I was definitely not expecting this from the slight, sweet-looking singer:

This morning, News Corp. CEO and majordomo Rupert Murdoch, his son James (who is also a top company exec) — as well as former employee and full-time lightning rod Rebekah Brooks — march on down to the British Parliament to answer questions from a committee there about the ever-growing PhoneGate scandal.

For those living under a rock, News Corp. is embroiled in ever more serious controversy about who knew what and when (also where, why and how much) in the hacking of phones of a myriad of well-known people in the U.K. by its News of the World tabloid newspaper.

Besides celebrities and politicians, that has included the voicemails of a murdered girl, an appalling act that has galvanized public opinion and the weak spines of legislators into action in this inquiry.

It’s sordid, it’s ugly and it makes for what could be an explosive event, starring the man who brought you “Titanic,” Glenn Beck, “Glee” and, most recently, the sale of Myspace.

There’s no question, getting the 80-year-old Murdoch on the ropes will be the aim of the committee members holding the hearing, and how one of the world’s most famous and legendary media moguls performs — or does not — will be a big deal to both interested observers and News Corp. shareholders.

By way of full disclosure, that’s not me, but this site is owned by Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. In other words, somewhere up the corporate food chain, Murdoch is my boss.

In any case, that has never stopped me or AllThingsD.com from telling it like it is, so here is the liveblog of what is sure to be a doozy of a media event:

6:36 am PT:: It all starts for the Murdochs, as soon as the former Scotland Yard head John Yates has completed questioning about the police’s obvious bungling of the various investigations over the years.

Rupert Murdoch and his son, James Murdoch, are on, looking grave and dressed in grey.

Sitting behind them are Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, and his top adviser at News Corp., Joel Klein, who is heading up the phone hacking scandal internally at the company.

The hearing — in a room that looks like a high school debate could take place there — starts off politely enough.

But the first question is directed toward James Murdoch about his clearly incomplete investigation when phone hacking allegations were first made many years ago. He begins with an apology.

“These actions do not live up to the standards of News Corp.,” says the younger Murdoch.

He is interrupted by his father, Rupert Murdoch, who notes rather dramatically: “This is the most humble day of my life.”

The questioner quickly asks the obvious query, after James Murdoch claims News Corp. was not in full possession of the facts when execs had told a previous committee there was no reason to believe there was more widespread hacking.

Were News Corp. execs lying?

James Murdoch continues to insist that the bulk of evidence came out — “real evidence” — in later civil trials. And also, that News Corp. is now investigating the situation fully.

He throws around words like “proactive action” and “transparency,” which is probably cold comfort now to those hacked when things were less clear to News Corp.’s senior management.

Now up, Rupert Murdoch, who is asked quickly about statements he made about not tolerating wrongdoing and who had lied to him at News Corp. about the phone hacking.

Apparently, he “didn’t know” a lot about the hacking that took place, while also defending the non-hacking employees of his company.

But the questioner is still on him about exactly what he did know about the situation, which seems to be — at least according to his testimony — a lot of I-don’t-knows.

6:53 am: It continues about what Rupert Murdoch knew and when he knew it and what he did. Or not.

As Rupert Murdoch keeps up with this tone of not being clued in to what have turned out to be critical events, James Murdoch wants to keep jumping in with the details, which he is eager to impart.

“At what point did you find out criminality was endemic at News of the World?” asks the questioner.

Rupert Murdoch does not like the word endemic, but stresses that he was “shocked, appalled and ashamed” by the case of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler.

The questioner seems frustrated by Rupert Murdoch’s answers, which are, for the typically razor-sharp media mogul, unusually slow.

Like a persistent terrier who wants to perform, James Murdoch is back again offering to serve up the deets.

7:04 am: Now, it is onto the closing down of News of the World: Was the tabloid shut down because of the criminality?

“We had broken our trust with our readers,” says Rupert Murdoch. “We felt ashamed for what had happened.”

A new questioner is on, with a bizarre query about why Rupert Murdoch came in the back door of the Prime Minister’s house at 10 Downing Street on a recent visit there.

It’s a cloddish effort to show him as a powerful puppetmaster to pols, but only serves as a punch line.

Back on track, with questions about whether there was hacking in the U.S., which Rupert Murdoch said he could not believe had happened.

More questions about how badly the company acted, which came down to the questions about whether he was “ultimately” responsible for the hacking.

“Nope,” says Rupert Murdoch, who keeps insisting he relied on others, some of whom apparently “misled” him.

It’s an astonishing admission and, really, excuse, given he has been chairman, CEO and a very strong leader of News Corp. for more than a half-century.

7:16 am: A new questioner, who asks who decided to close down News of the World. It was Murdoch himself, his son and other execs.

Next up, why did News Corp. pay off a victim of hacking, which James Murdoch did without informing his father or the News Corp. board.

James Murdoch essentially points out that it is typical to do this in companies of the global scale of News Corp.

These are apparently very busy, busy, busy people, who do not seem to have time to notice how such juicy and best-selling scoops might have been magically produced by News of the World.

Onto ethical conduct guidelines, which News Corp. has in a pamphlet form, says James Murdoch, but pages which some at the company have obviously never cracked.

Rupert Murdoch is asked again about his culpability in the case, which he continues to maintain he does not shoulder the blame.

James Murdoch does note that the company “will think more forcefully … about our journalism and ethics.”

Given the situation, in which every day brings a new revelation of bad acts by News Corp. employees, this promise of better behavior seems to be a case of much too little and very, very late.

Rupert Murdoch still uses the opportunity to stress the need for a free press, despite its excesses.

7:31 am: More about the payments to settle with phone hacking victims and how soon the company realized the problems were more widespread.

James Murdoch talks about how he might have acted differently had he known more then as he does now.

“If we knew now what we knew then,” says James Murdoch, “we would have taken more action and moved more aggressively.”

But what else is he going to say? It’s a could-have, would-have, should-have line of questioning that is eliciting very little in the way of true information.

Finally, a good point about “willful blindness,” which is a term from the Enron scandal about avoiding knowing about problems you really should have known about.

“Is that a question?,” asks James Murdoch. It is a statement, actually, and a decent enough one.

“We didn’t do that,” says Rupert Murdoch firmly this time.

Still, soon enough, Rupert Murdoch is insisting he was not as involved as people have imagined him to be with the management of his newspapers.

A new questioner is pressing this important point, but Rupert Murdoch is not biting on a query about his legendarily hands-on managing style.

“I’d say, ‘What’s doing?’” he explains about his conversations with editors, but adding he might not have been told about payoffs to phone hacking victims.

The questions are in the deep weeds here, but it’s still interesting that Rupert Murdoch continues to maintain that his life was too busy to wallow in the details, however controversial and important those details might be.

7:55 am: More and more don’t-knows pile up and up in a giant mountain of acts perpetrated by someone somewhere, but not the Murdochs.

