Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

The battle for your living room rages on. Touting consoles, boxes and premium content delivery services, companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon continue to jockey for digital supremacy.

And now Google has fired a cannonball.

The company unveiled the “Nexus Q” media device at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, a $300 black orb-shaped amplifier capable of wirelessly streaming music and playing video to connected devices, with the specific locus situated inside the home.

The device will essentially act as a gateway to Google Play, the company’s online digital content distribution portal. The Q connects to users’ Play music accounts — which were initially debuted at last year’s I/O conference as Google Music accounts, before Google launched a massive rebranding campaign in March — and streams tracks directly from the cloud to the device, which acts as an amp that connects to speakers inside the living room. It’s directly comparable to a Sonos in utility and function.

As is often the case with Google, there are twists. The Q is powered by the Android operating system, and is controlled via your Android-powered smartphone or tablet devices. Directly from the phone, users pick tracks from their Google Play music libraries and add them to their playlist “queue” (hence the device’s name). What’s more, multiple users can add tracks from their disparate music accounts to the same queue, creating what Google calls a “party”, essentially a modern take on the collaborative playlist with a nod back to the days of record-swapping listening parties.

The Q’s most striking qualities, however, have nothing to do with its utility. Completely distinct from the handsets and tablets it has worked on with partner companies, the Q was designed entirely in-house by members of the Android team. In essence, it is Google’s first foray into becoming a proper hardware company.

With this its first true hardware product, Google is aiming at the high end. With a matte black finish and a minimalistic, spherical shape, there are familiar traces of that famous Silicon Valley company that pays obsessive attention to hardware and design detail. Indeed, project leaders Joe Britt and Matt Hershenson — the two of whom previewed the Q on stage at I/O last year under the code name Project Tungsten — both come with an Apple hardware pedigree. This is Google making a clear statement: Not only can it do hardware, it can do hardware well.

The hurdles, as it would seem, most likely do not lie on the hardware side. The challenge is drawing users to Google Play, the online digital content storefront forced to compete with the iTunes juggernaut, a content portal that just last quarter accounted for $1.9 billion in Apple’s overall revenues. Google hasn’t broken down what percentage of its revenues Play is responsible for, though according to some reports, it is far less than that of iTunes.

While those two continue to duke it out, the war amongst the big four — Amazon and Microsoft as well as Apple and Google — continues to inch further into the living room. The $100 Apple TV device remains a modest — though still significant — foothold inside the home, offering streaming media capabilities across devices with its Airplay service. Microsoft’s biggest beachhead lies in the Xbox console, one of the company’s largest recent successes. Already installed in tens of millions of living rooms, the Xbox serves as a portal to downloadable Microsoft content like games, video and, as the company recently announced at E3, an Xbox Music service. And Amazon’s Cloud Player, MP3 store and Amazon Prime services also offer content across multiple platforms, including the Xbox.

Now, it’s a chicken and egg problem for Google (and to some extent, Microsoft and Amazon). As Apple’s content ecosystem grew over time, iPod and iPhone sales strengthened iTunes, and in turn iTunes strengthened hardware sales. That sort of momentum will be difficult for Google to reproduce, especially considering its content platform is years behind that of Apple’s in terms of both titles offered and users engaged. That obviously gives consumers less reason to buy the Q, and a lack of interest in that hardware can only serve to weaken Google Play’s traction.

The secret sauce here, however, is Android. If Google can leverage Android’s significant lead in mobile market share and convince users to migrate their music to Google’s cloud service, perhaps consumers will see the utility in switching over to a Google-centric universe, one rooted in hardware, software, and Google-distributed content.

So Q as well as Google Play are big bets for Google, a company whose ambitions now lie far beyond that of organizing the world’s information. When the device actually launches, we’ll see if customers are eager to line — or queue — up.

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Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Oracle shares finished today’s regular trading session down more than 2 percent or 58 cents to close at $27.12. The main reason was market chatter, about upheaval at the top of its sales ranks, following the disclosure in court documents of a series of embarrassing instant messages by the company’s head of North American sales.

But among the nuggets from today’s surprise earnings conference call — held three days earlier than scheduled — was news that not only is Oracle’s business officially killing it, but that Oracle is now on track to be the second-largest software-as-a-service company in the world behind Salesforce.com

How’d that happen? Acquisitions. Earlier this year, Oracle spent a combined $3.3 billion for Taleo and RightNow. The combined effect, as CEO Larry Ellison put it during his remarks on a 35-minute conference call with analysts, is that Oracle is on track to bring in $1 billion in bookings this year.

That would put Oracle in second place behind the biggest SaaS company, Salesforce.com, run by former Oracle exec Marc Benioff, which is on track to do its first $3 billion year.

Ellison also took another shot at his new favorite punching bag, Workday, the SaaS or cloud-based human resources software company run by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, two former execs of PeopleSoft, the HR software company Oracle took over in 2004 after a $10.3 billion hostile takeover that has raised a lot of money at an impressive valuation and expects to IPO this fall.

Hear Ellison tell it himself in this audio clip from the call below.

Last week, I posted an audio recording of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, from a radio interview he did in early 2009, in which he did not deny he had a computer science degree when the host of the show stated it as a fact as a key part of her question.

Thompson did not have such an academic credential.

The host of Tech Nation, Moira Gunn, sat down with me yesterday to further explain in the video interview below why she asked the question that particular way of Thompson.

In the video and in emails to me, Gunn firmly asserts that she did so because Thompson and she had a conversation about their CS degrees leading up to the interview and also kibitzed about the importance of such an education in the pre-roll of the interview.

(That audio is also embedded below, along with the part of the interview itself in which he does not correct Gunn’s assertion that he has a CS degree.)

At the time of the interview, Thompson was president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and was there to talk about its growth.

As I previously wrote:

At the end of the largely charming interview, Moira Gunn asked him a direct question about his college degrees, specifically noting they were in accounting and computer science.

“Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s PayPal,” said Gunn. “What are the most important things you learned?”

