature them, again with the smallest amount of text possible and direct links to the original site. In that section, we pick our favorite post of the day.

We have also removed comments and sharing icons from the posts that are not original to our site.

All content for Voices is selected by, and/or solicited by, the editors of All Things Digital.

If you do not want your pieces selected for our Voices section, please let us know immediately and we will refrain from pointing to any of your work. We will also, on request from an author or site, remove past posts, if so requested.

Regarding original material, we are open to proposals at any time. If you have an idea for an original Voices post, please send it, in the form of a short paragraph, to voices@allthingsd.com. Include a second short paragraph describing yourself and your relevant credentials.

If we like it, we may invite you to submit the full post, and consider publishing it. However, we lack the staff and time to acknowledge such proposals or to engage in a debate or discussion about their suitability. You will only hear from us if we are interested.

We reserve the right to edit the original posts we publish in Voices, but all legal responsibility for their content rests solely with their authors.

We do not make editing changes to posts from other Web sites we point to, except to add ticker symbols when appropriate. We obviously claim no copyright over any content that is not original to our site.

We welcome and feedback about Voices at voices@allthingsd.com.

Even more disclosure: Dow Jones is owned by News Corp. (NWS), whose CEO and Chairman, Rupert Murdoch, also complained about some Internet aggregators, which this site covered here in MediaMemo.