“I can tell you I was surprised as you were,” says James Murdoch about certain payments to various hackers and those who were hacked.

Was it Les Hinton, who then ran News International and later Dow Jones, from which he recently resigned?

Could be! Maybe! Mistake were made! Who knows!

Well, someone does!

It moves onto Brooks, the tarnished News International exec and editor whom Rupert Murdoch does note he still trusts. Finally, some certainty!

Brooks is definitely one of the more compelling characters in this drama, although the media focus on her striking red hair color seems odd and vaguely sexist, as if she is some flame-haired she-devil from media hell. She might certainly be guilty in this mess, but her fabulous hair has nothing to do with it.

(Rupert’s mane is grey, by the way, and James’ is brown, if you really need to know.)

Fascinatingly, Murdoch’s backing of Brooks has been strong and consistent, despite intense criticism of her by many in this scandal.

The payment of legal fees of perpetrators and payments to the victims in the hacking seems to obsess one questioner, who wants News Corp. to stop doing it.

Murdoch says he’d like to if contracts did not preclude that, which essentially means News Corp. will keep up forking over the legal fees and payments.

8:12 am: The attention turns to how James Murdoch found out about the various emails that showed there was more evidence of hacking than was first thought about and what he felt about it.

He says very little, noting that the matter is under police investigation. It’s not don’t-know now, but can’t-say.

The hearing is beginning to feel a little rope-a-dope, with the Murdochs apologizing and taking blows, saying very little — either claiming lack of knowledge or lack of ability to comment about the ongoing police inquiry — and tiring out the questioners.

It is a classic tactic of the boxing champion Muhammad Ali and it works in the ring.

Whether that will be the case with PhoneGate remains to be seen, but it certainly has made what could have been a more explosive hearing much less so.

Instead, it seems to have turned into a what didn’t the Murdochs know and when didn’t they know it hearing.

On questioner gets this irony. “That’s frankly unsatisfactory,” he says about the Murdochs continuing shock and surprise at the thorny situation they find themselves in.

Maybe it seems a little hard to believe, but the persistent story from James Murdoch is that they were told by their lawyers, the police and others that nothing was awry once the initial phone hacking investigation was complete and only found out about the larger problem in later civil lawsuits.

But, asks the questioner to Rupert Murdoch, should his editors and managers at News of the World have known about it?

Of course, they should have.

But, once again, the legendary media baron, who made his fortune and fame in disseminating news and information across the world in newspapers, on television, on satellite and on the Web — at least for now — can’t say.

So, was he “kept in the dark” about the situation? Rupert Murdoch acknowledges he might have asked more questions, although he noted his British newspapers were only a small part of his massive empire.

But, he adds, “Anything that is seen as a crisis comes to me.”

Well, not the phone hacking crisis, it seems.

But, they’re sorry. So sorry. And, of course, humbled.

8:54 am: Suddenly, there is a disturbance, in which someone seems to have possibly attempted to accost the Murdochs.

But it is not clear what has happened, as the hearings are suspended for 10 minutes.

James Murdoch leaps up quickly to protect his father, which he has been doing in this hearing verbally already, where the strategy seems to be to let him largely do all the talking.

Even faster on her feet and with arms raised toward a man in a plaid shirt and carrying a pie plate with shaving cream is Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi.

The man seems to have managed to get some of the foam on Rupert Murdoch, but Wendi Deng appears to have partially thwarted her husband from receiving a full pie in the face.

It’s the first striking visual of this hearing, protecting the patriarch and the king of the empire from harm, no matter what.

Here is a video of the incident:

According to Britain’s Channel 4: “As the man was being led away in handcuffs escorted by a single police officer, he refused to give his name, saying: ‘As Mr Murdoch himself said, I’m afraid I cannot comment on an ongoing police investigation.’”

9:09 am: The room is cleared, so it is only the Murdoch crew behind James and Rupert Murdoch, and now the committee is even more solicitous.

Rupert Murdoch is without his jacket and his wife is being commended for her most excellent left hook.

Still, it’s back to business and the questioner does zero in on a major disconnect over how two media execs as famously aggressive and involved as the Murdochs were so passive in this hacking situation.

It “was a terrible shock,” says James Murdoch.

The same is said about what would be even more disturbing and recent allegations of the hacking of the victims of the 9/11 bombings.

Both father and son say there is no evidence of this so far, but they were surely looking into it.

While it certainly did not come through in what have largely been feckless questions from the committee, the final questioner does correctly ask the pair if they might want to pay more attention.

The last question is for Rupert Murdoch and finally gets to the real query everyone wants to ask.

Noting Murdoch is “captain of the ship,” she asks if he has considered resigning.

“No,” answers Murdoch firmly.

“Why not?” she presses.

“People let me down and it’s for them to pay,” says Rupert Murdoch. “But I think, frankly, I am the best person do clean this up.”

He finishes up with a statement about being sorry, how he was also betrayed and how phone hacking and bribery is wrong.

“Saying sorry is not enough, things must be put right,” he says.

Finally, something we do know.

For years now, it looked like the tousled adorkability and winsome charms of British movie star Hugh Grant were beginning to grow long in the tooth.

That is, until the phone-hacking scandal in Britain — with the News Corp.-owned tabloid News of the World’s editors, reporters and managers accused of serious misconduct — got really going in recent weeks.

The issue about the out-of-control press has put the well-spoken Grant, a victim of the hacking, at the center of the action and he’s doing a laudable job as both an indignant and also reasonable voice.

Here are three videos where you can see Grant talking about the controversy and also debating both the hackers and the pols who apparently protected them.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

The British version of the Huffington Post, which has been expected, went live today.

It is the site’s first major international expansion beyond North America (Canada was first).

While the content is aimed at the audience there, it will still have the usual HuffPo mix of saucy news, videos and blogs.

But in this case, instead of U.S. celebs and pols, those blogs will come from famous British luminaries, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair; Sarah Brown, wife of another former PM, Gordon Brown; and entertainers Ricky Gervais and Tracey Ullman.

The Huffington Post apparently already attracts a monthly audience in excess of 1.2 million in the U.K.

AOL — which bought the high-profile news and opinion site for $315 million — has given its content head, Arianna Huffington, a lot of backing and also funding for expansion, including globally.

Other international Huffington Post sites are likely to roll out soon.

Here’s the official press release:

BRITAIN WAKES UP TO THE HUFFINGTON POST UK TODAY

Latest Edition of “HuffPost” Blends Brand’s Unique Mix of News, Opinion, Community, and Engagement with Original, UK-centric Content

6th July, 2011, London – The Huffington Post UK (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/), a UK version of The Huffington Post (“HuffPost”), the popular American news and opinion site, goes live today. The site features HuffPost’s unique combination of original reporting, aggregation, a leading-edge commenting forum, pioneering social engagement tools, and a vibrant platform for a wide range of bloggers. High profile bloggers already lined up to contribute through the site include Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt and Sarah Brown as well as comedy and entertainment luminaries such as Ricky Gervais, Tracey Ullman, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jonathan Meades and Kate Garraway .

