But the question of just how compelling the service will be long term remains to be seen. Bradley Horowitz, the project manager for Google+, joins the AsiaD stage to talk about where things are headed.

Peter Kafka: So what is Google+?

Bradley Horowitz: “It’s more than a product. It’s a project.”

That means it will take longer and be bigger than a typical product.

Kafka: The view outside of Google is that it’s the company’s response to Facebook.

Horowitz: “There are parts of Google+ that will look very familiar” to people who have used social networks. But other parts are very different, he said.

5:03 pm: Kafka: When will regular people use it?

Horowitz, to Peter: Are you a regular person?

Kafka: No.

Horowitz: Well, we have 40 million users; we’ve reached beyond the early adopters.

It’s open to everyone now, and that’s only been the case for a couple of weeks.

Kafka: But why would you want to?

Horowitz talks about Hangouts, the group chatting feature.

5:04 pm: One of the lessons Bradley said Google has learned is that people want different levels of privacy and relations.

5:07 pm: We are just getting started, Horowitz said, adding the project is just getting started.

He quotes his boss, saying that the company has shipped the “plus.”

“We have yet to ship the ‘Google,’” which brings the entire company’s products into the service.

Horowitz also notes that most Google services actually know relatively little about their users.

“Everything gets better when we know who our users are.”

Kafka: Do people really want a different relationship with Google?

Horowitz: “I think provisionally. They have to have a good value return. They don’t want to do it for the sake of Google. They want to be able to manage it.”

It needs an incognito mode as well.

5:10 pm: Isn’t setting up Google+ kind of a pain?

Horowitz: It was a big gamble on Google’s part, he said.

“No one wakes up and says I want to segment my life into circles,” Horowitz said. However, he said that the company put one of its best designers, Andy Hertzfeld (of early Mac fame), on the project.

5:11 pm: What did you do right and wrong with Buzz?

Horowitz: Buzz was in the older model of Google, its bottoms-up, let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom mode. Now the company is trying to take its best flowers and make a bouquet.

I think we are doing less throwing things at the wall.

People are aligning around fewer efforts. It’s a very healthy thing for this company.

5:13 pm: Are you saying goodbye to 20 percent time, then? (The idea that Google employees can spend 20 percent of their time doing whatever they want.)

Horowitz: I think 20 percent time still exists. What does change is a higher bar for what we are going to put to market, sort of an editing function.

5:14 pm: Kafka asks, under that new model, would Google TV have even come to market?

“I can’t specifically answer that,” Horowitz said. “I’m not close enough to Google TV.”

5:15 pm: Expect a lot of social influence on search. Some 20 different projects aimed at making search more related to who is doing the searching.

“The opportunity to bring social into search is huge,” Horowitz said.

5:18 pm: About that memo — the Google+ critique that was supposed to be internal that was made public.

Horowitz: “That wasn’t a great day. My heart sank when I read that.”

Kafka: Because it was aired publicly or because it was right?

Horowitz: “I think the tone of the post mostly was disheartening.”

There were elements of validity, he said. But there were also areas where that Google employee, who doesn’t work on Google+, was in the dark, he said.

“We’re moving at light speed. We’ve been in the market for 120 days.”

That said, Google is in no rush to build its user base, Horowitz said.

5:22 pm: You are going to allow pseudonyms now. Why?

There are many reasons. “Those who have defended that use case have done so with great passion.”

The company wants to open to other groups, including minors and those Google Apps customers that are the businesses actually paying Google money.

“We want them in and we’ll fix that.”

Brands, too, have been told to wait.

“We kicked out Nike and Coca-Cola” not because we didn’t want them, but because we want to do that in the right way.

At the same time, Horowitz said, they don’t want to make it too easy for bad actors.

5:25 pm: Kafka: Why did you go from Yahoo to Google?

Horowitz: I was going to become a venture capitalist.

“They (Google) sort of talked me off the ledge,” Horowitz said.

Every myth you hear about Google is grounded in reality, both good and bad. Within weeks it was clear to me why they were as successful as they are.

5:27 pm: How would you fix Yahoo?

Horowitz: “Wow. I am really ill-qualified to answer that.”

Kafka: You are kind of qualified.

Horowitz said he actually was talking with some other ex-Googlers and they noted that Yahoo is not actually a struggling company.

They have brand and market position. “What’s missing is relevance.” They need to hire good people and take some risks.

It would be a shame if the strategy is just milking the current audience, he said.

“They can do a lot more than that, and I hope they do.”

5:29 pm: Q and A. What about Google+ as a platform?

Horowitz: We have thought about platform from the inception. It’s not an afterthought. This has been part of the strategy from Day One.

We don’t want platform to be the Wild West, and we want to keep the stream useful. “We don’t want to repeat the sins of previous generations.”

I don’t think it means hand-curation and approval processes.

“We are getting enough signal within the system that things can self-correct.”

Another audience question. Sure, but where is the Google API? When are we going to see it actually be a platform?

Horowitz: I love the fact that 120 days after launch there are demands that we build a platform. “That’s a champagne problem.”

Over time, he said, there will be more opportunity. “It’s not far off.”

There’s a lot on the agenda, including letting in Google Apps customers, minors and those using pseudonyms in addition to opening it up more to developers. All are on the agenda, he said.

Horowitz said that is part of why the company is focusing more.

“We would rather do fewer things well than tend to a thousand flowers with equal attention,” he said.

5:36 pm: Google is still more open than most companies when it comes to empowering workers’ creativity. “I still think there is a tremendous amount of Google culture that will never change.”