“Yeah,” begins Thompson, failing to correct her at all on the fact that he does not actually have a computer science degree — only one in accounting.

He then went even further, touting his early tech training at Stonehill College, near Boston, which did not offer a computer science degree and had only one basic computer course at the time he went there, from 1975 to 1979.

“And that’s really the background that I have, and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way,” said Thompson.

In the most generous interpretation, it’s not quite clear whether Thompson was saying “Yeah” to her statement of his academic credentials, or if he was not actually listening.

But it’s a careless oversight on his part not to have corrected her about the degrees, which could also be said about a computer science degree being present on his bio for more than a half-dozen years at eBay and later at Yahoo without some notice by him.

Because while Thompson has had a long career as a tech exec, as well as a stint as a CIO, academically speaking, a computer science degree did not happen in his college days nor did he graduate as an engineer.

While it is entirely possible that Thompson did not correctly grok what Gunn was saying, it seems pretty clear that he implied his college background was in tech and he was an engineer.

It is true that Thompson did take some computer science classes at Stonehill. And it is entirely possible that he thinks of himself as an engineer by work training and not by college degree.

But Gunn claims that Thompson put himself out to her in the time before and during the interview as someone who did have such a degree and never corrected her assumption about that or her direct statement about it.

Here are excerpts from several emails she sent to me this week before we did the video:

My recollection is that they sent me some talking points (they had a message they wanted to get out) and a bio — I always insist on an official bio from the PR folks — the PR folks would have booked him. I didn’t seek him out — they approached me — I would have gotten it from them. I would have done more research, but likely not confirming his degrees.

And:

I could swear I talked to him about the bachelors in CS before we did the interview. Maybe in the elevator before the tape rolled — you see, *I* have a bachelors in computer science. I thought it was opportune and important. I always mention it to people who have the same degrees I have or went to the same schools. I would have thought it was important. (I have a bachelors in CS, a masters in CS and a PhD in mechanical engineering). I mentioned it to the google boys when they first came in 2001, and everyone before and everyone since — whether it enters the interview or not.

And:

FYI the entire time I was conducting the interview, I was under the impression that Scott had a degree in Computer Science and considered himself to be an engineer. I wouldn’t have asked many of these questions as such if I had known he didn’t have that degree — in CS you learn about “architecture” which is what he was discussing in the pre-interview which you will hear. I would have instead asked “How does a guy with an accounting degree get the technology right? How does he possibly understand it? How can he possibly have the technology vision?”

In this case, it was sufficiently important that I had it in my written interview questions — it was not an afterthought.

And:

As a professor in a business school — who has also taught in computer science — I knew it was highly unusual to have someone with degrees in both accounting and computer science. Typically, these are two very different kinds of people — it would be a very unusual credential to have, and I immediately noticed it.

This multiple major combination would also lift a person above other resumes immediately, as you don’t see the combination. It would be a highly [sought] after combo-combination in any high-tech field which relates to finance and which requires that new technology be developed to uniquely create the business opportunity. It follows Scott’s career path, including CIO. One presumes a chief information officer to know about technology architectures and software risk — something he would definitely have background in with a computer science degree … but he doesn’t have one. (Remember in the run-up to the interview, even Scott was talking about the difficulty of finding people who could imagine the architecture?)

And, lastly:

I’m always a stickler about a person’s biography — here’s from my “Media Information” section on technation.com.

Under “Basic Steps to Booking Tech Nation Guests:”

“Essential in the materials to be submitted is a detailed biography of the proposed guest or guests, identifying relevant experience and education.”

Here’s the complete link: http://www.technation.com/pages/media.html

“A detailed biography of the guest is essential. Traceable credentials are a must.”

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and it’s always relevant — especially in tech and science. It affects perspective, insight, depth of understanding, basic skills, etc. I also want to know what *they* say is relevant in the person’s official biography.

Yahoo confirmed last week that it included inaccurate information about Thompson’s academic background on its Web site and in its regulatory filings.

The admission came after activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point correctly asserted that Thompson’s resume was overstated related to his education.

Yahoo first called the inclusion of the computer science degree on his bio an “inadvertent error,” but has given no other explanation as yet. Later, the Yahoo board said it was reviewing the matter and would then make appropriate disclosures afterward.

There is now an official board probe taking place.

I sent the Gunn email quotes, which are similar to the video interview I did, to a Yahoo spokeswoman. She declined comment.

Here’s Gunn talking about the circumstances of her interview with Thompson, as well as the new audio segment of them talking about computer science education, which she said flowed out of an earlier non-recorded bonding over their CS degrees. I also included the part in the actual interview where he does not deny her assertion that he had a CS degree.

Here is video interview with Gunn:

Here is new audio of Gunn and Thompson discussing CS education, just before the formal interview:

Here is the actual interview, where Thompson does not refute Gunn’s clear assertion he has a CS degree:

And here are Gunn’s interview notes from the time, too, in which she goes into why she asked Thompson the CS question directly:

_Interview-Scott Thompson

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• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
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• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120509/technations-gunn-says-she-and-yahoo-ceo-talked-about-their-cs-degrees-before-2009-show-video-and-audio/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 06:22:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203636

On March 25, 2009, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson — when he was then president of PayPal — appeared on the TechNation radio show to talk about the revival of the eBay payments unit.

At the end of the largely charming interview, Moira Gunn asked him a direct question about his college degrees, specifically noting they were in accounting and computer science.

“Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s PayPal,” said Gunn. “What are the most important things you learned?”

“Yeah,” begins Thompson, failing to correct her at all on the fact that he does not actually have a computer science degree — only one in accounting.

He then went even further, touting his early tech training at Stonehill College, near Boston, which did not offer a computer science degree at the time he went there, from 1975 to 1979.

“And that’s really the background that I have, and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way,” said Thompson.

In the most generous interpretation, it’s not quite clear whether Thompson was saying “Yeah” to her statement of his academic credentials, or if he was not actually listening.

