Here’s a ZDNet video of the gadgets I selected for the Churchill Club event that Walt Mossberg and I do annually.

This year’s celebrity geek guests were a pair of well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VCs, Reid Hoffman and John Lilly; along with our regular gadget freak, Greg Harper.

Here’s the video of my stuff, with an assist from my No. 1 son, Louie:

It started as curiosity and it turned into just being addicted to what was going on behind the scenes … I was almost relieved when they came and took the computer.

Christopher Chaney, the alleged “celeb hacker” who was arrested on charges of hacking the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities, said he was glad he got caught because he didn’t know how to stop.

The latest advertising for Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad is kind of cool, especially compared to the old spots for its webOS cousin, the Palm Pre, that featured the creepy naked lady.

(I still have nightmares that she is going to appear at the end of my bed in the middle of the night and stab me to death with a Pixi.)

In any case, TouchPad’s recent celebrity spokesmodels — comedian Russell Brand and “Glee” diva Lea Michele — are now presumably out of a job flacking the now-defunct tablet device. HP said yesterday that it had decided to stop making them.

Here are the videos of their ads, as well as a few more Brand did for HP about the TouchPad. And, just to remind you of the horror, I also added the creepy naked lady ad, in which she freakishly recounts a weird juggling story.

Enjoy:

Related posts

• Hewlett-Packard Says Goodbye to PCs, webOS
• HP Pulls Plug on webOS Hardware, Leaves OS Future in Doubt
• HP And webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Liveblogging HP’s “Everything Including the Kitchen Sink” Conference Call
• HP’s Apotheker: We Struck Out with WebOS, but Maybe Someone Else Wants a Swing?
• Viral Video: Like Palm’s Creepy Naked Lady, TouchPad’s Floating Celeb Heads Get the HP Boot
• Licensing webOS May Not Be Much of an Option for HP
• Hewlett-Packard’s PC Business: What Happens Next?
• Worth More Dead Than Alive: Could HP Turn a Profit on Palm’s Patents?
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?

One of the latest is SceneTap, a free application for iPhone and Android smartphones released in recent weeks that displays real-time stats on the local bar scene. Based on information collected via face-detection cameras installed at participating bars, the app shows the number of people at the bar, the male-to-female ratio and the average age of patrons.

Another application called SocialCamera allows users to snap a picture with their Android phone, instantly recognize their Facebook friends in the frame, tag the photos and post them to the Web. In other games, the technology detects which celebrity a person most resembles or whether they have the genetic traits of a vampire.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Huffington Post Media Group, AOL’s fast-moving content unit, is launching a celebrity site called HuffPost Celebrity today, as well as another called HuffPost Culture.

HuffPost Celebrity, which ate AOL’s former celeb-focused site PopEater, is described as “an insider-y look at entertainment and celebrity, with the latest news, original reporting and scoops from our team of reporters.”

While the Huffington Post has always had a huge dollop of celebrity news and blogs, it puts the much more focused site into a very crowded arena online, with competitors such as Yahoo’s omg!, Time Warner’s People magazine Web site, as well as AOL-owned TMZ.com.

That means a major focus on the news site’s mix of short and juicy items, blogs of the famous (and infamous) and lots and lot of videos and photos.

And, indeed, the new site, which can be viewed here, has that. The main feature now is a big photo with the title, “PHOTOS: Gaga Arrives Down Under” and blogs by Jon Favreau and Tracey Ullman and slide shows of “Kardashian Bikini Show & Tell” and “Child Stars That Avoided ‘The Curse.’”

The move is another of a series of them in an aggressive expansion of AOL’s content offerings under its chief, Arianna Huffington (pictured right), who now has the money and staff she has obviously long wanted to blow her online media empire out.

And it is clearly yet another sign of the reliance AOL now has on the media group’s platform, since it bought the Huffington Post for $315 million in January.

She recently launched a U.K. edition of the site, for example, and has pushed out a number of new categories as the HuffPost has subsumed all of AOL’s previous content efforts.

Here’s the official press release on the latest launches:

AOL HUFFINGTON POST MEDIA GROUP ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF TWO SITES: HUFFPOST CELEBRITY AND HUFFPOST CULTURE

Entertainment News Site Goes Live Today, Arts Destination on Wednesday;

Both With HuffPost’s Real-Time News and Opinion, and Leading Edge User Engagement

“HuffPost Celebrity Network” Syndication Feed Launches Today

New York, NY (July 11, 2011) — The AOL Huffington Post Media Group, a leading source of news, opinion, entertainment, community and digital information, announces today the launch of two destination sites: HuffPost Celebrity (huffingtonpost.com/celebrity), a lively mix of real-time entertainment news, opinion and gossip, and HuffPost Culture (huffingtonpost.com/culture), covering a wide span of the arts, from theatre and film to music and dance. HuffPost Celebrity goes live today and HuffPost Culture launches Wednesday.