5:37 pm: Kafka: Is this all Larry’s influence?

My experience is that Larry is a consummate product-oriented leader. “It’s thrilling. It feels like the company is coordinated in a way that I have never seen. I could not be more impressed with Larry as CEO. I didn’t expect this level of change in the company culture.”

So who is using Google+?

Horowitz said they aren’t going into detail, but there are 41 supported languages. “There’s a higher concentration in the U.S.” Trying to get local content, including a popular Hong Kong pop singer.

Bradley Horowitz Session Photos

So why Asia? It seemed the most obvious choice for us, as we looked at the global landscape for tech. While the whole world has now been engulfed in the powerful trends of digitalization, perhaps nowhere else has been as important a place for understanding where it is headed next than this region, which is home to companies critical to the next phase of innovation.

There’s no question that Silicon Valley, which has been the base for most of the key players — such as Google, Apple, Facebook and more — has driven the digital revolution over the past decade. But as we look out onto what’s to come, it’s clear to us and many others that what’s coming next and even the next great company might be born here.

That’s why we have created a conference that mixes both important speakers from U.S. tech and also from all over Asia.

Given that smartphones are in ascendance globally, having Andy Rubin, who runs Google’s Android efforts, is a no-brainer. The longtime mobile exec is at the top of an aggressive push by the Internet giant to dominate the important sector across the world.

Speaking of domination, Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma efforts to make the company a powerhouse in China and elsewhere are hard to ignore. His recent tussle and interest in Yahoo, as he has built a wide-ranging Internet giant, should make for an interesting interview.

Expect a deep dive into what makes the future Web work with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, who is someone breaking new ground as he tears down old digital paradigms. With Twitter, Dorsey redefined the real-time world and how the virtual one communicates; with Square, he is upending the payments arena.

Nvidia is not only a pioneer of graphics chips, but now its processors are widely used in the latest mobile devices. That’s why its founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a lot to say about the future of the fastest-growing sector of computing, from smartphones to tablets and whatever’s next.

Asus Chairman Jonney Shih has presided over the Taiwanese tech giant since the early 1990s. Most recently, the company pioneered the netbook market and is now plunging deeply into the tablet business, making Shih perfect to discuss these key issues in Asia and around the world.

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance in tech, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use?

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind-Google-and-Apple job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia, and Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

We also felt that it was important to hear from Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including: Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site; former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who is running the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online; and David Goldberg, who is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company.

Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, who will appear with the Internet giant’s Asia head Rose Tsou, needs little introduction. For all of the noise around the company these days, Yahoo has a huge footprint in the region, maintains a big e-commerce business there and holds massive stakes in key firms, such as Yahoo Japan and China’s Alibaba.

And so does LivingSocial, whose CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy, who will appear along with founders of two of its Asian units, Daniel Shin and Paul Srivorakul, which the daily deals site just bought as part of its aggressive move into Asia.

Because of Samsung’s increasing importance as a global player in smartphones and tablets, it was natural to invite Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, who heads global product strategy for the Korean giant’s mobile business. That has surged in the past year to make Samsung a leader in Android-based phones and tablets, and a significant challenger to Apple.

Also key in the mobile arena is Cher Wang, chairman of HTC, the important and innovative handset and tablet maker which has been a key player in Android’s success story. Add to that HTC buying an operating system, which would further strengthen its hand in the competitive market, and it’s clear it is in a pole position on the critical mobile market going forward.

Finally, we are also glad to bring back Al Gore, who had a memorable interview at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006. The former VP and Nobel Peace Prize winner is now chairman of Current TV and also continues as a prominent environmental activist. He is also on the board of Apple, while also being a senior adviser to Google, as well as a partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins.

In total, along with some very cool demos to show off, it’s going to be an exciting AsiaD, and we are thrilled most of all to welcome our first international audience. So get ready for a busy three days here and we hope you will like what we have to show you.

“We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+,” Google VP Product Bradley Horowitz wrote today in an announcement post on the Google Blog.

Old Buzz content will continue to be viewable on users’ Google profiles, Horowitz said, and users can export their data before Buzz becomes unavailable. When does that happen? “In a few weeks.”

Google is also shutting down a couple more social products — Jaiku and iGoogle social features — as well as Code Search and a program that gives academic researchers API access to Google search results. And as of today the Google Labs site will no longer be available.

The moves come as part of a continued housecleaning effort under CEO Larry Page, which has included shutting down other social products like Slide and Aardvark, as well as many experimental projects.

In the larger social picture, Google is continuing to commit resources and focus to Google+, which now has 40 million registered users. “We are absolutely in a feature race,” Horowitz told us earlier this week.

Update: Horowitz elaborated in a personal Google+ post,

What did we learn from Buzz? Plenty. We learned privacy is not a feature… it is foundational to the product. And this awareness gave us the resolve to design privacy in from the very beginning, which led to Circles for sharing the right information with the right people, as well as transparency around which parts of your profile can be seen by whom. We also learned how compelling it is to have meaningful conversations with interesting people, which we’re happy to see happening all the time in Google+.

Google+ users have uploaded more than 3.4 billion photos to the service so far.

“People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!” Google CEO Larry Page exclaimed in a press release statement.

“It’s still incredibly early days,” Page added on a call with investors on Thursday, while complimenting the Google+ team for cranking out features. “Our goal is far bigger than the feature launches themselves.”

Page said he wants to provide an “automagical” experience across Google, by “baking identity and sharing into all of our products so we build a real relationship with our users.”

In other words, he added, “We shipped the +, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.”

See also: our interview with Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz about plans and expectations for the project.