But it’s a careless oversight on his part not to have corrected her about the degrees, which could also be said about a computer science degree being present on his bio for more than a half-dozen years at eBay and later at Yahoo without some notice by him.

Because while Thompson has had a long career as a tech exec, as well as a stint as a CIO, academically speaking, a computer science degree did not happen in his college days nor did he graduate as an engineer.

That became apparent earlier today, when Yahoo confirmed that it included inaccurate information about Thompson’s academic background on its Web site and in its regulatory filings.

The admission came after activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point correctly asserted that Thompson’s resume was overstated related to his education.

Yahoo called the inclusion of the computer science degree on his bio an “inadvertent error,” but gave no other explanation as yet. Tonight, the Yahoo board said it was reviewing the matter and would then make appropriate disclosures afterward.

While it is entirely possible that Thompson did not correctly grok what Gunn was saying, it seems pretty clear that he implied his college background was in tech and he was an engineer.

It is true that Thompson did take some computer science classes at Stonehill. And it is entirely possible that he thinks of himself as an engineer by work training and not by college degree.

I am awaiting comment from Yahoo PR, which has its hands full today (welcome to the circus, Amanda!).

Until then, here is the actual audio of that part of the interview and the pertinent part of the transcript, which began at the 26:33 time on the audio, to judge for yourself:

Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.

And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?

And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120430/a-bigger-jambox-yes-please/ http://allthingsd.com/20120430/a-bigger-jambox-yes-please/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 04:01:57 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=201534 The worst-kept recent secret in tech — aside from Google Drive — is out: Audio-gadget maker Jawbone has created a monster Jambox.

The original Jambox, for those not familiar, is a nifty Bluetooth-equipped speaker that wirelessly connects with the iPhone, iPad and Android phones to play music. It’s easy to see why, even at a price point of $199, the little Jambox has become the best-selling speaker in the U.S. — it’s small, sleek, and it works; plus, it’s easy to travel with, as I noted in this review of a competing speaker.

Starting today, a new, bigger version of the Jambox is available for preorder, and is expected to hit stores on May 15. The bigger Jambox is called — wait for it — Big Jambox.

Big Jambox is 10 inches long by 3.1 inches wide and 3.6 inches high, closer to the size of the shoebox-style box the original Jambox comes in. It weighs 2.7 pounds, is made of stainless steel with a polymer base and sides, and has music-control buttons on the top of the speaker, in addition to volume control.

Soundwise, Big Jambox definitely packs more power and better sound than the standard Jambox. It’s got Jawbone’s signature LiveAudio technology, which is supposed to digitally enhance the sound coming out of the speaker to create “3-D” sound. The company claims 15 hours of continuous play on Big Jambox without needing to recharge the built-in battery, although that’s with the volume output at 85 decibels, and not maxed out at 110 decibels.

Like the little Jambox, Big Jambox also acts as a two-way speaker for phone conversations and conference calls. And there’s a bonus feature for Android users: If a calendar reminder pops up on your phone while it’s paired to the speaker, the Jambox will read the reminder out loud, then patch you directly through to any phone numbers you might have put in the reminder.

Unlike the little Jambox, Big Jambox allows more than one person or one device to be paired with the speaker at the same time.

It will be interesting to see whether consumers buy into Big Jambox as much as they did the original. With its “little” Jambox, Jawbone was focused on mobility — in terms of both mobile-phone connectivity and portability. Now, even though the company insists that the new device weighs less than a rolled-up yoga mat, Big Jambox is no doubt a little less portable. Plus, with a price point of nearly $300, the Big Jambox will now go up against products like the the Bose SoundLink Wireless Mobile speaker.

At the same time, Big Jambox is still less expensive than speakers like the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air or the JBL OnBeat Xtreme Bluetooth speaker.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120430/a-bigger-jambox-yes-please/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:31:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=195374

Another very interesting company I stumbled across in a funky building in Hollywood on my recent trip to Los Angeles is Gobbler, which bills itself as a “high-speed file transfer & backup for pro audio.”

In other words, a hopped-up version of Dropbox’s media-in-the-cloud efforts for cool music folks.

Armed with just over $3 million from angel investors like Sky Dayton, David Goldberg and others, the start-up is aiming to help media creators who need a lot more firepower, including backing up, transferring and organizing hefty music, video and photo files.

CEO Chris Kantrowitz knows whereof he speaks, as a designer of big music shows, including Coachella, the annual festival which takes place this weekend and next. He co-founded Gobbler with his sister, former Myspace exec Jamie Kantrowitz.

Here he is in a video interview with me talking about the future focus of the company, as well as where cloud storage is headed — Kantrowitz is one hep dude, so listen up:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/hp-envy-spectre-14-a-premium-ultrabook-at-a-premium-price/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/hp-envy-spectre-14-a-premium-ultrabook-at-a-premium-price/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:00:04 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=191712 Over the past six months in the personal computing world, there has been much ado about Ultrabooks — thin, lightweight laptops with Intel-determined technical specifications that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air. Windows PC makers like Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer have all introduced Ultrabooks, and Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer maker, has gotten into the game as well.

This week, I’ve been testing the HP Envy Spectre 14, a glass-covered laptop that falls into the Ultrabook category. The Envy Spectre hit the market in February, and the base model currently retails for $1,400.

I liked the Envy Spectre. It’s eye-catching, lighter than the laptop I usually carry, and zippy in terms of its processing power. But compared to other Ultrabooks, it’s heavier and more expensive. It’s really more of a premium product, rather than an ultra-light laptop. Also, there were a couple elements of its design, such as the fact that it wasn’t tapered and the lid was hard to open, that might prevent it from being my main laptop squeeze.

The Envy Spectre 14 is 20 millimeters thick — just over 0.79 inches — and has a 13.3-inch-wide body with a 14-inch-diagonal LED-backlit display. It weighs just shy of four pounds. In comparison, the Dell XPS 13, which AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg recently reviewed, is, at its largest point, 0.71 inches thick and just under three pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air, which at its largest point is 0.68 inches thick, also weighs in at 2.96 pounds.

