Famed director Peter Jackson, who helmed the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy, has promised to continue his production video blog from the movie set of “The Hobbit,” which is filming in New Zealand.

The man keeps his promise with a new installment that has lots more action.

I read the classic book when I was but a wee lass, so I will be very interested to see how it comes to life.

Here’s the latest vlog:

It’s official: Seven billion people are alive in the world at this moment, a high population point of all time.

Births are obviously outstripping deaths by a little more than two to one.

Here is a really cool site called Worldometers that has the countdown and all kinds of other cool stats, accounting for our little and now more crowded world.

The section on society and media is particularly terrific, showing how many cellphones are being sold, emails sent, tweets posted and, of course, blogs created. Like this one, blink and you will definitely miss it.

And note how much slower new book titles published and televisions sold are in comparison to digital stats.

Facebook, by the way, is now closing on one billion users, sources said — although the official number for the huge social networking site here is 800 million.

As a result, Greystripe, a mobile ad network purchased by ValueClick in April, says that it has seen travel-related mobile ad campaigns increase by nearly 50 percent over the past year.

In a study, it found that the overwhelming majority of iPad owners, or 91 percent, used their device for a travel-related activity. The data was collected from Greystripe’s 971 users on a network of iPhone (including the iPod touch), Android and iPad devices during June.

Specifically, it found that 47 percent of iPad users booked hotel rooms, which seems to coincide with the boom of applications catering to this activity.

I’ve written in the past about how travel companies are flooding the mobile app stores, including Expedia, Kayak, Priceline and even start-ups, like HotelTonight, which will find you a room the night you need it. What’s more, InterContinental Hotels Group, the massive hotel chain that includes Holiday Inn, told me it recorded $10 million in mobile revenues in April, jumping from only $1 million in the same period a year earlier.

Following closely after hotels, Greystripe said 37 percent of iPad owners used the tablet to book a flight; 28 percent have used it to make a restaurant reservation; and 24 percent have used it to rent a car.

Although Greystripe found that applications were not required, in fact, 69 percent of iPad users were more likely to use the mobile Web compared to 49 percent of iPhone and Android users.

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune magazine’s high-profile Silicon Valley reporter, will be penning a book titled “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”

An expansion of a well-read article that Lashinsky wrote for the publication earlier this year, the book will be available on Jan. 18, 2012 from Business Plus, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Lashinsky’s will be the second Apple tome to be coming out that will shed more light inside the workings of Silicon Valley’s most iconic company.

In November, former Time Inc. writer and editor Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography about Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs will be released by Simon & Schuster.

“Steve Jobs” has been written with cooperation from Jobs, who has not done so in the past.

Lashinsky said in an interview today he did not garner Jobs’s help on the book, but did manage to get a deep inside look at the company.

“Doing an unauthorized book is harder,” said Lashinsky. “But what you get is well-reported information, which is outside the message Apple wants to deliver, and there is so much good stuff, this company is worth far more than an article.”

Lashinsky has been a longtime reporter in tech, including covering Apple, a company that is notoriously secretive and difficult to report about.

Still, Lashinsky has written a lot about the maker of the groundbreaking Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad devices, including a piece in 2008 about recently installed CEO Tim Cook, titled “The Genius Behind Steve: Could the Operations Whiz Run The Company Someday?”

Inside Apple will be more about the entire company, which has vaulted from near death only 15 years ago to become one of the most highly valued companies in tech and, in fact, globally.

The publisher promises a lot of insidery facts, including, “how Apple creates killer products, forges intense bonds with consumers, and gets what it wants from suppliers … the lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal, and they should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career or creative endeavor.”

Lashinsky said these are important lessons for others to explore.

“So much of what Apple does stands decades of business teaching on its head, because they just don’t do things the way other companies do,” he said. “The rest of the business world might want to pay attention.”

Indeed, they should.

Let’s face it: Everyone in Silicon Valley — one way or another — fashions themselves as the next Steve Jobs.

And why not? Both the professional and even personal story of the legendary Apple CEO — which will be chronicled in November in a major book — are the stuff of tech legend and envy: Iconic, in charge, decisive, elegant, innovative, phoenix-like and visionary.

And, of course, more than just a little bit terrifying.

So why not Larry Page, too, and why not now?

One issue: By temperament and action — by which I mean genetically hyper-competitive and hammer-time aggressive — he’s been more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has been the Yin to Jobs’ Yang in their deeply interconnected careers over the last decades.

As I wrote before Page took over again as Google’s CEO earlier this year:

After our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

The latest incarnation of that has been Page’s move — bold for now and we’ll-see later — to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which Google announced yesterday.

By all accounts, Page was the key driver of the deal inside Google, where he now reigns firmly.

Although neither Gates nor Jobs has used acquisitions much as a key weapon in their arsenals, the size and scope of the deal is pure Gates: A focused, overwhelming and competitor-scaring display of might that speaks of industry dominance and play-to-destroy aspirations, masking what is also very reactive.

If Page’s doubling down on mobile reminds you a bit of Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum in 1995, that’s because the move-now tone is the same.

And, also, in that it is more than just a little bit sneaky. Case in point: Google’s yammering on about the importance of Motorola’s patents in the deal. While the patent love is true and an important element, bolstering Google’s own weak portfolio, it’s also a bit of a feint by the search giant, which can simply never come out and say what it is actually up to.

Which is to be the dominant and overwhelming player in the mobile market that Google sees as critical to its future.