Google+ VP of Product Bradley Horowitz replied in an interview yesterday: “We will compete on features — including simplicity. We are absolutely in a feature race, and I think we will run that race.”

Technology companies tend to talk about how innovative and incomparable their strategies are, so that’s a pretty rare admission.

Horowitz added, “If I had to say what fraction of Google+ is launched right now, we’ve just got the very basic foundation in place. Profiles, circle editor and stream, that’s sort of the minimum viable set of features that you need to start doing interesting things.”

I talked to Horowitz in advance of his appearance at our AsiaD conference next week, held Oct. 19-21 in Hong Kong. He said to expect new stuff to be announced there. In fact, he said to expect new features to launch every week through the end of this year — for instance, see today’s real-time search announcement.

As for whether Google+ usage is fluctuating or falling, as many watchers have speculated, Horowitz brushed them aside, saying external measurements can’t grasp the “dark matter” of Google+.

This dark matter consists of private sharing, which continues to account for two-thirds of all Google+ activity. In fact, Horowitz said, that number is “trending slightly up.”

Horowitz asked for observers to have a little patience while Google+ is being built, saying the project was never intended for such a large audience or so much scrutiny at this stage.

Shortly after I spoke with Horowitz at Google’s campus yesterday, Google engineer Steve Yegge published a scathing critique of Google’s lack of a platform strategy that was particularly hard on Google+, calling it “a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.” Yegge later said the post was intended for internal eyes only, but in addition to critiquing Google+, he apparently also had a bit of trouble using the site, and accidentally posted his manifesto on his public Google+ page. Google declined to comment on Yegge’s post.

Since Yegge’s critique wasn’t out when I visited Google yesterday, I wasn’t able to ask Horowitz what he thought of it, but his responses to my various questions might help fill in the gaps. First, Horowitz does think Google+ is a larger platform play rather than just a product, in that it will be a layer on top of all of Google’s products. And second, his team severely “underestimated the appetite for this product,” and it is currently rushing to push out all sorts of things users are asking for, as well as other stuff they haven’t anticipated.

I’m not sure those answers would suffice for Yegge, who would have preferred that Google have invited developers to be part of Google+ from the beginning, so that it could reap the benefits of being a service-oriented platform, as Amazon has through its Amazon Web Services for other developers.

Still, Yegge’s key examples of platform companies, Facebook and Amazon, only built their platforms after they had success with their own products — a social network and an e-commerce site. While some companies, like Foursquare, build their own products on top of their APIs, the usual pattern is product first, platform later.

Anyways, enough with a phantom argument between two people who work at the same company!

In my interview with Horowitz yesterday, I asked whether he thinks people are using Google+ because it’s an alternative to other social networks with a more precise structure for sharing.

“I think in the early going there was a lot of looking for an alternative,” Horowitz replied. “But I think increasingly the people who are using Google+ are the people using Google. They’re not looking for an alternative to anything, they’re looking for a better experience on Google.”

This idea of Google+ as a utility might be expressed as a button on Google Maps that helps a user send directions to attendees of a party, Horowitz said.

So does that make Google+ just a utility on top of the Google products people already use?

“That’s one rendering of it,” said Horowitz. “But there’s a stream, there’s a circle, a profile, there’s Hangouts, there’s games. It is both a means of communication and a destination.”

And then there was Schiller and Gore.

That would be Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller and former Vice President Al Gore, who round out the stellar list of speakers at our upcoming AsiaD conference.

Taking place from Oct. 19 to 21 in Hong Kong, the lineup is already impressive, with a mix of speakers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, as well as Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The previously announced speakers include: Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; Asus Chairman Jonney Shih; Sony president and second-in-command Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai; Google+ guru Bradley Horowitz; Hollywood big shot Peter Chernin; Huawei’s North American R&D head John Roese; Microsoft’s Windows Phone head Andy Lees; and a panel of Silicon Valley start-up stars — Joyus’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, SurveyMonkey’s Dave Goldberg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Asia head Rose Tsou; LivingSocial’s Tim O’Shaughnessy, along with founders of two of its Asian units, Daniel Shin and Paul Srivorakul; Samsung mobile head Dr. Won-Pyo Hong; HTC CEO Peter Chou, who replaces Chairwoman Cher Wang.

Schiller, who reports to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook (and before that, Steve Jobs) is a member of the executive team of the tech icon, where he has worked for 17 years. He is responsible for a swath of Apple’s outward-facing businesses, including product marketing, developer relations and business marketing.

Today, in fact, he was onstage at Apple’s iPhone event, outlining some of its new product offerings. In addition, Apple just opened its first retail store in Hong Kong.

Gore, who had a memorable interview at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006, needs little introduction. The former VP and Nobel Peace Prize winner is now chairman of Current TV and also continues as a prominent environmental activist.

Gore is on the board of Apple, while also being a senior adviser to Google, which is a neat trick. At the same time, he is a partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a partnership that is focused on sustainable investing.

And, as most people know, he knows a thing or two about the Internet.

Walt Mossberg and I could not think of two better people to add to the lineup we have for AsiaD, which has very few seats left.

See you in China in two weeks!

With AsiaD just a little over a month away, Walt Mossberg and I are adding even more speakers to the list, for what we hope will be an awesome event in Hong Kong.

Taking place from Oct. 19 to 21, the conference lineup is already impressive, with a mix of speakers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, as well as Silicon Valley and more.