The Huffington Post UK is edited by Carla Buzasi (nee Bevan), Editor-in-Chief, AOL Europe who leads an initial team of ten dedicated editors and writers, with further support from the wider AOL editorial team in the UK, as well as The Huffington Post team in the United States. The Huffington Post UK platform gives hundreds of British bloggers the opportunity to showcase their work to millions of readers globally.

Other recent new hires include Political Editor Chris Wimpress, a former political correspondent for BBC Radio 4; News Editor Jacqui Head, formerly an Online Journalist at Al-Jazeera, with stints at BBC and CNN; and Caroline Frost, Entertainment Editor, previously an Arts Producer for BBC News, and Online Entertainment Editor at the Herald Sun in Melbourne. Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chief Executive Officer of E.L. Rothschild and board member of Estee Lauder and The Economist Group, is the site’s Editor-at-Large.

The Huffington Post (US) was founded in May 2005, and has become an influential and oft-quoted media brand, “The Internet Newspaper.” It attracts 36 million* readers and only last month overtook the New York Times to become the world’s biggest newspaper online.

The UK site offers coverage of politics, entertainment, living, style, world news, technology, comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs and original content. In the coming months, The Huffington Post UK will evolve to feature even more content across a whole range of genres.

Commenting on the launch of the UK site, Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, said: “We are arriving here in the midst of a rich and thriving media culture marked by great innovation. We look forward to adding HuffPost UK to the mix, and to our real-time ‘digital water cooler’ — which embraces the best of the new (immediacy, transparency, interactivity) and the best of the old (fact-checking, accuracy, fairness, and an emphasis on storytelling) — becoming the spark for many interesting conversations.”

Kate Burns, SVP, AOL Europe, said: “The Huffington Post has pioneered a new way for people to connect with the news of the day, and with each other, so we’re excited to bring this unique platform to the UK. We’re giving people the chance to write, share and debate opinions, creating a democratic site that can give Joe Bloggs the same platform as Ricky Gervais.”

The Huffington Post (US) already attracts a monthly audience in excess of 1.2 million [comScore, May 2011] UK based readers who are engaged, influential, and affluent. The UK site will feature premium ad formats, including the recently launched “Project Devil,” which has generated unprecedented engagement levels, time spent on ads and time spent viewing ad videos. At launch The Huffington Post UK will showcase an LG Project Devil campaign brokered through leading media agency Mindshare and a Dell PLE campaign negotiated by Mediacom.

In an interview BoomTown did yesterday with Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving–the video of which will be posted later today–at the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s HQ in Sunnyvale, CA, he managed to actually give me some news to report: the hire of crackerjack user experience design head Tim Parsey.

Parsey’s title will be SVP of User Experience Design at Yahoo, which is now centralizing the important task, Irving said. Previously, in the 67-ring circus that has been Yahoo’s product organization, design was widely dispersed.

Parsey certainly has the cred in the industry, with stints at Apple, Microsoft’s entertainment and devices unit, Mattel and Motorola. Most recently, he was a principal at a Seattle-based design firm called shiftalliance.

The British native ran Apple’s design studio for five years in the early 1990s and and was the main dude behind Motorola’s freaky V70 switchblade mobile phone in 2001.

Best of all: Parsey was once responsible for Barbie, as you can read below from his bio from shiftalliance, which announced his departure several days ago on its site:

[Tim Parsey] co-founded shiftalliance to focus on higher order value creation in business. The company is built on three beliefs: 1. that higher order, or meaningful, value is the next value driver in mature markets; 2. that sustainable innovation needs to consider the whole business model and; 3. that establishing a people-centric continuous change process is critical for success in today’s markets .

Prior to shiftalliance, he served as Partner, User Experience (UX) Director, Xbox Design at Microsoft, where he led a 22-person team responsible for the design and development of a new technology-enabled paradigm of interaction and entertainment that would not disrupt revenue streams from the existing Xbox gaming platform and contribute to the business in a more strategic way.

Previously, at Mattel as VP, Consumer Products Design, Tim was responsible for the Barbie, Hot Wheels and Fisher Price brands (in all non-toy categories) across 45,000 sku’s contributing nearly $2 billion in revenue worldwide. His charge was to establish the strategic and creative vision, and evolve the culture from a traditional licensing to a ‘leveraged innovation’ and ‘marketed product’ based approach. Key components of this evolution were to establish the first design languages for Mattel brands; lead design innovation for cross-functionally conceived marketing platforms (product, entertainment/web and 360 degree marketing); and nurture the individual licensee businesses and 5,000 designers across the portfolio into a community motivated to share and innovate together, thereby driving the business evolution at an appropriate pace. Before that, as VP, Wheels Design, he led 45 toy designers to advance the Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Pixar CARS toy design businesses. Activities included establishing product and brand design strategies, evolving the toy teams and building the first licensed consumer products design team, all of which led to re-energized business growth. This experience was a planned opportunity to understand toy design and specifically play innovation, and led to the formalization of the first play design methodology for Mattel.

Prior to Mattel, Tim served as Corporate Vice President at Motorola, where he built and led the Consumer Experience Design (CxD) group for the Personal Communications Sector (mobile phones) from an established industrial design team of approximately 22 in the US to a multifunctional design organization of approximately 150 distributed. This journey that included developing design as a competitive advantage for the company began 5 years after the StarTac and led to the design of Razr, the most successful brand and product range to be informed by a design strategy called ‘rich minimalism’. At the time, approximately 100 cell phones a year were being designed with a broad range of derivatives for different markets and carriers. CxD was distributed across Asia, North America and Europe and included Advanced Design and Design Planning groups that fed advanced thinking and strategies into the User Interface, Industrial Design and Human Factors groups. Specific achievements included establishing a collaborative industrial and user interface design methodology with key carriers.

Before that, Tim served as VP, Product Design and Development for ACCO, a manufacturer of office supplies and Manager, Design Studio at Apple after working as staff designer at ID Two (now IDEO) and other leading design consulting firms.

And here is a video of him speaking at a TEDx event about a year ago:

As in freaky accurate. I am sure Streep’s performance will also rate, as she did playing Julia Child, in the movie about Thatcher that will come out this year.

See for yourself:

Shares in ARM have nearly tripled in value from this time a year ago, and the most recent surge occurred in December, when the first reports emerged that Microsoft would do something that previously seemed almost unthinkable: Create a version of Windows designed to run on chips other than the x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Microsoft confirmed the news two days ago. If 2011 is going to be the year of the tablet, then chances are it’s going to be the year of ARM chips.

The funny thing is, practically every year has been a good year for ARM chips. They’re so widely used already that there’s a good chance you use them, probably several of them, every day. During its most recent quarter, more than 900 million ARM-based chips were sold in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, while another 600 million were used in devices as varied as TV, toys, cars, alarm clocks and remote controls.