“The company obviously wants everyone to focus on the patents, but its ambitions are so much larger in mobile,” said one person close to the situation. “So it underplays as it overplays.”

Indeed, in the time I covered Google, it has always been my experience when the search giant insists stringently on one thing, Page and others are playing a more complex version of “Star Trek” three-dimensional chess.

As the New York Times’ DealBook noted correctly:

If there’s any question about Google’s motivation to own a handset maker rather than just a portfolio of patents, consider this: InterDigital, a licensing company that owns some 8,000 wireless patents and has another 10,000 patent applications being processed, has been up for auction. Many industry insiders were sure that if Google were serious about acquiring a portfolio of patents, InterDigital would be its target. The company’s market value is only about $3 billion and it doesn’t come with all the baggage of Motorola’s handset business.

That’s exactly right, because Page’s ambition is about Google playing a big part in the mobile market — which is humanity’s next critical platform in computing — for its interlocked ecosystem of Google products — from its flagship search to social networking via Google+ to Gmail to its latest Google Wallet initiative to Google Maps to Google Voice.

In other words, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it.

At the heart of it is a desire to make and completely control the object at the center of the virtuous circle: The mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, tablet or whatever doodad you might wear around your neck.

In fact, as I also remember from Google’s earliest days, Page did sport a lot of such contraptions back then, such as a communicator of some sort he once joyfully showed off to me that allowed him to reach Brin quickly. Later, it was a kind of pollution sensor that took its place.

My recollection from that time was that Page adored such objects, visibly inspired by the idea of digital devices that delivered a myriad of helpful and smart services to users as they moved around the world.

You know, like an Apple iPhone, the ground-breaking technical achievement that Jobs rendered unto the world less than a decade ago, changing everything.

With Android and Page’s firm backing, Google quickly and smartly jumped partway into that market with its powerful and fast-growing mobile operating system.

Now, like Jobs, I have no doubt Page wants to own and control the whole value chain to solidify what Google started several years ago and which is its best hope to vault into the next era of computing.

It’s a leap that Gates and Microsoft largely failed at, not for lack of trying — something else Page has to have taken note of.

So, perhaps by making things — maybe even beautiful things like Jobs — Page will transform himself from a Gates into a Jobs.

Or, more likely, a little bit of both.

Until that reckoning, here is a terrific video of Spock playing 3D chess with Captain James T. Kirk — and, yes, he does look freakishly like Page here:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

It is actually an old and well known, if striking, photo of Jobs, which has been much used by Apple over the years.

The new publication date for the much anticipated book from Simon & Schuster has also been moved up to November 21.

“Steve Jobs,” which is 448 pages long and is based on dozens of interviews, including the legendary Apple CEO himself, was originally set for March 12, 2012.

All Things Digital can say for certain this time: The iPhone 5 will launch before the book.

From 1999 until 2005, Doug Edwards was director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google, coming to the then-tiny search start-up from a business job at the San Jose Mercury News.

While there, the exec got a front row seat at the birth of what would become one of the most powerful tech companies in Silicon Valley and perhaps the best known digital brand ever for consumers.

While he didn’t kiss-and-tell for a while after leaving, Edwards said he could not get his experience there out of his brain, so he finally decided to write it all down in a book that just came out to pretty decent reviews.

And, indeed, “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59″ is a pretty fair rendition of those times and the insane pace of what it is like to be at a rocket ship of a start-up.

It also includes a story I had long forgotten, when current CEO Larry Page asked me — I covered Google at the time for The Wall Street Journal — to help pen its famous investor essay for its 2004 IPO. I declined and he got another journalist to do it, but Edwards got it right.

Here’s my video interview with Edwards, as well as a video he shot in 1999 of Google’s TGIF all-hands meeting, the last time Page was CEO (he’s back again, of course):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110727/xoogler-doug-edwards-talks-about-new-book-on-his-time-at-the-search-borg-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110618/viral-video-okay-3d-might-actually-work-in-the-last-harry-potter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110618/viral-video-okay-3d-might-actually-work-in-the-last-harry-potter/#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 02:32:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=88162

Here’s the second trailer for the last movie in the terrific “Harry Potter” series.

It’s also the first of the films to be presented in 3-D, which has become a much abused technology by Hollywood.

Such a bow to a dubious trend at the very end kind of depressed me, since “Harry Potter” creator, J.K. Rowling, has been so strict in keeping the production of the movie in line with her books.

But looking at this video for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” which opens July 15, it looks like it might be tremendous in 3-D, and a fitting end to the cycle.

Judge for yourself (and check out the first trailer here):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110618/viral-video-okay-3d-might-actually-work-in-the-last-harry-potter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110616/yes-thats-activisions-bobby-kotick-in-moneyball-movie-trailer/ http://allthingsd.com/20110616/yes-thats-activisions-bobby-kotick-in-moneyball-movie-trailer/#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:37:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=87775

In a surprise cameo, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has gone Hollywood, appearing in a new trailer for the movie “Moneyball.”

Based on the excellent Michael Lewis book about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its quirky general manager Billy Beane, who is played by Brad Pitt, Kotick is apparently playing its owner.

Kotick seems to do a pretty good job as a sports mogul, which is not much different than his one as a gaming mogul. And, if it works out as it seems it will, a social networking mogul as a possible new owner of Myspace.

Here’s the video of the trailer for the film, which comes out in September, with Kotick:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110616/yes-thats-activisions-bobby-kotick-in-moneyball-movie-trailer/feed/ 0