The previously announced speakers include: Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; Asus Chairman Jonney Shih; Sony president and second-in-command Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai; Google+ guru Bradley Horowitz; Hollywood big shot Peter Chernin; Huawei’s North American R&D head John Roese; Microsoft’s Windows Phone head Andy Lees; and a panel of start-up stars — Joyus’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, SurveyMonkey’s Dave Goldberg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Now, to add to the kitty:

Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, who will appear with the Internet giant’s Asia head Rose Tsou. For all of the noise around the company these days, Yahoo has a huge footprint in the region, maintains a big e-commerce business there and holds massive stakes in key firms, such as Yahoo Japan and China’s Alibaba. One of Yahoo’s first big investments came from Asian investor Masa Son, in fact, way back when.

Also on deck is LivingSocial’s CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy, who will appear with Daniel Shin, the CEO and co-founder of South Korea’s Ticket Monster, which the daily deals site just bought as part of its aggressive move into Asia. Competing there with its U.S. rival Groupon, as well as a myriad of local social buying services, the market is a tough one.

Because of Samsung’s increasing importance as a global player in smartphones and tablets, we thought it was important to have Dr. Won-Pyo Hong. He heads global product strategy for Samsung’s mobile business, which has surged in the past year to make the Korean tech giant a leader in Android-based phones and tablets, and a significant challenger to Apple.

Also key in the mobile arena is Cher Wang, the chairwoman of three Taiwan companies, including HTC, the important and innovative handset and tablet maker which has been a key player in Android’s success story. But just this week she talked about the possibility of HTC buying an operating system, which would further strengthen its hand in the competitive market.

That’s it for now, but we will have more big names to come, as well as some pretty cool demos we will be putting onstage at AsiaD. So stay tuned.

In particular, what should be frightening is that Google is attempting to break today’s 30 percent cut that has become standard across both Facebook and Apple.

In a video interview with reporters, Google+ Games Product Manager Punit Soni explained that initially Google will share 95 percent of the revenue from virtual goods sold with the developers and keep only five percent for itself.

That confirms what I originally reported hearing from sources last month.

Soni said it could change in the future, but pricing today will be based on the company’s new in-app payments platform, which charges five percent for microtransactions on the Web (unlike the 30 percent Google charges on Android).

While it’s obvious how this might make Facebook uncomfortable, it should also worry Apple, if there’s enough pressure from developers to shift the standard to something less rich.

Soni also said today that Google is interested in allowing games to be played cross-platform, meaning a person could pause their game on the Web and then pick back up in the same place on their phone.

“There’s nothing to announce today, but it’s something we are looking at,” he added.

Of the 16 games that were released by 10 developers today, one of them was developed in HTML5. The rest were built in Flash. The industry has high hopes for HTML5 unifying both the Web and mobile, by making it possible for software to be written once and run across multiple devices.

If Google+ games could run through the browser on the iPhone or iPad, it could undercut Apple on its own device.

In that scenario, of course, consumers would have to find a compelling reason to switch from playing games that are downloaded through the App Store to playing games through a Google+ experience. Regardless, it should be comforting to developers who are uneasy with the control that either Apple or Facebook has from time to time.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, also dropped in to the “hangout” session with reporters to give his thoughts on expanding into games.

“We don’t consider ourselves experts at making compelling games, but we can bring a lot to the party,” he said. “There were some internal debates about whether Google was well-suited to have games in our repertoire and what is the value of games to the users. There’s tremendous value for users. They provide a way for people to connect, discover and interact with each other … We don’t see games contrary to our mission, or a diversion. We see them as being core.”

After our grand tour of Asia last week — with stops in Korea and Japan — it seems like a perfect time to update the speaker list for our upcoming AsiaD conference in Hong Kong in October.

As Walt Mossberg and I said, we are trying to mix both U.S.-based speakers with a pan-Asian selection of speakers from across the region, and the new additions are just that.

For the international confab — this one will be held Oct. 19-21 — we’ve already announced a great lineup, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; and Asus Chairman Jonny Shih.

Now, to add to that terrific lineup:

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. In that role, the dynamic exec is at the nexus of the Japanese company’s efforts around tablets, smartphones, gaming and more. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance over the arena, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use? It’s an important question and Horowitz’s job No. 1.

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android far in the lead, Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. The former top News Corp. exec is now a movie producer — his first effort, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” is a big hit. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. The former CTO of Nortel, he’s heading up global development of Huawei’s cloud services for both businesses and consumers. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there is no denying that it has been a golden time for Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including:

Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site that recently got a huge dose of funding and an equally large amount of controversy. How Airbnb can take the company to the next level, including across the world, while dealing with the kinds of challenges the small management team has to face, will be an interesting topic for discussion.

After stints as president of Asia Pacific and Latin America operations at Google and co-founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is trying her hand at a small start-up again. She’ll talk about how the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online, plans to expand globally.

Finally, longtime tech exec David Goldberg is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company. With stints as founder of music site Launch Media, which was bought by Yahoo, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital, he is the perfect person to explain what it’s like being an entrepreneur today in Silicon Valley.

We have even more speakers for AsiaD we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so get ready for what’s next.

Google+ kingpin Bradley Horowitz has joined the board of Wordnik, which has also just raised another round of funding of $8 million.

It’s the first board seat ever for Horowitz, who has been a bit busy of late launching the search giant’s first successful social networking product.

Wordnik, which claims to have the word’s most complete map of the language you are currently reading, was founded by Erin McKean, the former editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

On its Web site, Wordnik notes it has “billions of words, 965,125,300 example sentences, 6,690,770 unique words, 223,693 comments, 168,573 tags, 121,180 pronunciations, 61,144 favorites and 936,294 words in 30,038 lists created by 70,054 Wordniks.”