ARM doesn’t build the chips itself; it designs the cores–or central brains–used on those chips. I like to compare it to selling a basic cake recipe. If you’re a baker whose expertise is making really great frosting, why bother dreaming up a brand-new cake recipe when you can use an existing one, and instead use your time and effort to make great frosting? A lot of semiconductor and electronics companies have reached the same conclusion, and paid to license ARM’s recipes for chips, and then built their own custom enhancements around the ARM core.

It’s a pretty popular recipe. The company issued more than 700 licenses as of last year to some 250 chip companies, which then turned around and sold the chips to more than 1,000 manufacturers. ARM estimates that in 2009 four billion chips based on its designs were sold, and that more than 20 billion have been sold in the two decades since the company launched.

Aside from the three ARM-based chips from Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Qualcomm that Microsoft demonstrated running Windows as part of CEO Steve Ballmer’s Jan. 5 keynote presentation at CES, the list of companies using ARM includes Samsung, Broadcom, Toshiba and scores of smaller chip companies.

ARM also has an interesting history. It was founded as a joint venture between Apple and a British outfit called Acorn Computers in 1990. Apple’s interest was to create and develop a chip that would run the Newton, and spur the development of a new-age handheld computer that the Newton was supposed to bring about. (As a few commenters note below, the first ARM chips were used in desktop computers sold primarily in the U.K.) The Newton went nowhere, but the vision for ARM as the chip of choice for mobile computing was right on the money. ARM chips from Motorola (now Freescale) landed in devices from Palm and early handhelds running Windows Mobile. ARM flourished and went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1998. Between 1998 and 2004, Apple sold off its ARM shares for combined proceeds of almost $800 million.

Now having built a considerable lead in the wireless world, ARM-based chips look awfully strong as the battle over tablets shapes up. And beyond that lies higher-end computing opportunities like servers. Some think Intel should be worried. Despite this week’s launch of its Sandy Bridge generation of PC processors, Intel’s shares are trading lower today than they did at the start of the week.

I caught up briefly with ARM Executive Vice President Antonio Viana by phone from CES to talk about the year ahead for ARM.

There’s been a lot of attention around ARM coming into the Windows fold, and everyone knows it from its strength in the wireless devices. How is 2011 shaping up for ARM?

We got our start more than 20 years introducing a chip architecture aimed primarily at the mobile industry. We offered a chip design that’s efficient in the way it consumes power. What happened was the technology moved beyond the cellphone: Into the home, cars, printers. And that trend is continuing. Consumers want features that require a lot more computing power. Some of these devices are handhelds, some aren’t. What makes the ARM architecture central to all that is that industry brings their own secret sauce, their own pieces to the table. The development with Microsoft is just a small microcosm of that.

Are there new licensees coming on?

Our roadmap is constantly evolving, and we’ve developed the architecture for a pretty broad set of use cases. We license to companies like NXP that are relatively simple 8- and 16-bit microcontroller chips that go into industrial equipment, or meters or toys. But because of the network connectivity requirements that are starting to come to those devices, you’re starting to see some of these move to more versatile 32-bit chips and the costs are manageable because developers are so used to working with ARM. Then if you swing way out to the other extreme we just launched our A15 architecture. That’s a multicore design, and it’s finding its way into next-generation servers.

Who’s using that?

Unfortunately, we can’t say yet. A15 was announced last year. We think we’ll start seeing production silicon in the latter half of next year, and there will be samples before that. When you start seeing samples then the partners working with it will start announcing products.

Obviously Intel has its Atom processor, which it has aimed at tablets and handhelds and many other market segments you’re involved in. What kind of competitive threat do you see from Intel?

The competitive threat is certainly there–x86 is incredibly robust and it has the incredible capital resources of Intel behind it. ‘Nuff said. Intel will be successful in various markets they go after. We’d be fools not to acknowledge that. But the question is who’s going to grow more? Who is going to leverage off the market trends right now? Tablets are a wonderful example of that. Right now about 90 percent of all tablets in the marketplace are ARM-powered. At a show like CES you see a lot of things that indicate the market trends. You always have to take a step back and wonder which of the things you see may never happen. But the trends are usually accurate. One of those trends is for always-on, always-connected power-efficient devices. When you look at it that way I’m pretty comfortable with ARM’s position.

Guardian Media has one for sale. The British publisher is peddling the “Inside.com” domain name, people familiar with the company tell me. Asking price, I’m told, is something north of $100,000.

If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you used to dine on big, well-prepared plates of media-covering-media during the first boom, when Inside.com spent a lot of money trying to create an industry insider/outsider publishing business.

That didn’t work, and eventually paidContent’s Rafat Ali, an Inside.com veteran himself, bought up the domain in 2008.

The idea was to use the name as an umbrella for his collection of trade sites, and perhaps to help Ali open up a Hollywood outpost. But that never panned out, and if you head to Inside.com now it will direct you to paidContent.

Ali ended up selling that site and its parent company to Guardian Media in 2008, and left two years later. The British company once had aggressive plans to expand in the U.S., but it’s unclear what it intends to do now. Caroline Little, who was running American operations for the publisher, stepped down earlier this year.

I’ve asked Guardian for comment and will update if it has one.

But the troubled Web property is a…really troubled Web property, its News Corp. parent stressed today. And it needs to get its act together before it gets kicked off campus.

That’s the message that COO Chase Carey took pains to get across during his company’s earnings call this afternoon.

Revenue at Myspace was down $70 million compared to the same quarter a year ago, the company said, and “traffic numbers are still not going in the right direction, Carey said. Which means that its “current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.”

Okay. But Myspace has been in decline for some time, and Jon Miller and Mike Jones have been trying to fix it for more than a year. And last year at this time, we heard a similar assessment, only then Carey kept calling the site a “work in progress.” So how much more time do they have?

Carey: “We judge in quarters, not in years.”

My understanding is that when Miller took the job as News Corp.’s chief digital officer in the spring of 2009, he believed he had a real shot at fixing the social network, which had already cooled from red-hot to not at all.

But sources in and out of News Corp. tell me that Miller and his team are now merely hoping to patch the service long enough to find a buyer. Perhaps no one has told Carey, who seems to be conducting an anti-sales pitch.

——————-

EARLIER:

First look at Rupert Murdoch’s latest report card: News Corp. ended the September quarter with revenue of $7.4 billion and earnings of $0.27 a share (after factoring out a one-time tax gain). That’s almost exactly what the Street was looking for–expectations were $7.4 billion and $0.24 per share.

A quick run-through by unit:

• Cable: Up, because ad dollars are up and so are those affiliate fees that cable providers don’t want to pay but do.
• Movies: Down, because last year the company had an “Ice Age” movie in its results, and this year it’s fairly hit-less. It is making money selling reruns of “How I Met Your Mother,” though.
• Broadcast TV: Up, because local TV stations are doing better than last year, when they were still crippled by the recession.
• Satellite: Down, because costs were up.
• Publishing: Up, because newspapers are doing better than last year, when they were terrible. Ad revenue is up 13 percent worldwide. (This is where I note that News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)
• Random other stuff: Down, in large part because of Myspace and the rest of News Corp.’s digital unit, which is still trying to turn around.