Despite its thickness, the HP Envy Spectre 14 is an attractive laptop. Its aluminum body is covered with Gorilla Glass, the thin, chemically-strengthened glass that makes up the displays of many smartphones and tablets. The glass is layered over three areas of the laptop: The lid, the 1600 by 900 pixel display screen and the palm rest. The trackpad is coated with chemically etched glass, which gives it slightly more traction than the cool-to-the-touch, super glossy Gorilla Glass.

The glass is scratch-resistant — I threw my keys into my laptop bag a few times, and the laptop wasn’t scratched — but it’s definitely not smudge-resistant. As with my smartphone and iPad, it was only a matter of time before the Spectre was covered with cloudy fingerprints. Fortunately, HP has included a protective case with the laptop.

The Spectre comes with a 128 gigabyte solid-state drive, 4GB of memory, runs Windows 7 and is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, with the option to upgrade to a faster i7 processor for an extra $200. For an additional $300, you can also get a 256GB solid-state drive.

When I fired up the Envy Spectre for the first time, I noticed how quickly it booted up and how fast it was compared to my regular laptop, a fully loaded MacBook Pro. I downloaded iTunes, purchased a new album, installed a new Web browser and ran multiple Web pages at once, including a video-streaming site; even with all that going on, the Envy Spectre didn’t seem to slow down at all.

HP claims 9.5 hours of battery life with the Envy Spectre, provided that the user has the laptop set to HP’s recommended power-saving settings. In my test of the Spectre, which involved turning off power savers and setting the display to full brightness, connecting to Wi-Fi, playing an iTunes playlist nonstop and running an email application, the battery lasted just over five hours. With more normal usage, I estimate you’ll get about an hour more.

After a week with the Envy Spectre, there were a couple of elements of its design that bugged me. The first is that it’s actually difficult to open. There’s a barely-there lip on the lid of the laptop, and every time the device was shut, I had to dig my nails around the edges to pry it open.

I also noticed that the Envy Spectre’s screen doesn’t recline as far back as some other laptop screens do. This laptop has a dropped hinge so the bottom of its display butts up against the keyboard, physically preventing it from going back further. I compared the Spectre to an Asus Ultrabook and even a MacBook Pro, and both laptops opened up wider than the Spectre does. For users who prefer a wide range of motion with their laptop screens, this could be a drawback.

But there were aspects of the hardware that I liked. The LED-backlit keyboard is a nice touch, and the keys had a velvety feel to them. The keys also have proximity sensors that sense when the user has stepped away from the laptop for an extended period, dimming the backlighting and acting as a minor battery-saving mechanism. While some people are used to function keys performing common shortcuts — such as F5 for refreshing a Web page — I liked that the Spectre’s function keys adjusted display brightness and controlled music playing.

There’s an easy-to-access volume-control wheel on the right-hand side of the keyboard. This is part of HP’s Beats product, offered in select computers, which is supposed to produce better-sounding audio. While Beats audio isn’t going to replace the sound system in your home or apartment anytime soon, the music tracks I listened to through the laptop sounded fuller with Beats, especially when heard through headphones.

Unlike the MacBook Air, the Envy Spectre comes with an expandable built-in Ethernet port, along with two USB ports, an HDMI port and a Mini Display port.

There are also some other sweeteners that HP threw in with the Envy Spectre 14, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements (which photo and video hounds will appreciate), a two-year warranty for the price of one year and a two-year Norton AntiVirus software package.

I would recommend the HP Envy Spectre 14 — but as a premium laptop, not as an Ultrabook. For consumers who want a super slim, lightweight laptop, there are options with similar technical specifications that weigh in at under three pounds and cost less.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/hp-envy-spectre-14-a-premium-ultrabook-at-a-premium-price/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20120201/go-the-fk-back-to-sleep-silicon-valley-facebook-ipo-likely-to-file-later-today-at-earliest/ http://allthingsd.com/20120201/go-the-fk-back-to-sleep-silicon-valley-facebook-ipo-likely-to-file-later-today-at-earliest/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:36:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=170212

Like political junkies waiting up for election returns (losers!), Silicon Valley folks, including tech journalists (losers!), are up this morning to await and then pounce on the long-expected IPO filing of Facebook.

But, several sources said, the social networking giant — as I have previously reported — will likely not file its copious documents until this afternoon, after the markets close, at the earliest.

In other words, my day is shot. Thanks, Dave Ebersman!

Sources said the filing could even possibly slip a day, as the company’s suits get busy with dotting all the I’s and crossing the T’s.

That’s unlikely, though — Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004, like today eight years later.

Sentiment from the not-very-sentimental co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Awwwwwwww …

And, if those dudes rush, we might even see all the deets of the Silicon Valley darling’s finances and other info — including who’s got what shares and who doesn’t — earlier today. But don’t count on it.

That’s right — Facebook is sucking up even more of your precious time, and it is not even fun like beating your mother at Words With Friends or creepily poking old flames.

Facebook, Web 2.0′s most successful start-up, is expected to raise many billions of dollars on a valuation of tens of millions times that.

In other words, blah, blah, blah until we get the real numbers …

To send you off to IPO dreamland until then, here’s the genius viral video reading of the book “Go the F**k to Sleep,” read by Samuel L. Jackson:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120201/go-the-fk-back-to-sleep-silicon-valley-facebook-ipo-likely-to-file-later-today-at-earliest/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120123/listen-up-neil-young-joins-dive-into-media-next-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20120123/listen-up-neil-young-joins-dive-into-media-next-week/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:50:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=166442 We’re a week away from the D: Dive Into Media Conference, which is going to feature a wide-ranging group of industry leaders who are going to have some very different takes on the way media and technology are colliding.

In light of this month’s SOPA/PIPA debate, for instance, it ought to be very interesting to compare and contrast what Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and YouTube head Salar Kamangar have to say about copyright and piracy. (Not that they were on the same page to begin with.)