Its grand aim is to be the company that powers definitions and context for publishers of all kinds around the Web — from blogs to articles to even tweets — much as a mapping company might render navigational information.

The aim of owning the world’s largest word graph is ambitious and innovative, although the effort to create a viable business out of it all will be its next job. Wordnik now has 18 employees at its San Mateo, Calif., HQ.

McKean gave a demo of its Smartwords feature at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in 2010, after it had earlier raised $4.8 million from a number of venture firms and other angel investors.

Here’s an interview I did with McKean, Horowitz and Wordnik CEO Joe Hyrkin, who came on board in March, this weekend outside Buck’s in Woodside, as well as the video of the D8 demo of Wordnik:

And here is the official press release about the new funding and Horowitz appointment:

BRADLEY HOROWITZ NAMED TO WORDNIK BOARD;
WORDNIK RAISES $8 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING

Horowitz Accepts First Board Appointment; New and Existing Investors Support Wordnik as it Takes Innovative Word/Context Discovery Capability to the Marketplace

SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 25, 2011 – Wordnik, maker of the most innovative word navigation system, today announced that Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google and longtime Silicon Valley executive, would join its board of directors. This is Horowitz’s first board appointment.

In addition, Wordnik has raised $8 million in its third round of venture capital funding, led by new investor Lucas Venture Group. Mohr Davidow Ventures, FLOODGATE, Baseline Ventures, Roger McNamee and additional private investors also participated in this round, which is earmarked to fund strategic growth as Wordnik builds out a range of new product and service offerings. This Series C investment brings Wordnik’s total funding to $12.8 million.

One of the most highly respected executives in the high-tech industry, Bradley Horowitz oversees product design for Google’s social and communications efforts including Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, and the recently launched Google+ Project. Before joining Google, Horowitz led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

“I’ve devoted my career to finding and working on innovative technologies,” said Horowitz. “In accepting my first Board appointment, I now have the opportunity to help guide Wordnik, a company that started with an incredibly innovative word navigation system, as it continues to offer deeper access to discovery and meaning across digital text. I know it will be a very rewarding experience.”

“Wordnik has changed the way consumers discover and interact with words by providing the most relevant context and meaning available anywhere,” said Joe Hyrkin, CEO of Wordnik. “With this investment from our longtime VC partners and strengthened by the addition of Bradley Horowitz to our board, we enter an exciting new phase for the company, building out our core technology and creating new leveraged offerings for a wide variety of content and commerce partners. Bradley brings us both great product insight and industry expertise, and will work with our founders, Erin McKean and Tony Tam, on future innovation.”

Wordnik was launched in 2008 with the mission to help people unlock the value of words and phrases and to discover what information is most personally meaningful. Wordnik’s technology provides additional access to content and context from a wide range of sources including the world’s most respected dictionaries, Wordnik users, and from unexpected places like Twitter and Flickr.

“Wordnik.com has offered consumers an easy way to gain more meaning and deeper context around words – kind of like a ‘GPS for words,’” said Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures. “The next frontier for Wordnik is to bring the power of Wordnik to a wide range of publishers and other content providers by providing the most relevant discovery experience for their users. We think Wordnik will quickly establish itself as a valuable asset to its business partners, in addition to its continuing as an exceptional consumer site.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110725/googles-horowitz-joins-board-of-wordnik-as-online-dictionary-site-garners-8m-more-in-funding-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110705/google-exec-is-now-really-plus-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20110705/google-exec-is-now-really-plus-one/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 04:01:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=94791 Usually, I don’t fall for this kind of stuff, but the posting on Google+ by one of the key execs involved in its recent launch, Bradley Horowitz, is too adorkable to resist.

In a post tonight, he announced his engagement to fellow Google exec Irene Au, complete with a photo of the ring in a pretty dish. Horowitz asked her last week in Paris.

Both also worked at Yahoo.

In the status update — which begins “She said yes!” — Horowitz noted, “Having gotten through the trivial details of launching Google+ (!), I recently turned my attention to more important matters…”

And, in an email to me about it, Horowitz wrote (judiciously for both Google and Au): “And just to be clear…I got her *permission* to make it public. (So I’m off to a good start, eh?)”

Like I said, adorkable.

Your move, Facebook!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110705/google-exec-is-now-really-plus-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110628/google-execs-explain-why-they-launched-google-now-before-its-ready/ http://allthingsd.com/20110628/google-execs-explain-why-they-launched-google-now-before-its-ready/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:32:32 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=92338 Google this morning press-launched a set of in-progress social products that people have been waiting to see for a long time. But most people are only getting the opportunity submit their email addresses for updates about Google+.

Even many of those promised first-day access, like the journalists at AllThingsD, waited hours for the company to untangle its “limited field trial” access process. I just corresponded with a Google PR person who hasn’t been able to get in yet himself. You call that a launch?

I have to wonder, why now? Why create any more buildup for something that’s not ready yet? If it’s not all ready to go, doesn’t this just seem like a mess of incoherent features? That’s what I asked Google+ honchos Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, who are midway through this unlaunchiest of launch days.

They essentially replied that they were at a point in development where they needed to get a product out to real users, and real users would leak the product to the press, so they had to mount a PR offensive.

Gundotra and Horowitz also helped untangle for me some of rationale and logistics for the product that didn’t come through from the cutesy videos and grand theories of privacy and sharing in their blog post and interviews today.

One thing I hadn’t grokked earlier is the somewhat awkward Google+ name, which Horowitz said is meant to signify how it will impact every Google product by making them socially compatible: “It’s almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine,” he said.

