AllThingsD » All Things D

KatieCam Goes Behind the Scenes at the D Conference

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:30:13 +0000

AllThingsD columnist Katie Boehret takes you backstage as we set up for another day of D9.

Take the same walk that all the speakers take, from the green room, back stage, and into the famous red chairs where Walt and Kara grill our guests.

Follow along with KatieCam–the only way to get behind the scenes at the D conference.

[ See post to watch video ]

AOL Sells Content Recommender Surphace to Content Recommender Outbrain

Peter Kafka — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 23:18:17 +0000

Tim Armstrong has disposed of another asset that AOL bought before he showed up: The company has sold Surphace, its content recommendation engine, to Outbrain, which does the same thing.

I don’t have the deal terms, but my hunch is that no cash is involved, and that AOL’s compensation could come in the form of equity in privately held Outbrain, or a tax benefit, or both.

“In keeping with the AOL strategy, any place where we are not a leader in the category or profitable, we are going to look at partnerships or other alternatives. This is one of those businesses. We are pleased we found a great home for the Surphace technology and its employees,” AOL venture and local head Jon Brod said in a statement.

Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai declined to comment.

AOL acquired Surphace for something north of $25 million in 2008, when it was called Sphere, and Armstrong was still running ad sales at Google. Co-founder Tony Conrad left AOL in 2009, but has since come back as part of the About.me acquisition late last year.

Both Surphace and Outbrain do roughly the same thing: They allow publishers to automatically present related pieces of content to Web surfers, based on the very straightforward theory that a visitor interested in a certain kind of story would stick around if offered similar stuff. (All Things D is a Surphace customer, so you can see it in action at the bottom of this post).

AOL reports earnings early tomorrow morning.

Do You Check Facebook or Email First Each Day?

Liz Gannes — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:00:12 +0000

When you first roll out of bed and hop onto your laptop (or perhaps you grab your iPad or phone before you roll out of bed), what site or service do you load up first?

Is it Facebook? Twitter? Personal email? Work email? A news site or aggregator? A corporate collaboration tool or chat room?

It’s a minor detail perhaps, but something I love asking people. Your bleary-eyed self may speak the truth about the utility you find in these sites and the loyalty they command.

(Personally, I’m not always a creature of habit; I mix it up. My All Things D email and our internal Socialcast stream are high up on the list. Facebook and Twitter usually come a little later in the morning scramble.)

There’s a user poll going around on Facebook at the moment that a couple of people from disparate parts of my life have taken, so it’s been popping up in my newsfeed. The poll asks, “Which do you check first each day: Facebook, or your Email?”

So far, with 518 responses, email is pulling 54.1 percent of the vote. This is in a survey of presumably very active Facebook users who would take the time to fill out the poll (which is part of the beta Facebook Questions product). What about you?

P.S. Quora has a question on the matter as well, with fewer but more diverse and detailed responses.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Photo-Sharing App Picplz Gets a Makeover

Ina Fried — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:00:04 +0000

Picplz is adding a few more tricks to its camera bag.

The social mobile photo venture is updating its iPhone application on Thursday to allow for, among other things, the ability to get a live preview of what various filters will look like before applying them. It’s the second major update to the iPhone version, following on the addition of filters a couple of months back.

In an interview, Picplz creator Dalton Caldwell said the company also did a lot of work to make the program faster and more responsive.

“We got a lot of feedback about just the look and feel of the product and how it felt sluggish to browse around so we made what I consider to be some pretty big changes and we rewrote quite a bit of the [user interface],” Caldwell told Mobilized.

Live preview of filters, Caldwell said, just makes Picplz more enjoyable. “These apps are fun,” he said. “Being able to really quickly scan through and see it through a bunch of different lenses is fun.”

While it’s fun for the users, Picplz is also aiming to show that the mobile social arena can be a business success, and it faces competition from rivals such as Instragram, which is picking up steam among large brands.