But in addition to executives who help distribute media for a living, we also wanted to make sure we heard from content makers at Dive. We’ll have several, but none more famous than Neil Young.

One of the nice things about having a music icon join you onstage is that you don’t need to spend much time introducing him (though it’s easy enough to get the official and unofficial takes; and, courtesy of Kamangar’s YouTube, plenty of audiovisual reminders, which you can see at the bottom of this post).

That’s going to give us more time to have a freewheeling conversation: The man has a 40-plus-year career and is still making music and movies today, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. One digital topic I imagine we’ll certainly touch on: His long-running campaign to fix the way modern music sounds – not the songs themselves, but the way they’re recorded and distributed.

That isn’t the easiest sell, when lots of people seem content to listen to super-compressed iTunes files bleeding out of tiny, tinny, laptop speakers. But perhaps things are changing a bit: Dr. Dre and company sure have sold a lot of sort-of high-end Beats headphones in recent years.

Dive kicks off on the evening of Jan. 30, and we’ll have complete coverage here. If you want to join us in person in Laguna Niguel, Calif., grab a seat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120123/listen-up-neil-young-joins-dive-into-media-next-week/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120111/ultrabooks-from-hp-and-lenovo-that-are-kinda-sorta-different/ http://allthingsd.com/20120111/ultrabooks-from-hp-and-lenovo-that-are-kinda-sorta-different/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:38:56 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=162820 As we expected, Ultrabooks are everywhere this week. And despite will.i.am’s proclamation yesterday at Intel’s press event that they’re the new ghetto blaster, many of them seem indistinguishable from each other.

So HP and Lenovo have added some features to their Ultrabooks to set them apart from all the ultra-noise.

Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga is named as such because of its flexibility. The 10-finger touchscreen has a full range of motion at the hinge, so when fully folded, the laptop turns into a 13.3.-inch tablet. And it can be propped up in tent mode — or, in this case, downward dog. I could see this being useful for entertainment viewing at home, as well as in small spaces, such as on an airplane.

Other laptops have shown this range of motion before — remember the Dell Inspiron Duo? — but adding this feature to a super-slim, touchscreen Windows 8 laptop is a nice touch.

The Yoga’s cover is solid aluminium; it measures 16.9mm thick and weighs 3.1 pounds. It is, of course, powered by an Intel Core processor, with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive. Lenovo claims the battery lasts up to eight hours.

Since the IdeaPad Yoga runs the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, the laptop likely won’t be available until the second half of the year. A representative for Lenovo said the company hopes to price it around $1,300.

Gorilla Glass is what makes the HP Envy Spectre 14 stand out. The ultra-thin, chemically strengthened material is what coats the exterior and the wrist rest of this laptop, giving it a sleek, reflective look — albeit one that needs to be wiped with a cloth pretty frequently.

HP's Envy Spectre 14

Yesterday at CES, someone lamented to me, regarding the Envy Spectre 14, “But it’s so heavy.” Weighing in at almost four pounds, the Spectre is a bit heavier than other Ultrabooks, but for comparison’s sake, the 13-inch version of the “regular” HP Envy notebook is just about the same, at 3.68 pounds.

The Spectre is 20mm thin, has a 14-inch screen and Intel Core processors, and supports up to 256GB of storage. It also boasts nine hours of battery life, versus Lenovo’s eight. The Spectre also has a backlit keyboard and proximity sensors which detect when a user is approaching the laptop and light up the keys in advance. And it has HP’s Beats Audio built in.

Another interesting feature of the Spectre is that it’s NFC-enabled; theoretically, users can share data from an NFC smartphone by tapping the phone against the Spectre.

The HP Envy Spectre is expected to launch in early February, and will cost around $1,399.

Neither of these Ultrabooks have DVD slots, but the HP Envy Spectre 14 has an expandable Ethernet port, USB 3.0, HDMI and Mini DisplayPort, while the IdeaPad Yoga has USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, an HDMI port and an SD card slot.

A fun side note about the HP Envy Spectre 14: A company representative says HP actually first displayed a prototype of this Ultrabook last fall, during New York Fashion Week. But it was a “bejeweled” version, with Swarovski crystal designs by Marchesa, and fashion-focused reporters barely batted an eye at the thing. Who knew they were missing one of this season’s biggest CES trends?

(Images courtesy of Blogeee/Flickr)

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120111/ultrabooks-from-hp-and-lenovo-that-are-kinda-sorta-different/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:06:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=157537

I was on San Francisco’s public radio station today, talking about this past year in tech with “Forum” host Michael Krasny and fellow panelists, former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy and CNET’s Molly Wood.

2011 was a big year, as it turned out, with good and bad news for companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and others.

We also looked forward to 2012, which will include new online TV efforts and, of course, the much-anticipated Facebook IPO.

Here’s the chat:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111221/jawbone-gets-40-million-from-deutsche-telekom-kleiner-perkins/ http://allthingsd.com/20111221/jawbone-gets-40-million-from-deutsche-telekom-kleiner-perkins/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:25:55 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=155994 Jawbone, maker of nifty audio devices and the recently maligned UP fitness wristband, has raised $40 million from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Yuri Milner and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. The new capital brings Jawbone’s funding to date close to $210 million. CEO Hosain Rahman has said that the company plans to introduce more products in the healthcare and audio markets, according to GigaOM.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111221/jawbone-gets-40-million-from-deutsche-telekom-kleiner-perkins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111201/complaints-pop-up-for-jawbones-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20111201/complaints-pop-up-for-jawbones-up/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:35:18 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=148907

Like previous Jawbone product launches, its newest slick device, called UP — a digital wristband that tracks your health — hit the market amid high interest and positive reviews.

But, just over three weeks after its launch, it seems that some users are down on UP.

One of the complaints about UP involves the hardware and design of the device, a MotionX-powered bracelet that tracks users’ daily activity, sleep patterns and even their meals.

One major issue involves the end of the wristband — which is protected by a removable cap — that plugs directly into users’ iPhones for immediate access to the data through a Jawbone UP iOS app.