I’ll come back to liveblog the conference call at 4:30 eastern, in the hopes that Murdoch says something interesting about politics, pay walls, the economy, Myspace, Apple and/or Google. He usually does!

LIVEBLOG:

BIG bummer: No Rupert on call today–because he’s traveling. (Some place with no phones? What’s up with that?)

CFO Dave DeVoe running through segment performance.

Cable: Some boasting about Fox News, FX, Big 10 Network, etc.

Movies: Nothing new here.

TV: TV stations up, but broadcast network losses up big “from higher cancellation costs.”

Satellite: [Apologies, had to duck out for a second.]

Newspapers: Again, ads up in all big newspapers.

Other/Digital: $70 million lower search and ad revenue at Myspace y/y.

Guidance: Leaving unchanged (though DeVoe notes that Myspace is still under plan).

COO Chase Carey:

Lots of focus on our retrans deals, and they are “critical” to our future. “We will be taking this business to a whole new level of profitability.”

Lots of growth ahead in International pay TV market.

Walk through of “key initiatives” throughout the company.

[Still sulking over Rupert-less call.]

Fox Film hasn’t had breakout hits, but no stinkers “in an industry known for them.”

We’ve got Jim Cameron locked up for Avatar 2 and 3, you know. And Modern Family is going to make us a pile of money in syndication.

Wish the World Series wasn’t such a bummer, and a short one. But NFL on Fox doing great.

WSJ still growing. Building digital business that “will take time to emerge.” “We feel very good” about subscription business in U.K.

“We’ve been clear that Myspace has been a problem.”

But relaunching “and we feel really good about” it. “Current losses are not acceptable or sustainable” and current management knows it, even though it’s not their fault.

But we know that we have to work very hard in coming months to get this thing sustainable.

[This is some of the most negative commentary I've heard yet from News Corp. on Myspace. Hard to sell an asset when you're describing it this way.]

Q&A:

Myspace: How much time do you give the relaunch to figure out if it’s successful. And what if it’s not?

Carey: We judge in quarters, not in years. Goal is to get to a place where top-line revenue is going in the right direction and “a clear path to profitability.”

We feel good about the relaunch. But “our traffic numbers are still not going in the right direction” and we have to stabilize that.

Fox TV content on digital platforms: It’s available on Hulu and Fox.com. How is that strategy going, and will you continue to be open?

Carey: Broadly: “This digital arena is still evolving.” We’re very focused on managing rights. Key issues: Windows, ad load, pricing. [Not answering at all, really.] “We think the digital arena is a very important one” particularly mobile, iPad, but “look, scarcity of our product is a real value.” But we’re learning as we go. “I do think it’s important that the digital platforms continue to develop dual revenue stream options.” That’s critical, and options are just beginning to evolve.

More on Myspace: There are a lot of operations in “other” besides Myspace: Mobile, Fox Audience Network, etc. What else could improve there?

Carey: Only two other businesses in there: Mobile, and outdoor networks, (and IGN). Not a lot of room for growth in those businesses.

So it’s really about Myspace?

Yes.

Avatar: What’s upside here?

Carey: Sequel to the most successful film ever? It should be pretty good! “Enormous events, without comparison or rival.”

[Please bring Rupert back!]

Please talk about terms of new Cameron deal?

Nope.

On retrans: Cablevision said they got better terms by holding out for a couple weeks. How do you react to that? If true, will we see more of these holdouts?

[Also a question about BSkyB I'm not that interested in.]

Carey: Mostly I saw Cablevision complaining that the government didn’t bail them out. But we feel pretty good about where we are. We didn’t think the government needed to get into it, and it would have been nice if the government would have been clear up front “it may not have gone off the air at all,” but whatever–”this was a matter to be dealt with between private parties.” [Ignore all those press releases we sent out!]

Can you talk about advertising trends and expectations?

DeVoe [I think]: They haven’t changed.

Cable margins: How long can you keep growing them?

Carey: We have room to drive a number of our channels, via more distribution, jacking up fees, advertising, etc.

What about getting more money from regional sports networks?

Carey: Won’t get into specifics.

[We want Rupe! We want Rupe!]

International channels seem to be doing well. Where is that growth coming from?

Carey: Part of it is the weak U.S. dollar. But overall, growth is “big and broad.”

Oh man. Even Chase Carey is yawning as he answers the question.

[Skipping accounting question.]

Back to network TV: Please talk about sports programming costs, etc. NFL, baseball, NASCAR. You spend a lot. Does retrans help support those costs? Or will you move some of that to cable?

Carey: I don’t think it makes sense to differentiate broadcast and cable much anymore. That’s the point of retrans–to make broadcast look like cable, with dual revenue stream.

On sports: It’s expensive, and draws big crowds. “It’s a unique strength in a world of DVRS” but “they come with big price tags.” We’d like to continue running it, but we have to do it at the right price.

Retrans does help, though–networks that are only ad-supported won’t be able to pay for these rights over time. Still, gotta be disciplined, etc.

Back to digital: What’s going on with Google TV? Are you thinking about different devices and different screens as a way to window, instead of calendar? I.e.: Make it available on PC but not on the big screen, etc.

Carey: I think within the house, the difference between screens won’t matter. I do think mobile is a discrete platform. [And some general chatter about tablets.]

But generally, “our content is incredibly valuable” and “we’re not going to throw it out there for everybody” unless we get compensated for it.

[Boring question about syndicated TV. Carey flipping through papers]

Hey, what about M&A deals, like Yahoo?

“Things like Yahoo are because the press needs things to write about.” [Zing! Also, hey, Jon Miller!] “We don’t need to make any acquisitions. But if there’s something out there, we should consider it, but we’ll do it in a very disciplined way” like we have in the past. Generally, we’d rather build than buy. “But if we see something we can acquire at a very attractive price that fits, we’ll take a look at it.” We’re not shopping.

[Skipping another cable channel question.]

Time for press Q&A:

How do you make broadcast look more like cable?

Carey: Retrans fees, like we’ve been talking about for the past couple years.

What about doing “premium video” (windowing movie release on TV?).

Carey: Looking at it.

What about further delaying movies to Netflix, Redbox beyond 28-day window (Warner talked about this today)?

Carey: We’re okay right now, but we’re looking at it. But as VOD grows, windows will change and evolve. But right now “we feel what windowing we’ve done has been good for us.”

Color on Apple TV 99-cent rental, please:

Carey: It’s pretty new. Only relevant for the past month or so. Too early to judge.

What’s your vision for European and British markets after you buy Sky? Will you buy Endemol?

Carey: Don’t really want to talk about it, too early.