Horowitz and Gundotra explain what that the heck that means in a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

AllThingsD: Why launch now when you’re not really launching?

Bradley Horowitz: I think we learned a lot from [previous much-maligned social product] Buzz and it has very much informed the product that we’re moving forward. People care deeply about their online presence and representation and a lot of what we’ve built conveys that. One of the things we’ve learned from Buzz is that putting a product to market teaches you a lot of things you cannot learn from testing. I believe we’ve exhausted what we can learn from internal testing and so we’ll now expose to a limited number of users.

What kind of demand are you hoping for?

Horowitz: Demand is interesting when we’re capping growth artificially through this invite stage. At this point we don’t have the intention of generating pent-up demand, mostly we’re in a learning phase.

But isn’t that what a press launch does — generate demand?

Horowitz: There’s no way that we could have tested this that doesn’t become a story. We’re not proactively marketing this. Right now if users come it’s a relatively frustrating experience, they’re told to go away. The intent is to discuss our motivation so people understand where we’re headed.

What is the hook that gets people to incorporate this into their daily lives?

Vic Gundotra: : We looked at how people share and we looked at the tools available to them and we saw this huge missing capability. [Here he goes into the comparison of Circles with Facebook without naming it; you can get this from other coverage around the Web so I'm leaving it out here.]

[continued] You’re using these services already; you’re using Google maps, you use Google search, you use YouTube, you might be using Android or Chrome. So we’re going to continue to make Google dramatically better and reward you for spending the few minutes it takes to say this is my family, these are my real friends. And we think the process of creating circles is a breakthrough. People don’t like cumbersome processes.

Is this a set of features or is it a whole package?

Horowitz: We’re calling this the Google+ project for a reason. It’s not a monolithic product. We’ve had products before: Blogger is a product, Orkut is a product, Buzz is a product. This is a project and when we say “project” we mean it’s much broader in scope. This is something that will impact Google.

That’s why it’s Google+, almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine.

Similarly, it’s much longer in timeframe. There are features and foundational elements that we’re dropping today: things like the stream, the rich profile, the Circle editor, those are core to everything that will come next and those are new.

But you’ll see increasingly that this is about making these suite of Google services coherent and better. So when you’re on maps and you want to share driving directions, you don’t have to do it in a different way, it utilizes common infrastructure, common gestures.

We already have literally billions of users using these services at Google with the inefficiencies we have today, and we think this will delight these uses and create a common way for them to connect to other people and ultimately on the net.

Why did you do so much self-flagellation about being late to social in the various interviews you did around this announcement? Why did you feel like you had to convey that level of humility?

Gundotra: It’s just sincere. I don’t think it’s anything more than that. We do have a mission that we’ve been working on for a long time: organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and available.

And when you look at the web today it’s obvious it’s not just about pages, it’s about people. It’s not just about information, it’s about what individuals are doing. So I think we have to do that in a coherent way. We think there’s just tremendous room to do great stuff.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110628/google-execs-explain-why-they-launched-google-now-before-its-ready/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:00:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5851 This weekend I spent some time reading Steven Levy’s “In the Plex,” an account of the history of Google based on Levy’s deep embedding within the company (see Kara’s video interview with Levy from last week). The book as a whole is captivating, so I thought it might be worth highlighting a couple anecdotes about internal Google conflicts that previously never saw the light of day.

Levy relates that Sundar Pichai (the recently appointed SVP of Chrome who has been leading Google’s software projects for years) spiked Google’s GDrive storage service just prior to launch because he thought it was out of line with the cloud-based future. (Both Pichai and GDrive leader Bradley Horowitz spoke to Levy directly for his book.)

Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”

“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”

…Eventually they won people over by a logical argument–that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

In another longer section, Levy describes how Google product manager Wesley Chan, who had pushed for the company’s GrandCentral acquisition and was leading development on Google Voice, concocted and executed a plan to block Google from buying Skype, which it was seriously considering. (The timing and order of these events isn’t made explicit, which is a recurring issue through the book, but I’m a niggler for those details.)

Chan apparently bragged directly to Levy about his machinations:

With [Salar Kamangar and Sergey Brin] on board, Chan devised a plan to kill the Skype purchase. As he later described it, his scheme involved “laying grenades” at the executive meeting where the purchase was up for approval. Chan tricked the business development executive who was pushing the acquisition into thinking that he was in favor of the deal: he had even prepared a PowerPoint presentation with all the reasons Google should buy Skype. Chan says that halfway through the presentation, though, the trap sprang. Brin suddenly began asking questions that the deck didn’t address. “Who’s going to run this?” he demanded. “Not me,” said Kamangar. Craig Walker said he had two kids in school and wasn’t about to make regular runs to Eastern Europe. “What are the regulatory risks?” A lawyer said it might take months to get approval. Finally, Brin looked at Chan and asked why Google would want to take the risk to begin with. Chan dropped his defense entirely and began explaining why Google had no need for Skype.

“At that point,” recalls Chan, “Sergey gets up and says, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen.’ And Eric [Schmidt] gets up and walks out of the room. The deal’s off.”

Ruthless! Which of your darlings have you killed today?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/feed/ 19 http://allthingsd.com/20101119/the-landscape-around-googles-hiring-binge/ http://allthingsd.com/20101119/the-landscape-around-googles-hiring-binge/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:38:35 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=605 After a year or two of stagnancy, the Google employee count is growing rapidly again. But the growth spurt and retention efforts seem forced, and unlikely to be the perfect formula to keep the company at the top of the Web heap, despite its clout, market share and massive revenue. Part of the problem is that the company’s executives seem out of touch with how the Web is evolving.