Some users are claiming that the cap falls off too easily, and have submitted multiple complaints about lost caps to Jawbone’s online forum. The cap is also designed to lie on the underside of the wrist, which some allege gets in the way for frequent laptop users.

Others are complaining that the UP device sometimes doesn’t sync with the iPhone and send the necessary data after plugging it into the smartphone.

Finally — in what might be the most critical of complaints about the UP, since it’s meant to be worn 24/7 — some users are claiming that too-quick battery drainage is an issue with their devices.

Jawbone, a San Francisco-based start-up known for its nifty audio products, such as the Jawbone wireless headset and Jambox wireless speaker, said it is aware of the issues and has been addressing them on its Web site.

In an interview, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said a minority of users are affected, and that both the company and outside teams are working hard to diagnose the roots of the various problems.

He declined to say when exactly the company will have answers for its customers, except to say that they are “close” on the diagnostics results.

“We’re taking all of this technology and trying to simplify it for the user, which is a complex problem to solve,” Rahman said. “There’s waterproofing, power management, how to utilize the phone, design, a social experience and more, all in one product.”

It’s a fair point. And while it works to solve complaints, Jawbone has been shipping free replacement UP devices to dissatisfied customers. Three-packs of replacement caps are also available for $9.99.

The possible problems with UP do not seem to have affected sales. For first-time buyers, Jawbone said UP is currently back-ordered, with new orders expected to ship in one to two weeks.

But the possible device malfunctions are an unusual misstep in the company’s first foray into the health and fitness market. The UP, which costs $100, was introduced as a comprehensive solution for personal health analytics, offering both hardware and software and aimed at the same market as such products as the wearable Fitbit and the Zeo Sleep Manager.

“We do believe the issues that people are experiencing can be addressed very quickly,” Rahman said. “It’s going to be a constantly evolving product solution.”

Here is a video interview that Kara Swisher did with Rahman and Jawbone’s software head Jeremiah Robison, just before UP’s launch:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/complaints-pop-up-for-jawbones-up/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20110909/viral-audio-while-arrington-fiddles-and-bartz-erupts-my-cup-o-crazy-runs-over/ http://allthingsd.com/20110909/viral-audio-while-arrington-fiddles-and-bartz-erupts-my-cup-o-crazy-runs-over/#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:49:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=119105

From a Starbucks in Menlo Park yesterday — and obviously hopped up on too many doppios — I talked with the Mediatwits (Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali) about the twin clown circuses going on at AOL and Yahoo this week.

That would be firebombers — Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and fired Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — on one side and punching-bag big companies on the other.

For me, it’s obviously Christmas in September.

Enjoy the podcast:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110909/viral-audio-while-arrington-fiddles-and-bartz-erupts-my-cup-o-crazy-runs-over/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110429/boomtown-on-kqeds-iphone-or-ispy-radio-show-audio/ http://allthingsd.com/20110429/boomtown-on-kqeds-iphone-or-ispy-radio-show-audio/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:02:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43253

The Apple iOS and Google Android smartphone location-tracking kerfuffle. Smarty-pants commentators. KQED’s “Forum” radio show with interviewer Michael Krasny yesterday.

Go!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110429/boomtown-on-kqeds-iphone-or-ispy-radio-show-audio/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ibm-jeopardy-challenge-day-one-ends-in-a-tie/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ibm-jeopardy-challenge-day-one-ends-in-a-tie/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:55:05 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3216 Day one of the three-day battle between the human brain and silicon on the game show “Jeopardy” ended in a tie.

The IBM supercomputer and human player, Brad Rutter, each had $5,000 on the scoreboard, while Ken Jennings, who had bested Watson in the much-publicized practice match, ended with $2,000.

Watson missed some questions and in interesting ways. At one point Watson repeated a wrong answer, the “1920s,” which Jennings had just said. Host Alex Trebeck referred to these as “weird little moments.”

Watson sprang to a huge lead early. By the first commercial break, Watson had $5,200 to Rutter’s $1,000, and $200 for Jennings. It began a serious run interestingly enough after hitting the Daily Double and making a bet. This is interesting in that Watson, in the practice match which it ultimately lost, showed a weakness in situations where betting was called for. This was a weakness that Jennings exploited to his benefit. This made it a surprise when Watson threw down and bet $1,000, more than it had on the board at the time.

I asked Stephen Baker (pictured), author of the forthcoming book on the match, “Final Jeopardy,” to call me after the episode aired for a little color commentary from the point of view of someone who was in the studio to witness it. Our conversation, which I recorded on Google Voice, is below.

Steve Baker Talks about The IBM Jeopardy Challenge, Day 1 by ahess247

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ibm-jeopardy-challenge-day-one-ends-in-a-tie/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:23:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40466

Here is my appearance yesterday on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where I pontificate about AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Whatever you think of the purchase–and there are a lot of differing opinions–I noted: “What [the deal] does say is that news is an exciting area and it always will be. It just depends on how it’s going to be distributed.”

Very sensible!

Listen in:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/a-very-short-letter-from-a-friend-in-cairo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/a-very-short-letter-from-a-friend-in-cairo/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:27:09 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2692 For the last few days I’d been trying to reach an old friend and graduate school classmate named Abdalla, who lives in Cairo. As you might have guessed, I didn’t hear back. I assumed, correctly, that he was unable to check his email or receive the voice mail messages I’d left on his wireless phone.

Today I heard back from him. His sister, who lives in New York, had checked his messages for him, and kindly replied to my email messages. She then gave me the number of a wireless phone he has that is for one reason or another able to send and receive text messages.

I sent a message to that number and heard back from him, mere minutes after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had finished giving the speech in which he said he wouldn’t be a candidate in the forthcoming election in September.

It is one thing to see the media reports that have been emerging from that country, but quite another to hear from someone you know on the ground, especially under the difficult communications circumstances that the government has imposed. Because of that, his terse messages feel all the more precious.

