AllThingsD » Brangelina

Waltgelina 2011: Walking the CES Floor With Walt and Katie

Kara Swisher — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:05:13 +0000

BoomTown likes to take an annual walk on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret to get a perspective of their very long march and what’s coming next.

Then, I get to leave!

I jokingly call Walt the “Brangelina” of CES, since he is stopped constantly on the floor by fans who want to meet him in person and those who just want to kibitz with him about the latest and greatest trends in the tech sector.

Here’s this year’s video I did last Thursday, in which we look for tablets that are not Apple iPads, marvel at a Klingon lady, try to make 3-D glasses look styling and generally are overwhelmed:

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Headed to Vegas for the Umpteenth Time–And I Am Not Even Tiger Woods!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:15:51 +0000

BoomTown will be Southwesting to Las Vegas today for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, being held there over the next several days.

CES has certainly lost some of its immediacy over the last several years, as big players like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) suck up all the oxygen outside its noisy, analog crowd-filled pushfest. This year’s spoilers are the Nexus One launch yesterday and upcoming iSlate arrival in a few weeks.

But CES is still the place to see a lot of different kinds of tech treats in one spot–from big-screen televisions to mobile devices to tricked-out stereo systems to whatever those odd booths in the back are peddling–and try to discern the tea leaves for innovation.

And, of course, to go to a lot of parties with passels of geeks! Yes, it is that kind of fun. Ladies, hide your gadgets!

This year, Walt Mossberg–with whom I do an annual video walk across the massive Convention Center floor, where he is treated like the tech equivalent of Brangelina (see last year’s video below)–and I are trying to up the ante a bit by throwing a substantive interview event with top tech execs, which All Things Digital will be live-streaming on Friday.

We are at capacity at our venue in the Venetian Hotel, but you can see Walt, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka and me grilling digital leaders, starting at 3:30 pm PT and ending at 5:30 pm (the video will also be available later for watching anytime).

Onstage: Jon Rubinstein, chairman and CEO of Palm (PALM), talking to me; Reed Hastings, CEO, president and chairman of Netflix (NFLX), to be queried by Peter; and Android guru and Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin, who will be interviewed by Walt.

ATD will also provide extensive coverage of all the doings at CES over the next several days, so there will lots to peruse, from keynotes to product launches to the annual blogger snub by Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who seems to prefer doing pre-speech interviews with television crews from Omaha.

And we’re not bitter about not being invited to the special off-the-record session either, at which Ballmer will talk about whatever he plans to gab on about onstage tomorrow at the opening keynote at CES.

Rumors swirl about what he’ll talk about. Will he show off a slate PC called the Courier with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)? (My guess: No!) Or will he touch more on the future of cloud computing, portable devices and importance of Microsoft software plus services. (My guess: Yes!)

So, not hearing what Ballmer will say to a passel of reporters, which I couldn’t tell you about anyway since the event is off the record–well, you can imagine how devastated I am!

But there is plenty more I will be able to get into and write about, as well as deliver videos on.

Remember: What happens in Vegas, stays right here.

Until then, here is my annual video interview of Walt, as well as Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret, on the CES floor last year:

[ See post to watch video ]

Weekend Update 5.09.09

Beth Callaghan — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:30:49 +0000

It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players but ended in a three-way tie.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO) deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown wondered whether Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, on his trip to the Bay Area this week or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination. At least one of his reasons for being in the area was to give a talk at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. BoomTown liveblogged the session and attempted to determine Ballmer’s soul-mate status. Given some of the acquisition rumors flying around this week, BoomTown decided to conduct a little experiment. Would the same sort of “Brangelina”-esque mystique apply as well to the combination of two incredibly hot tech companies? Would it create the same hysteria, and sell as many magazines (figuratively speaking)? (Non) results on BoomTown.

MediaMemo had a Kindle-ish kind of week. Amazon (AMZN) unveiled the latest iteration of the device on Wednesday in New York, and MediaMemo was there to liveblog the whole thing, including the crazy demo, during which the location’s facilities prevented Jeff Bezos from demoing pretty much anything. Also, Bezos forget to mention the fact that Amazon will be conducting a Kindle pilot program at six colleges starting this fall. Forget about getting your hands on one, though–only five students per school will be carrying their textbooks around in a Kindle instead of a backpack. MediaMemo’s advice for cash-strapped students once the devices do become available? Wait three years until the price drops. $489 is a lot to shell out on a student’s budget.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch had some news this week during the company’s earnings call (besides earnings)–he believes that while the state of the economy is still dire, “the worst Is over.” He also noted that although he plans to extend WSJ’s online pay model to his strongest properties soon, News Corp. will not be selling any of its content via the Kindle, as some of its competitors will. All this and more on MediaMemo.

On Thursday, Digital Daily liveblogged a press event hosted by Google (GOOG) in advance of its annual shareholder meeting. Some of the topics covered? Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, the econalypse, YouTube, netbooks, China, antitrust issues and the Apple (AAPL) Board. CEO Eric Schmidt was most forthcoming about the Federal Trade Commission’s just-opened inquiry into Google and Apple’s overlapping boards: When asked if he’d resign from the board, he replied that the thought “hasn’t crossed his mind.” Elsewhere, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison probably ruined a few people’s mornings over at IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) when he told a Reuters reporter that part of his plan for Sun (JAVA) is to create an integrated hardware and software solution, effectively making their competition a little bit steeper. As such, it will be extra interesting to see how the little matter of Sun and a possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act plays itself out in the courts. Details on Digital Daily.

Over in Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed Quickoffice, a program that brings some full-fledged word processing capabilities to the iPhone, but has its limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using Macs and PCs together on the same home network, backing up and transferring Outlook Express data and whether it’s possible to find a GPS program for the iPhone that will speak its directions. In the Mossberg Solution this week, Katie Boehret reviewed the Sidekick LX and found it a little out of touch with its market. More in-depth discussion, of course, on the section of the site containing Walt’s columns.

More next week. RIP Dom Deluise.

The AppleTwitter-Equals-iBrangelina Experiment*

Kara Swisher — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:05:43 +0000

AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter
AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter

* Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple (AAPL), was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:

“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”

I wrote that because the pair rivet the tech press and digital fanboys as no others do, fomenting an obsession normally reserved for, say, Brangelina.

And since I imagine that a marriage of Apple and Twitter would be covered a lot like those two are–Red alert: Someone just sighted Evan Williams with a giant iPod getting a scoop at Fraiche Yogurt for Steve Jobs!–I thought I would get started early, just in case.

(Finally, given the epic Twitter diss of last year, let’s all just assume that Facebook will be playing the Jennifer Aniston role.)

BoomTown's Annual Waltgelina Walk at CES: Walt and Katie on the (Less Crowded) Floor

Kara Swisher — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:15:05 +0000

As BoomTown did last year, I took to the much-less-crowded floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week with tech review kingpin Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret to get their take on the scene.

Big news for Walt was the Palm Pre launch and the Yahoo Connected TV initiative. For Katie, it was a $2,000 cellphone.

As I also said last year, I jokingly call Walt the “Brangelina” of CES, since he is stopped constantly on the floor by fans who want to meet him in person and those who just want to kibitz with him about the latest and greatest trends in the tech sector.

So, here are this year’s video ruminations:

[ See post to watch video ]