The search giant has 2,076 job openings, as tabulated in a story by Reuters last night. It has acquired more than 20 start-ups this year, it’s giving all employees a 10 percent raise and it’s still adding search market share–even if only measured in tenths of percentage points. The company is even building a new 1.2-million-square-foot corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif., that is to include housing. Google now has more than 23,000 employees. It’s currently adding about 100 people per week, said a source.

But it’s an awkward time at Google, where a group of employees can leave, create a start-up and come back two years later through an acquisition with $50 million in their pockets. And the stories about competitive hiring wars with Facebook just keep getting more fantastical.

According to a source, a Google engineer recently ended a counteroffer war with Facebook by accepting $6 million worth of Google stock to keep her job there. Apparently she was not in a senior role at Google, but part of what made her so coveted was the fact she’s a female engineer. And this was Google’s second counteroffer after she had already told them she was going to Facebook.

At this point, Facebook (narrowly) has fewer employees than Google has job openings.

Google needs to find a way to foster its employees’ entrepreneurial desires and talents. The promise of exponentially growing stock options versus a simple raise still tempts many people.

Part of why Google needs to “get social” so badly isn’t just on a product or market level, but to impress its own employees. At a place where the top management is firmly ensconced and immutable, younger employees, especially, say they are turned off by their bosses’ lack of social media savviness on a personal level. It’s clear that tomorrow’s tech leaders are already blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking, so why are today’s leaders still resisting?

Here’s a quick tally (tell me if I’m getting any of these wrong): Eric Schmidt has a Twitter account that he updates every week or two, mostly to promote Google stuff. Sergey Brin’s last blog post and Tweet were both in January. Larry Page doesn’t seem to do much of anything personal or professional online; there’s not even a LinkedIn account or a Google Profile that I can see. Marissa Mayer seems to be the most active high-profile Google exec on Twitter, and actually responds to people there, as well as syndicates some Foursquare updates. As for the folks leading Google’s social stuff: Vic Gundotra’s last Tweet was in May. Bradley Horowitz isn’t blogging much anymore, and his last Tweet was a month ago.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101119/the-landscape-around-googles-hiring-binge/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20100209/google-buzz-adds-social-networking-features-to-gmail/ http://allthingsd.com/20100209/google-buzz-adds-social-networking-features-to-gmail/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:27:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=34520 Can a microblogging twist on Gmail raise Google’s profile in social networking? We’ll soon find out. At an event at company headquarters today, Google announced Google Buzz, a new Twitteresque status update system for the email service that will allow users to share their everyday mundanities and inanities and follow those of selected contacts.

“A Google approach to sharing,” Buzz is designed to, in the words of Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management, “find the signal in the social networking noise.”

The service exists within Gmail and promises to bring the social network that Google (GOOG) says always existed beneath the email service to the surface.

“The stream of social messages has become a torrent,” said Horowitz. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Hence, Buzz.

Buzz taps into the torrent via the sort of feature set you’d expect: auto-following, which turns Gmail contact lists into social networks (which seems to me a horrifically bad idea; Like most folks, I imagine I have quite a few contacts I absolutely do NOT want to included in my social network); public and private sharing options; support of the “@ reply” feature popularized by Twitter; and a feature called “Recommended Buzz” that allows users to endorse updates they enjoy. The service also strives to make it easy to enhance those updates with content from other sites–Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and, yes, Twitter (no Facebook, though–yet).

Buzz, which launches Tuesday, is closely tied to Google’s mobile ambitions. It will debut in concert with a Web app for Android and iPhone and an enhancement to Google Maps for Mobile that will use GPS data to associate public Buzz content posted from mobile phones with location.

Google is the latest search company to try to graft social-networking features onto email service. Yahoo did it last year by adding “status casting,” its variation on Twitter, to Yahoo Mail. That feature has been mostly ignored since its debut. Perhaps Google’s effort will fare a bit better. It is, perhaps, the one company with enough heft and market power to reasonably take on Facebook. But it won’t be easy: Facebook has some 400 million unique users. Gmail, about 176 million.

Still, embrace and extend. Embrace and extend.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100209/google-buzz-adds-social-networking-features-to-gmail/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080123/kara-visits-dld-in-germany-the-naomi-campbell-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20080123/kara-visits-dld-in-germany-the-naomi-campbell-edition/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:03:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080123/kara-visits-dld-in-germany-the-naomi-campbell-edition/ Why was supermodel Naomi Campbell suddenly standing right next to German publisher Hubert Burda at the final lunch for his company’s DLD–Digital, Life, Design–conference in Munich yesterday?

I have no idea, nor do I know why Burda broke out into song either–how much do you have to love a media mogul willing to do that?

But I got it all on video and a whole lot more on the last day of the pre-Davos European gathering focused on digital issues and innovation.

(And here is a post by European serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, who apparently thinks his video shows that Accel Partners’ Simon Levene and I were not impressed enough by Campbell.)

In any case, DLD’s motto was: “Uploading the 21st Century.” And while it did not quite do that, there were definitely a lot of interesting moments I captured for your viewing pleasure.

Along with Campbell (who was supposed to appear on a panel on Africa, but did not) and a singing Burda, the video features clips from two sessions today.

The first was titled “Exploding Media” and included: pundit Clay Shirky riffing on flash mobs; a very funny clip of kids talking about television (made by Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg); Google’s Marissa Mayer noting that Google will still not be in the content business; Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz discussing Yahoo’s plans to de-focus on making original content; and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis advising old media to just ask WWGD? (What would Google do?).