In response to my first message he wrote:

Hosni Mubarak is clinging to power despite everything. There is a lot of impatience among Egyptians for him to leave office now. Protests are intensifying and they are drawing bigger crowds. I am working on some filming.

I replied that I thought at first the people would be feeling victorious following Mubarak’s announcement. He replied back:

They want him to leave this minute! They don’t want him to stall. He is already 20 steps behind the demands of the street. His time is up. Mubarak is in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. But if he were in Cairo, he would have fled the country by now, fearing protesters might charge the presidential palace.

I sent another reply containing the phone numbers for Speak2Tweet, the service Google and Twitter launched yesterday that allows people in Egypt with working phone lines to leave audio messages that are then broadcast to the world via Twitter. That Twitter account has now carried more than 1,000 messages from people in Egypt, some of which, like the one from the young woman below, are in English. Judging by her tone, events there have yet to reach their conclusion.

For those messages not in English, some volunteers have been translating the messages into English and publishing them into a continuously updated spreadsheet on Google Docs. This effort in turn led to a site called “Alive in Egypt,” where SayNow messages continue to be translated and transcribed.

I haven’t heard back from Abdulla after his last message. Now that Mubarak has pledged to leave office in September, there is as yet no information about when Egypt’s communications infrastructure will be restored to a normal operating posture.

Meanwhile, the folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who have so deftly tracked the finer technical details of Egypt’s disappearance from the Internet, have produced yet another visualization of the peculiar event as it unfolded. The video below is a minute-by-minute graphical representation of Egypt’s four major Internet service companies as they went dark. In a new blog post, they point out that what you’re watching is the silencing of the voices of 80 million people. One of them is my friend.

[Image Via: SheKnows]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/a-very-short-letter-from-a-friend-in-cairo/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/rupert-murdoch-gives-guests-a-sneak-peek-of-tomorrows-daily-tonight-heres-what-theyll-see/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/rupert-murdoch-gives-guests-a-sneak-peek-of-tomorrows-daily-tonight-heres-what-theyll-see/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:31:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28952 The Daily makes its official debut tomorrow morning, at a press event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

[CLICK HERE FOR LIVE COVERAGE OF THE PRESS EVENT]
But a select crowd will get to see the iPad newspaper tonight, at an equally notable Manhattan location: Rupert Murdoch’s apartment, where the News Corp. CEO is hosting a “low key” cocktail party.

Although News Corp. owns this Web site, my email invite to tonight’s pre-launch launch event hasn’t arrived, and I’m told it never will. The company hasn’t offered me a peek at the Daily, either.

But at this point I’ve still got a pretty decent sense of what Murdoch’s guests will see this evening, and the rest of us will see tomorrow: A newspaper that’s both old-fashioned and cutting-edge.

People who have gotten up  close to the the Daily describe a digital paper where many of the news stories look just like news stories you’d see anywhere else.

Others will look more like iPhone apps, featuring interactive graphics or videos, or photos you can swipe, pinch and zoom–with perhaps almost no text at all.

And there’s more! There’s no 3-D video yet, though it’s on the agenda. But there will be an audio feature so you can have stories read aloud to you. And there’s a crossword puzzle! And Sudoku!

A Daily-watcher who thinks the thing is amazing compares it to the Daily Prophet, the magical newspaper read by Harry Potter and his wizard pals.

More jaded observers tell me it’s more or less what they’ve seen in existing iPad magazine apps, particularly Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and Condé Nast’s Wired. The big difference is that those magazines come out monthly, and the Daily will get beamed to your iPad… daily.

Still, the most striking thing about the Daily has nothing to do with any technical bells and whistles. It’s Murdoch’s insistence that he can sell a digital newspaper app to consumers trained to expect that digital news is what you get on the Web, for free.

The Daily is almost defiantly anti-Web: It will have a free site, with a grudging sample of perhaps 10 percent of the newspaper’s stories, but that’s it. While Web news sites increasingly focus on aggregation and filtering of other people’s content, the Daily will focus on making its own stuff, even though plenty of other people are already doing it.

And while News Corp. officials have tried to argue that the Daily isn’t a newspaper but something else, it is most definitely produced using a newspaper model: Six sections, written once a day–the Daily team is particularly excited about its sports coverage–and delivered in the wee hours of the morning.

The Daily will allow for some midday updates, but it’s really designed to land with a digital thud on your virtual doorstep, just like the newspapers Murdoch has loved all his life.

Murdoch will charge 99 cents a week for a subscription, and he’s certainly going to get some takers at the start, especially since the Daily will be free for the first two weeks after tomorrow’s launch.

Which will be a noisy one. The press will give it plenty of free promotion, and News Corp. will augment that with a digital ad campaign, in addition to offline marketing donated and/or bartered from other Murdoch properties. Perhaps there’s a way to mention it once or twice during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast on Fox.

Much more important will be the endorsement from Apple, which is using the Daily to roll out a new “push” subscription feature.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was supposed to appear onstage in San Francisco with Murdoch to bless the launch, will send content boss Eddy Cue to New York tomorrow instead.

That’s still Apple’s seal of approval, though, and I can’t think of another time the company has so conspicuously blessed a single third-party product. That alone will be enough to prompt an enormous number of people to try it out.

Remember that Apple already has a customer base of  some 125 million iTunes users–if you do want to buy this thing, you won’t need to pull out a credit card. A few button clicks will do.

The real question, of course, is how many people are going to pay for the Daily a month down the road, when the buzz is gone. And there’s no way to guess at that when you get your first look at the thing. No matter when that happens.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/rupert-murdoch-gives-guests-a-sneak-peek-of-tomorrows-daily-tonight-heres-what-theyll-see/feed/ 17 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/espn-retools-its-radio-app-for-a-superbowl-push/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/espn-retools-its-radio-app-for-a-superbowl-push/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:33:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28906 Fox has the rights to the Super Bowl this Sunday, but every other media outlet in the free world will take full advantage of the game up until kickoff. Here, for instance, is an app launch from ESPN–not a new app, but a refresh of its Radio app at Apple’s iTunes store, featuring all sorts of personalization bells and whistles.