Please talk about Times of London pay wall performance to date. Also, what are you thinking about your iPad newspaper in the U.S.?

Carey: Re U.K.: “We feel very good about it. Realistically, it’s very early….This is not something that’s a one or two quarter game.”

Same thing with the “whole digital arena” evolving, etc.

Hah. Refuses to talk about iPad newspaper. Which is not a newspaper!

Call finished, mercifully.

The music video for this original song for the Disney movie sequel, which is essentially about being inside a really cool videogame with mean people. In 3-D. Riding wild motorcycles. And wearing weird glowing catsuits.

Which is what BoomTown does every weekend.

It opens Dec. 17.

And don’t miss British actor Michael Sheen channeling David Bowie.

Enjoy:

Yesterday afternoon, BoomTown got on the phone for a little chitchat with MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn (pictured here) about the company’s latest hire, as well as an update on major changes the social networking site is undergoing in its bid to revive itself.

Plus, since I have written a lot about the departures of execs there, such as the Partovi brothers, fair is fair to discuss the arrivals!

The most recent of which is David Donegan as MySpace’s SVP of marketing. He replaced longtime MySpace marketing head Angela Courtin, who left earlier this month.

The former managing partner of Kastner & Partners Interactive, who also has an entertainment background, had previously been the director of interactive marketing at Red Bull.

Donegan will report to Hirschhorn, who said he made the hire because he is interested in just the kind of “nontraditional marketing” for MySpace used to flack Red Bull’s energy drinks.

“We wanted a CMO who understands viral marketing, events and how to build traffic online,” said Hirschhorn in an interview with me. “And you can be scrappy and you don’t have to spend $100 million to do that.”

Take that, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT)!

Still, the job will be a big one as it entails launching a new look and feel–as well as a new logo–under an internal initiative code-named “Futura.” Rolling out in the fall and winter, it encompasses a wholesale new branding campaign for the troubled News Corp. unit.

“We are repositioning ourselves as a place for self-expression and discovery, so the marketing has to reflect that too,” said Hirschhorn about efforts MySpace has outlined to curate content better.

They include innovations in everything from video snippets to topic pages to adding trending data to pages, as well as simplified navigation and a redo of the site’s profile pages already underway.

Hirschhorn also points to platform plays for the service, such as the recent and seemingly successful effort by MySpace Music to host online auditions for Fox’s television hit, “Glee.”

That points to more entertainment, said Hirschhorn, focused on celebrities and entertainers using MySpace to “make sure fans know what they are about” and a place for those same fans to discover new acts.

Such as British band Florence & The Machine, which I have never heard of.

I will soon, insisted Hirschhorn, via MySpace Tools, which will differentiate it from leader Facebook.

“It’s not a reskinning of the site,” he said. “It is a reimagining.”

Until it is all there, though, here’s a video of Hirschhorn giving me a tour of some of the new concepts for MySpace in March:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100519/myspaces-jason-hirschhorn-talks-about-futura-new-logo-and-marketing-dude-and-bands-boomtown-has-never-heard-of/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100416/almost-famous-david-maher-roberts-of-the-filter/ http://allthingsd.com/20100416/almost-famous-david-maher-roberts-of-the-filter/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:56:38 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=23925 This week, we interviewed David Maher Roberts, CEO of The Filter. The Filter has been around for awhile, but has been reinvented as a service for content companies. It takes what David describes as some pretty high-caliber math and marries it to user data to spit out things users want to see and hear.

Who: David Maher Roberts

What: CEO

Why: David came to The Filter from the publishing world. The Filter used to be a music-selection engine (pre-Apple Genius). Today, after a major overhaul, David says it’s trying to be a recommendation engine that brings “the world of entertainment, filtered for me.” Now The Filter offers that service to businesses that want a recommendation engine on top of their own content services. NBC is the company’s latest major client.

Where: thefilter.com (Web site); @davidpmr (Twitter); Bath, United Kingdom (analog place)

Who Else: Apple’s (AAPL) Genius is trying to supply the service on top of its own content engine in iTunes. Pandora is in the mix too.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Man of the World: I don’t know where my accent is from. I’m half French and half English and was raised in international schools in Brussels. I’m a true European.

Started Life: I went into journalism as a photographer. When I was 24, I started a couple of magazines, which didn’t go well, but I got picked up by a U.K.-based publisher (Future Publishing) and moved up their ranks.

Biggest Influence: Chris Anderson, founder of Future Media (David’s former employer) and now of TED.

Real Passion: I was trained as a jazz drummer from the age of 10 and always played in bands and things.

On His Playlist: All based around French Electro Pop. Right now, I’ve fallen in love with Owl City. It represents exactly the sort of music I grew up with in France. It just makes me smile. My staple diet is much more British. Stuff like the Twang. My favorite band of all time is Belle and Sebastian.

---

Bio in 140 Characters

Lives in Bath, U.K., but began life a citizen of Europe. David commutes globally so his family doesn’t have to.

---

The Five Questions

Break this down for me. What does The Filter do now, and why is Peter Gabriel involved?

Yeah, so Peter Gabriel was one of our founders and is an investor now. He and our CTO, Martin Hopkins, had the idea about 10 years ago that we would need some kind of tool to help us navigate the world of content when we had too much choice. Our model has changed since then, but we still do basically the same thing. Today, we are basically in the SaaS, software-as-a-service, business. Our technology gets laid on top of other businesses’ content to deliver more relevant recommendations.

A good example is Nokia (NOK). They use us to combine information about your content preferences and your geolocation to give you recommendations about events nearby.

Let’s say I’m listening to music online. How much information about me does my music service need to give you in order for this to work?

Well, what we offer to most of our customers is an anonymous service. We do a lot of personalized services too, though. We can do a good job not knowing anything about the person and just about the session they are in right now. We take input like the piece of music, how many times you’ve listened, whether or not you’ve shared it or saved it to a play list, and then recommend statistically similar content. At its core, our product is a Bayesian inference engine, so it assigns mathematical probabilities to whether or not you will like something and then computes the best fit. We blend the metadata connections with the behavioral connections, and then we filter the output.

I’m a little hazy on how you connect consumers to their data and then make recommendations. You said you do use individual-level data sometimes. Do you guys use data collected from one company to inform the algorithm that recommends content at another?

Well, there are two things we are being careful about, as you’d imagine. Generally, we use data from within an organization to inform the decisions made there. We do anonymize and aggregate all of the data and use that for all of our customers. The individual-level data we try to keep anonymous.

What does a paper publishing guy have to offer a digital recommendation engine?

I came in originally as a consultant to help them with their “come to market” strategy. I was running all of Future Publishing’s Web operations for Europe and stumbled upon Eden Ventures, who are the VCs behind The Filter. I came in, and there was already a CEO. I didn’t realize they were trying to replace him, but we worked on what they should be doing and at the end of it they offered me the job. I would say that I come in from the content and publishing world, and I know how media companies make the kinds of decisions like using a service like The Filter.