Picplz now has just under 200,000 registered users, and its Web site has a rapidly growing number of daily page views, he said.

Caldwell said the company is also working on more updates for the Android version, but noted that since Android updates don’t require approval in the same was that Apple updates do, it’s easier to update that version more frequently with smaller changes.

For more on Picplz, here’s a recent video interview that Caldwell did with my All Things D colleague, NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes.

[ See post to watch video ]

Tired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone. Wired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone Sales.

John Paczkowski — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:16:10 +0000

Verizon Wireless will hold an event in New York tomorrow where, as we first reported here, it will announce the availability of Apple’s iPhone on its network. And when it does, it will halt once and for all the near-pathological Verizon iPhone speculation that preceded it.

But only because those who speculated about the existence of a Verizon iPhone have been struck by a new monomania: Speculating about first-year Verizon iPhone sales numbers.

Indeed, the sales estimates are already rolling out, with the consensus so far hovering between nine million and 12 milion.

“Some think 10 million is possible in the calendar year,” Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair told me. “And I think it’s a reasonable assumption–not just because of what we’ve seen on AT&T but because you have three years of pent-up demand from users who are loyal to the Verizon network because of its coverage and reliability.”

Gleacher & Co. analyst Brian Marshall agrees, though he’s betting on sales hitting the top end of the range I mentioned.

“The iPhone on Verizon will sell 12 million units in calendar 2011 assuming there’s a ramp-up similar to the one AT&T experienced in 2007-2008 (i.e., 5 percent penetration of the postpaid subscriber base within five quarters of launch),” he told me, adding that AT&T will see a material decline in its iPhone sales as a result.

Taking a more conservative view of the iPhone’s prospects on Verizon is Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who expects Verizon to activate roughly 25 million smartphones in calendar 2011, of which nine million will be iPhones.

Barclays Capital analyst James Ratcliffe too is betting on that nine-million figure, and of those he expects approximately 500,000 to one million to be purchased by AT&T switchers. Said Ratcliffe, “We don’t believe that the addition of a Verizon iPhone will be a seismic event in the wireless competitive environment, although we do expect it to result in a modest spike in AT&T churn, as customers who love their iPhones but have become unhappy with AT&T’s network take advantage of the alternative.”

PREVIOUSLY:

Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan

Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event

Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan

John Paczkowski — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:05:15 +0000

When the iPhone finally arrives on Verizon’s network, how will the carrier set it apart from the one that’s been offered by AT&T since it first debuted in 2007?

Here’s one way: By offering it with a wireless service plan free of the data caps used by AT&T.

Sources close to Verizon tell me the carrier will offer the iPhone with an unlimited data plan (presumably the same $30 unlimited plan it offers for other smartphones)–though they wouldn’t say for how long. That should distinguish it a bit more from the iPhone on AT&T, which requires a capped plan for data service.

Not that such differences worry AT&T any. “We think customers will prefer AT&T’s faster speeds and better functionality over a CDMA network device,” a spokesperson told me. And he has a point. AT&T’s UMTS network allows the use of data and voice simultaneously. Verizon’s CMDA network doesn’t–at least not yet. So, initially, Verizon iPhone users won’t be able to use the Web or check email while on a call–something AT&T iPhone users have long been able to do.

All Things D reported Friday that the special event Verizon is holding in New York Tuesday will be the carrier’s long-rumored iPhone announcement.

PREVIOUSLY:

Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event

Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

Remember the Parrot!

Peter Kafka — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:30:55 +0000

This is the gadget industry’s week of hope and promise. But if you’re a dark sort, you can invert all that and see nothing but doom.

Me, I’m a peppy, perky guy. Ask anybody! Still, if I were a gloomy Gus, I’d spend some time reminiscing about 2010′s Consumer Electronics Show, where I spent a bunch of time checking out:

Hearst’s Skiff e-reader
The Plastic Logic Que e-reader
Palm’s new line of smartphones
Keychest, a dizzingly dull rights-management scheme from Disney.