Another session on the video features the founders of the genetics-focused social-networking company 23andMe–Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Esther Dyson–answering questions about fears people have about learning too much about DNA.

Here is the video (and now I am off to Hamburg to visit Xing, a business social-networking company):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080123/kara-visits-dld-in-germany-the-naomi-campbell-edition/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20080121/kara-visits-dld-in-germany/ http://allthingsd.com/20080121/kara-visits-dld-in-germany/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:36:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080121/kara-visits-dld-in-germany/

I am now at the DLD conference in Munich, which is put on by Hubert Burda Media, a gathering that has become one of Europe’s most interesting in recent years.

The three-day DLD–which stands for Digital, Life, Design–focuses on digital innovation, science and culture and has the most cosmopolitan audience of any conference out there.

It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

It is interesting to be here to garner a lot of different viewpoints from outside the U.S., and I will be visiting a lot of German Web start-ups over the next week.

There is also a lot of Olympic-level schmoozing, of course, since there are precious few such events in Europe compared to the conference-crazy U.S.

There are also, of course, a lot of the usual suspects from the States and especially Silicon Valley.

So far this morning, I have run into folks like former Microsoftie Linda Stone, Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz, writer and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Facebook’s Matt Cohler and, yes, Martha Stewart (who needs no introduction).

I am also here to interview onstage for DLD today Kenneth Roth (pictured here), longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, which investigates, reports on and seeks to curb human-rights abuses in some 70 countries.

To say I am out of my league in interviewing such a serious and substantive figure is an understatement, especially given that I spend all my time contemplating the monetization of widgets (to be more specific, the non-monetization), the fate of content on the Web and the exact date the hype of social networking will end.

Still, I will give it my best effort and perhaps focus on the use of digital tools to get information and stories of heinous injustices out worldwide. After all, the Web has to be more than SuperPoking and dumb online videos on cats skateboarding.

Our session is aptly named: “Inconvenient Stories.”

My favorite kind.

Video, of course, to follow.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080121/kara-visits-dld-in-germany/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080107/ces-jerry-yang-emails-it-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20080107/ces-jerry-yang-emails-it-in/#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2008 02:52:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080107/ces-jerry-yang-emails-it-in/

How glad BoomTown was to finally see Jerry Yang up close and personal, after our valiant but futile efforts to get near the Yahoo co-founder and CEO in 2007.

No, we’re not stalking him in a restraining-order kind of way, although I did stake a claim to a front-row seat in the intimate theater at the Las Vegas Hilton for his keynote this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Yang couldn’t help but see me.

Like he cared!

Not at all, as he was riveted to delivering his shtick about Yahoo’s mobile efforts (it’s a 3.0 version, according to Yang, which is a good move since Web 2.0–in general and in particular–has not been so kind to the Internet giant), as well as giving the audience a glimpse of some interesting new concepts related to its popular email program.

The front rows were so packed with top Yahoo execs–including President Sue Decker, as well as David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Brad Garlinghouse, Ash Patel, Dave Karnstedt, Bradley Horowitz, Hilary Schneider and even Chairman and former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel–that you had to wonder who was running the show back in Sunnyvale, Calif.

(I mean, say, if Google had decided to launch a sneak attack today with their bicycle brigade, it could have taken over Yahoo without a shot fired!)

Yang maintained a low-key tone throughout the presentation, as is his way (I kept imagining the performance being done by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who would have sold it all hard until he popped a vein).

Nonetheless, Yang did get the message through that opening its platform up to third-party developers would be a big push in 2008 for Yahoo.

So, the widgets in the excellent mobile product, called Yahoo! Go 3.0, are laudable and much more innovative than anything out there, even though Yahoo has been too quiet about marketing its Yahoo! Go product until now.

But at CES, Yang brought Yahoo Connected Life Executive Vice President Marco Boerries (pictured here) out to show off the mobile apps, including one from MTV (Viacom head Philippe Dauman and MTV Networks head Judith McGrath were in the audience) that seemed fun.

More interesting was Yang’s presenting new concepts for its Yahoo Mail product, which will be more social, relevant and integrated. A lot of this functionality is already being used by the open-source email company Zimbra, which Yahoo recently acquired (and whose head Satish Dharmaraj I interviewed last week).

As I wrote in that piece, I love the innovations, including ranking of those you email with most frequently and instant mapping from email, as well as a plethora of great features for email.

So, one vexing part of Yang’s presentation was that this concept needs to become a reality tomorrow. He brought out Co-Founder and interim CTO Filo to basically promise “soon,” but I say: Make it snappy!

I know, we’re pushy when it comes to Yahoo, but it’s because we care!

Well, care is not the right word exactly, but we are certain that a powerful and pioneering company like Yahoo can out-innovate these Web 2.0 newbies who get ridiculous funding to make goofy widgets and have the nerve to call it a business.

Thus, we took the chance and his prone position after the speech surrounded by well-wishers to go up and say hello in person to Yang, whom BoomTown has known for longer than either of us would care to say.

And, miracle of miracles, Yang said it had been far too long since we had gotten together and agreed to meet in 2008, a meeting for which we have been asking and egregiously posting about forever, to no avail.

How much does BoomTown love CES? Not so much.

But if it gets me lunch with Yang, I love it. So, Jerry, it’s officially 2008 and I am waiting by the phone for your call.

Here is my video of parts of Yang’s keynote:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080107/ces-jerry-yang-emails-it-in/feed/ 0