Most impressive: Searchable audio that lets you sift through all of the network’s daily audio output to find mentions of your favorite teams, players, etc. So you can leave work, head to the gym and download, um, all of the day’s Clay Matthews news, without having to waste time Web surfing through the day. (Yes, you’re going to Web surf, anyway.)

The Disney-owned sports network isn’t changing the app’s price, which will stay at $2.99. ESPN says it has sold “hundreds of thousands” of the apps since it launched in September 2009. 1-800-FLOWERS.com has signed on as the exclusive sponsor for the relaunch.

Meanwhile, ESPN.com’s audio ventures seem to be doing well across the board: ESPNRadio.com reaches more than three million listeners per month, while multimedia star Bill Simmons’s podcast racked up 42 million downloads last year. (I’m responsible for a couple hundred, at least.)

ESPN says a version for Google’s Android platform is on the way.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/espn-retools-its-radio-app-for-a-superbowl-push/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-nvidia-ceo-jen-hsun-huang-at-dces/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-nvidia-ceo-jen-hsun-huang-at-dces/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:21:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27766 All of those tablets rolling out this week means lots of opportunity for chipmaker Nvidia, which used to specialize in graphics, but is now looking to power a whole new class of mobile devices. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang tells Mobilized’s Ina Fried how he sees the market shaking out, and what it means for his company and his competitors. We’ll also be looking for an update on Nvidia’s legal battle with Intel.

Sorry, joining slightly late. Jen-Hsun Huang is walking through Nvidia’s recent announcements.

And also some history. 1995 was important because the personal computer really became personal back then. (I assume this relates to a Windows release but not clear why.)

At the time, we thought we’d be a $300 million company in five years. But we got a lot bigger.

Ina Fried: You’re expanding beyond graphics, but how big is that business?

JH: We’ve shipped one billion GeForce processors. That’s a lot. We’re also doing Quadro processors for high-end processing. We’ve got the new Tesla business, where we use our GPU for general technical computing. It’s being used for the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Our newest business is the Tegra business. Using our expertise for a new class of mobile computing.

IF: Earlier versions of the Tegra were used in the Zune.

JH: And the Kin.

IF: I wasn’t going to mention the Kin.

Now JH is talking Intel. Which started with move into building chipsets, 12 years ago. Started with Xbox, then AMD platforms, then we wanted to scale out so we started talking about Intel. Now we’re in a dispute.

IF: So where do things stand with that?

JH: [More or less a non-answer here.]

IF: Okay, let’s talk about the future!

JH: Cool. 2011 is a big year, a year that computing is getting redefined because of these mobile products.

IF: That sounds like hyperbole, but I sort of agree. There’s some amazing stuff being shown off this year. But explain what’s different about this stuff.

JH: We like to call the new phones superphones. Time to do a demo.

JH is plugging in a new Android handset into a dock. It’s taking awhile. Complains about his vision. Okay, there we go. Showing off multitasking, apps, etc. Showing off 1080p video that looks cool. No audio, though. “This is a full-on computer.”

JH: We think these will really change things, because they can be laptops, or a media center, etc., simply based on where you dock it and the kind of accessories.

IF: So you have cellphones basically being able to replace a computer. But Microsoft is also announcing that Windows will run on ARM processors, including ones you make. How important is that?

JH: If you’re a software company of any kind, your primary focus is to target processors, anywhere. At this point, it’s a foregone conclusion that ARM will be the largest installed base of processors in the world.

Then the important thing is the operating systems: Andriod, iOS and RIM are incredibly important.

IF: So Windows is fourth most important?

JH: The most important CPU architecture going forward is likely to be ARM. At this point, you have to embrace ARM or you’re going to miss out on a very important market. Now they have a huge growth market that’s opened up to them.

IF: Again, explain the importance of Windows on ARM vs. Intel, etc.

JH: It’s huge!

Then he talks about energy dissipation, and that the designs are more elegant. He notes that the D staff backstage is using MacBooks and Airs “because they’re more elegant.”

And note that Steve Ballmer showed off a next gen of Windows running on Tegra 2/ARM. Office, too.

IF: But beyond Windows, what kind of software work has to be done to take advantage of ARM?

JH: Lots of work.

IF: Windows took a decade to catch up last time around. They can’t take this long this time.

JH: Right. That’s why we’re talking about this now, so when next gen of Windows is out, we’ll be ready.

A discussion about how the market shakes out between different chipsets.

JH: Next-gen Windows, by the time it shakes out, I don’t think it will matter what chipset you use if you’re a consumer. Enterprise will still run on x86, I think.

IF: Back to the cool stuff we’re seeing this year at CES, which seemed impossible a few years ago. What will we see in a few years that we can’t imagine now?

JH: Whatever expectation you have for game consoles, PCs, etc. will be “fully met by mobile devices in the next three to four years.”

And in the next three to four years this kind of device will likely exceed your expectations, because the supercomputer will be in the cloud.

IF: More future talk, please. 3-D on the phone?

JH: 3-D on the phone is a foregone conclusion. This kind of glass (on phone) is perfect for 3-D display. And it will work perfectly when you’re touching it. Long term, this device will have much better computer vision, so instead of taking a picture and sending it back, it might analyze the image and send a signal back, to reduce bandwidth.

IF: Except there are all kinds of problems with bandwidth. You had problems with wireless at your demo. Isn’t that a bigger problem going forward?

JH: The carriers finally have real incentive to invest in the pipe, because there’s a reason to use it, with all the hi-def video, etc. So we can take their promises seriously, finally.

Next year every phone will be a 4G phone.

IF: Talk about your fab-less approach to this business.

JH: In 1993, we couldn’t get a fab. We didn’t have a choice. And now ARM has democratized the CPU. It’s a big deal. [Missing the connection here, but perhaps it's my ignorance.]

Okay, that’s it! Thanks.

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