A year later, and they’re all gone: Either officially dead, or just pining for fjords, and very unlikely to perk up.

Not all of this stuff was vaporware, in the technical sense. Palm, at least, really did sell a few of those Palm Pre Pluses before it gave up and sold out to HP.

Still, an 0-for-4 experience like that is enough to make a humble media correspondent want to avoid checking out new technology altogether, and that’s basically what I’m going to do.

I might take a look at the UltraViolet media locker demo, but that’s about it. I’m headed to Las Vegas this morning* with the primary goal of talking to media people, many of whom live in New York, just like I do.

So yes, it might seem a little odd to head across the country to talk to people who live and work a few miles away, but there’s a logic to it. Trust me!**

And if you do want smart, incisive technology coverage, trust the rest of the All Things D team: Walt, Katie, Kara and Ina are on the ground already, and the rest of the gang is monitoring developments from their home bases. It’s good stuff!

*Not just because I enjoy being fashionably late, but because it was many hundreds of dollars cheaper to fly out today than earlier in the week. (And also because I’m old, and at my age every extra day you spend in Las Vegas is a dog year.)

**Totally not a boondoggle. Note the line about saving money on airfare, above.

Chartbeat Says the Rise of the Machines Won't Be So Bad if You're a Cyborg

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000

Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

[ See post to watch video ]

Still Changing Passwords Today? Silverpop Attack May Be Why.

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:40:33 +0000

It still remains unclear whether the password-jacking of McDonald’s Web site that was revealed Monday was in fact related to what we here at All Things D are now calling Gawkergate. Though as I noted yesterday, the timing was certainly suspicious.

However, we’re starting to get more information about how the McDonald’s incident appears connected to hacking incidents at other sites. Chicago Business is reporting that the company responsible for McDonald’s email marketing is Silverpop Systems, and that it had been operating under a subcontract from Chicago-based Arc Worldwide.

So who else is a customer of Silverpop? Yesterday I received an email from someone who’s a customer of deviantArt, a social network where artists share their creations. DeviantArt has a base of 13 million users. Got an account there? You’d better change any passwords that overlap with other sites. The site advised customers that their accounts were compromised, and blamed Silverpop.

It could extend much further yet. Silverpop has more than 100 clients, and not all of them are publicly disclosed, though here are a few, found on its client quotes page and its case studies page: Stamps.com, Pitney Bowes/Mapinfo, Encyclopedia Britannica, Santander Consumer Finance and watchmaker Fossil. There’s no word how any of those other companies are affected, if at all.

Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey said in a blog message to customers that the FBI is investigating the incident, and that only a small percentage of Silverpop customers have been affected. He also said that Silverpop was “among several technology providers targeted as part of a broader cyber attack.” Stacy Kirk, a Silverpop spokeswoman, wouldn’t say anything beyond what’s in Nussey’s message.

I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some indirect connection between what happened to Silverpop and what happened to Gawker. I’m speculating here, but it’s no stretch of the imagination that numbering among deviantArt’s 13 million users are some of the 1.5 million people whose accounts were compromised in the Gawkergate affair. And the FBI is investigating both. Thomas Plunkett, Gawker’s technology chief, told me by email that there’s no evidence of a connection. Then again, as Business Insider tells it, he hasn’t yet had his meeting with the FBI.

Maybe I’m looking for connections that aren’t really there, but it’s really not hard to see how the breach at Gawker could turn out be the start of a domino effect that’s much larger than anyone has yet realized. There certainly is a lot of grumbling about changing passwords today.

If you know more more about any of this, get in touch!

Below is the email to deviantArt users.

From: deviantART.com (address deleted)
Date: Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 5:54 AM
Subject: RE: Email Notice

Silverpop Systems, Inc., a leading marketing company that sends email messages for its clients, told us that information was taken from its servers. This was probably part of a sweep by spammers. As a result, email addresses belonging to deviantART members were copied. Corresponding usernames and birth date may also have been removed.