What is the eventuality you guys hope for here? Is success in ubiquity or in being bought up?

I think my goal with The Filter is to grow it to be so large that it is the glue that connects people to their content. Once that happens, I think we’d hope for a large business to be so connected to our technology that they want to own it.

---

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100416/almost-famous-david-maher-roberts-of-the-filter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100317/the-myspace-sale-or-spin-off-may-be-a-non-story-but-my-barry-manilow-badge-is-sure-for-real/ http://allthingsd.com/20100317/the-myspace-sale-or-spin-off-may-be-a-non-story-but-my-barry-manilow-badge-is-sure-for-real/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:30:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25691 Like others, without inquiring, BoomTown got an email–from someone who would know–regarding inexplicably whirling rumors of the sale or spinoff of MySpace.

Read the “pre-emptive” note: “There is no truth, zero, zip to myspace sales report.”

Well, to tell my truth, I actually wasn’t wondering, especially since that was the exact same on-the-record answer I got from MySpace Co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Michael Jones when I asked them that very question in an interview last week about the fate of the social networking site within its parent company, News Corp. (NWS).

But whatev!

In any case, what is completely true–and I could not be more thrilled–is that I am now the proud and only owner of a Barry Manilow badge (pictured here in all its glory) from a yet-to-be-released feature MySpace is working on.

It was sent to me by Mike Macadaan, head product dude at MySpace now, after my recent video tour–which you can see below–of the changes being planned to try to revive the troubled Internet service.

When shown the badge idea, full of hipster stuff about three decades too young for me, I wondered what there was on MySpace for Manilow fans–Fanilows!–like me.

Hence, my one-of-a-kind Barry badge (which sort of makes the crooner look a little like Carol Brady/Florence Henderson, whom I also love, so no foul).

I am not sure I am ready to take a chance again on MySpace–or if anyone is–but, Mike, you came and you gave without taking, so I won’t send you away.

(A free All Things Digital T-shirt to the first commenter below to name those tunes.)

And, so more will understand Manilow’s bizarre appeal, here is one hysterical video mashup of “Copacabana,” which somehow includes former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a pimp and dog wearing a pirate hat:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100317/the-myspace-sale-or-spin-off-may-be-a-non-story-but-my-barry-manilow-badge-is-sure-for-real/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100210/how-to-report-snow/ http://allthingsd.com/20100210/how-to-report-snow/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:55:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16161 As you may heard, it snowed last week in Washington, D.C., and today it is snowing in New York City. It also snowed in other parts of the country, but that’s not relevant here because snow in other parts of the country doesn’t inspire massive media overcoverage.

In any case, I’m assuming that the good people at “The Daily Show” will be dissecting said overcoverage very soon. But for now, we’ll have to make do with a British takedown of that country’s snow overcoverage last month, via Charlie Brooker.

I don’t like it quite as much as his more sweeping takedown of TV news in general. But aside from a few problems with the British/American language barrier, it does the job. Thanks to Mike Dunn, via Jeff Jarvis, via Bernie Gershon, for spotting.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a respite from snow non-news, Twitter isn’t the worst place to go right now.

“Blizzard” is indeed a trending topic, but Twitterers have other things on their mind as well, like Google Buzz, of course. And, obviously, John Mayer.

But Twitterers have more esoteric interests, too: They’re busy compiling reasons you should “shooturself,” and offering tributes to Captain Phil, whom you may know from “Deadliest Catch.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100210/how-to-report-snow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090918/parsing-the-legal-tantrums-of-zennstrom-and-friis/ http://allthingsd.com/20090918/parsing-the-legal-tantrums-of-zennstrom-and-friis/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:30:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18614

Is it just me or is it completely ironic that a pair of European entrepreneurs kept out of the United States due to tantrum lawsuits from the music industry are stamping their own legal feet like two ill-tempered toddlers of late?

That would be Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who today filed yet another lawsuit in their seemingly never-ending quest to win in court what they couldn’t in business dealmaking.

Today, via a new lawsuit, they are following through on their recent attempt to smear former Joost CEO Michelangelo Volpi.

Zennström and Friis co-founded Joost, you see, and last week were part of dumping him as a director and as its chairman, a job Volpi had retained when he left his top job at Joost to join Index Ventures in July.

Not satisfied with that, Joost also said then in an astonishing statement: “The company and its board of directors is conducting an investigation into Mr. Volpi’s actions during his tenure as CEO and as chairman.”

Of course, it is all part of the pair being on the very-sore-losing side of the $2 billion deal to buy Skype from eBay (EBAY).

Zennström and Friis got very rich selling the Internet telephony service to eBay in 2005.

This year, they turned around and tried to buy it back, hooking up with a group of private-equity investors.

Both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) also considered bids, and dropped out for various reasons.

And so did Volpi, in one of his first deals at Index–and the London-based venture firm was one of the smaller players on the winning side of the deal to buy Skype, putting up $75 million.

To complicate things further, Zennström and Friis also own a company called Joltid, which has licensed key technology for Skype to eBay.

Joltid and eBay have already been fighting in a British court over that agreement, bickering back and forth about whether eBay violated the terms of that deal or not.

Earlier this week, via Joltid, Zennström and Friis also filed suit again against Skype and its owner, eBay, for copyright violations in the U.S.

For good measure, they also added the winning buyout group, including Silver Lake Partners, Index, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Did I forget to mention that lawsuit-happy Zennström and Friis also sued the investment banker who represented them in the original Skype sale?

So, it comes as no shock that both Joltid and Joost–aka Zennström and Friis–announced yesterday that they are suing Volpi personally, as well as Index again.

They allege tech skullduggery on Volpi’s part, in which he used confidential information he learned at Joost to thwart Joltid.

Evidence and proof–on first blush–seem to have little to do with this and ire at losing a deal and trying to gain leverage for a settlement seem to be the true game.

And what their next legal move might be is anybody’s guess.

But you get the idea here, don’t you?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090918/parsing-the-legal-tantrums-of-zennstrom-and-friis/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090918/kara-visits-the-oxford-social-media-convention-i-say-twitt-er-you-say-twitt-ah/ http://allthingsd.com/20090918/kara-visits-the-oxford-social-media-convention-i-say-twitt-er-you-say-twitt-ah/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:40:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18594

Today, BoomTown has traveled to England to see the Queen, but mostly to attend and speak at a conference at the University of Oxford, titled “Oxford Social Media Convention: Assessing the Evolution, Impact and Potential of Social Media.”

In other words: What is up with this Twitter thing, but in a British accent.

(By the way, the Twitter stream on the conference can be found at #oxsmc09.)

Well, I can report here that some folks are perplexed by the growing size and valuation of the San Francisco microblogging service, some adore it and some don’t use it at all, thank you veddy much.

Of course, there is a whole lot more going on, including: Discussions of the changing relationship between blogs and mainstream media, making science more social, the growth of the corporate blog and the political impact of social media.

I am on the panel about the ways companies need to use social networking, as well as a wrap-up on the overall impact of this key Internet trend.

So far today, it seems people here are still chewing over the changes wrought by Facebook, Twitter and the blogs and the way the audience has taken over the conversation from the so-called professionals.

In other words, as in the U.S., the social trend is still seen as an experiment rather than the real thing.

In the media session, for example, mainstream journalists here seemed to still be stuck in their whiny woe-is-me mode rather than leaning forward and trying to come up with ways to ride the latest wave of change.

When many kept harping on the issue of accuracy in the blogosphere, I could not resist and asked: “Can you give me the exact date when the old media will stop whining about new media?”

I did not get an answer, but I can tell you it better be quick, especially as these innovative social sites grow larger and larger, evidence that consumers like what’s happening.

So does the guy from Facebook, of course, the social networking service that announced it had reached an astonishing 300-million users mark last week.

“It’s very exciting,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s European policy director, discussing how social media are evolving in ways that everyone still cannot imagine.

I’d agree.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090918/kara-visits-the-oxford-social-media-convention-i-say-twitt-er-you-say-twitt-ah/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090902/youtube-uk-settles-royalty-fight-turns-music-videos-back-on-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20090902/youtube-uk-settles-royalty-fight-turns-music-videos-back-on-again/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:00:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10687 Rejoice, British Web surfers! You’ll soon be able to watch your favorite music videos on YouTube again.

Google has reached a settlement with a British licensing group in a dispute over royalty payments, which means that YouTube’s U.K. outpost will begin showing licensed music videos again. The clips disappeared five months ago when YouTube and PRS for Music, the U.K. body that collects money on behalf of songwriters, couldn’t come to terms.

Google (GOOG) executives wouldn’t disclose how much they’re paying songwriters for the rights to play videos that feature their songs, but said they would be cutting PRS for Music a single check that covers the length of the deal. The new pact will extend through June 2012 and will retroactively stretch back to the beginning of this year.

The deal may provide a blueprint for resolving a similar dispute between the video site and a German rights society. But I’m not sure it will do much for the one Google is still (still!) stuck in with Warner Music Group (WMG).

Meanwhile, this video doesn’t feature a British composer or performer and wasn’t shot in Britain. No connection at all, really. But if you like Lou Reed, louche ’70s fashion and/or awesome ’70s facial hair, you’re gonna like it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090902/youtube-uk-settles-royalty-fight-turns-music-videos-back-on-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090626/just-imagination-running-away-with-apple-intel/ http://allthingsd.com/20090626/just-imagination-running-away-with-apple-intel/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:30:14 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20301 Apple (AAPL) put some of the vast $28 billion in cash and short-term investments it has socked away to good use this week, raising its stake in Imagination Technologies. The $5.16 million investment nearly triples Apple’s original 3.6 percent stake, giving it 9.5 percent ownership of the British chip designer whose PowerVR graphics technology figures prominently in the iPhone and iPod touch.

Interestingly, the move follows an investment by another high-profile licensee: Intel. The chipmaker last week increased its own stake in Imagination to 14 16 percent, causing some to speculate that Intel (INTC) was prepping a takeover bid for the company. After all, Intel uses PowerVR in its Atom platform, which is crucial to its success on the mobile phone market.

Could these dueling investments set the stage for a takeover battle for the company? It’s certainly possible, but Seymour Pierce analyst Ian Robertson says it’s unlikely.

“Apple and Intel are investors not buyers,” Robertson said in a research note. “We do not expect either Intel or Apple to go beyond 15-20 percent in the short to medium term and we would be very surprised indeed if they were to attempt to buy Imagination. We note that both Apple and Intel have the resources to swallow up the company without chewing. We remind investors that Intel has a long history of taking and holding significant stakes in companies that it has seen as important to its further success–notably Micron and RAMBUS where its investment was not necessarily a guarantee of success for these companies.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090626/just-imagination-running-away-with-apple-intel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090601/susans-last-stand-internet-phenom-boyle-comes-in-second/ http://allthingsd.com/20090601/susans-last-stand-internet-phenom-boyle-comes-in-second/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:13:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14059

The Scottish woman who went from unknown to become the Internet’s most watched video failed to win first place in the final of the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent” this past weekend.

Instead, a noisy dance troupe called Diversity won, putting Boyle in second place.

Boyle’s chances had been diminishing over the past week, since the British tabloids have been piling on and tarnishing her fairytale reputation, reporting on odd public outbursts by her due to the pressure of her instant stardom online and off.

Their nickname for her: SuBo.

And, sadly, there are now reports that Boyle has been taken to a mental facility to get some rest and relaxation.

In any case, there’s no question Boyle’s been a treat to watch online and she deserves that time to recover from impact of the media frenzy around her.

It’s likely she’ll be singing again publicly soon–but, until then, here is her performance in the finale (and below it is Diversity, the winner):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090601/susans-last-stand-internet-phenom-boyle-comes-in-second/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081222/another-critic-tries-stomping-on-the-long-tail/ http://allthingsd.com/20081222/another-critic-tries-stomping-on-the-long-tail/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:09:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2364 Wired Editor’s Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” theory–in a nutshell, that the Internet would allow a huge market of niche products to survive and thrive–is one of the more influential memes of the past few years. Which means it is also subject to backlash.

Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review tried to refute Anderson in a well-argued piece. Now comes a set of British researchers trying to do the same thing. From the U.K. Times:

The idea that niche markets were the key to the future for internet sellers was described as one of the most important economic models of the 21st century when it was spelt out by Chris Anderson in his book, ‘The Long Tail,’ in 2006. He used data from an American online music retailer to predict that the internet economy would shift from a relatively small number of ‘hits’–mainstream products–at the head of the demand curve toward a ‘huge number of niches in the tail’.

A new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, suggests that the niche market is not an untapped goldmine and that online sales success still relies on big hits. They found that, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. For albums, the figures were even more stark. Of the 1.23 million available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.”

Anderson, who has been a good sport about jousting with his critics on his blog, tells the Times that he needs to see more data before weighing in on this newest salvo. But I don’t have that compunction. My two cents–or at least, my two sort-of related points:

• The Long Tail is a useful way to think about back catalogs. The Web means you can extend the reach of a product once it has had an initial run, and it allows aggregators like Amazon (AMZN) to make money by assembling lots of niche products at one storefront. It’s less useful for people who are creating albums, books, movies, etc., and need to get compensated for their work in the present tense.
• One area where the Long Tail holds up just fine: Web publishing. The awesome power of Google (GOOG) means that stuff you publish once on the Internet will continue to find new audiences in the future, more or less without any additional effort on your part. Any Web publisher invariably finds that a large chunk of its audience tends to come to its site to consume stuff they produced weeks, months or years ago. Of course, consumers don’t want to pay anything in order to consume that stuff, which means it’s only useful if you can sell Web advertising against it. But that’s a different post.

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