We can assure you that nothing occurred on our systems with respect to this incident and no access was gained to private information on deviantART’s servers.

As a member of deviantART, you certainly have a right to know when an incident of this kind occurs. Unfortunately spammers are an unavoidable part of living on the Web.

The likely result of this event might be an increase in spam to your email. Experts have told us that there is an increase in email scams out there on the Internet and you should be cautious. Only click links or download attachments from people you know, particularly if they ask for personal information, and be sure that your email service provider has adequate spam filters.

Because we value the information that members give us, we have decided not to rely on the services of Silverpop in the future and their servers will no longer hold any data from us.

After the Party It's…Post-Dive Cocktails and Fun

Voices — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:48:31 +0000

Tonight we kicked off D: Dive Into Mobile with an in-depth interview with Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android. The discussion went a little long, but that didn’t keep the attendees and All Things D staff from partying the night away.

Walt, Kara and the D staff gobbled up mountains of tiny cupcakes and sipped a drink or two.

We even caught a few photos of the fun.

Flipboard Partners With Web Publishers for Full Content (and Full Disclosure: Including ATD)

Liz Gannes — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:22:33 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about Pulse, a news-reading app with innovative design, going social by integrating Facebook.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

Walt Mossberg Interview on C-SPAN

Walt Mossberg — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:02:03 +0000

Walt Mossberg discusses his Personal Technology column for The Wall Street Journal with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb on Sunday, July 19, 2009.

Palm's New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:33:58 +0000

“The key thing was our CEO, Ed Colligan, had the insight that once the [BlackBerry] Pearl came out, the smart-phone business was going to be a consumer business, and Palm was not positioned for that and needed a major transformation, and that’s what we got involved in doing. The whole notion was you wanted to take that cultural legacy of innovation that created the Pilot and the Treo and then apply it to the next customer.”

–Roger McNamee lauds Palm CEO Ed Colligan at our recent D: All Things Digital conference

Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at D last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out.

On Wednesday, Palm (PALM) named Rubinstein as its new chairman and CEO. Come Friday he’ll succeed Colligan, who is leaving the company after 16 years to join McNamee at Elevation Partners. Apparently Palm, who recruited Rubinstein, a former Apple (AAPL) engineer, to turn the company around has decided it would much rather have him in its highest office than Colligan under whose leadership it was foundering.

In a statement, Rubinstein–who has spent the past two years quarterbacking the development of the Pre and its webOS–welcomed his new role. “I am very excited about taking on this expanded role at Palm,” he said. “Ed and I have worked very hard together the past two years, and I’m grateful to him for everything he’s done to help set the company up for success. With Palm webOS we have ten-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products. Due in no small part to Ed’s courageous leadership, we’re in great shape to get Palm back to continuous growth, and we plan to keep the trajectory going upward.”

Reached for comment late Wednesday afternoon, Roger McNamee offered up this rather canned statement on Palm’s leadership transition: “With Ed’s decision to step down, Jon Rubinstein is the natural choice to lead Palm into its next phase of growth. Jon has proven to have exactly the right mix of product vision, organizational leadership and operational capabilities to help Palm regain a leadership position. We are grateful for the leadership role Ed has played in initiating this transformation and getting through the successful launch of webOS and the Pre.”

Palm shares are up 3.75 percent at $12.44 on the news.

Palm's New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:33:58 +0000

“The key thing was our CEO, Ed Colligan, had the insight that once the [BlackBerry] Pearl came out, the smart-phone business was going to be a consumer business, and Palm was not positioned for that and needed a major transformation, and that’s what we got involved in doing. The whole notion was you wanted to take that cultural legacy of innovation that created the Pilot and the Treo and then apply it to the next customer.”

–Roger McNamee lauds Palm CEO Ed Colligan at our recent D: All Things Digital conference

Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at D last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out.

Palm shares are up 3.75 percent at $12.44 on the news.