Both sites offer The Huffington Post’s unique combination of real-time news and opinion, and a passionate and engaged community powered by the latest social engagement tools. HuffPost Celebrity also features a syndication platform offering the latest entertainment news and blog posts to partner sites. HuffPost Celebrity is edited by Katy Hall, Managing Editor of Entertainment of AOL Huffington Post Media Group; HuffPost Culture is edited by Gazelle Emami, Culture Editor of AOL Huffington Post Media Group; and both sites are being overseen by John Montorio, Editorial Director, Entertainment, Culture & Lifestyle of AOL Huffington Post Media Group. Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, made the announcement.

“We’ve always offered a take on celebrity and culture that is a fun, high/low mix that reflects our users’ diverse range of interests and desire for comprehensive entertainment news delivered in real-time. Creating these two new destination sites will allow us to both expand and deepen our coverage,” said Arianna Huffington. “Our goal is to give our readers everything from buzzy items to thought-provoking opinion pieces delivered with a style and a voice that’s uniquely HuffPost. We want to inform and entertain, while engaging our community around these subjects and serving as a starting point for compelling ‘digital watercooler’ conversations.”

HuffPost Celebrity is an insider-y look at entertainment and celebrity, with the latest news, original reporting and scoops from our team of reporters. The site is accessible, fresh, and filled with the kinds of stories our readers love to share. HuffPost Celebrity encourages users to engage with stories and features the most up-to-the-minute photos, videos, slide shows, and blog posts from industry executives to celebrities, all weighing in in real-time. Among the talent that has blogged on The Huffington Post are Alec Baldwin, Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney, Madonna, Ryan Reynolds, Larry David, Bill Maher, Rob Lowe, Russell Simmons, Natalie Portman and more.

HuffPost Culture will complement our entertainment coverage, delivering a one-stop-shop for all that’s happening in the performing arts, visual and broadcast arts, including dance, opera, music, architecture, film, TV, photography and more. The site will have visually arresting images of performances and art pieces with HuffPost’s singular style of coverage, including original reporting, artist profiles, reviews, interactive infographics, sneak peeks, slide shows, videos and more. HuffPost Culture will be a forum for discussion of arts and culture, and serves as a guide for users wanting to stay abreast of cultural news and events.

The site will offer a number of ongoing features meant to explore the arts from all angles. For example, as part of a “Strange Bedfellows” series — following unexpected collaborations between artists — HuffPost Culture will offer an exclusive video collaboration between David Lynch and the band Interpol; “On Our Radar” will highlight emerging talent; and profiles of artists include an “Architects in America” series. HuffPost Culture will feature exclusive playlists from musicians and DJs, starting off with a summer playlist from Chromeo. The weekly “Culture Forecast” will serve as a handy guide to what’s happening in arts and culture. At launch, HuffPost Culture will offer different best-of-the-year-so-far picks, from music to art exhibitions. In addition, HuffPost Culture will present curated content from AOL sites such as Moviefone and HuffPost Celebrity, as well as the best arts coverage from around the web.

The launch of the HuffPost Celebrity Network today offers media partners syndicated, constantly updating entertainment content available for use across a wide variety of platforms. Participating partners include SFGate, Tribune’s Zap2It, and Russell Simmons’ Global Grind. “HuffPost Celebrity demonstrates our ability to combine compelling content with a platform centered around user engagement, while our new feed, the HuffPost Celebrity Network, shows how we can most effectively leverage our unique assets,” said Kerry Trainor, Senior Vice President/General Manager, AOL Entertainment. “We make it turnkey for our partners to offer their users the highest quality entertainment news, whether it’s for the latest tablet or a long-standing website. We want to offer a vibrant distribution feed that reaches a wide audience for our content, while enabling our partners to engage their users around it as well –- it’s a classic win-win.”

Oh dear, oh my — with the first move that the new owners of Myspace have made, it’s pretty clear they are taking the worrisome look-at-the-shiny-celebrity approach.

The trio of Vanderhook brothers who run Specific Media, which paid $35 million to buy the News Corp.-owned music-focused social networking site, loudly added Justin Timberlake as an investor in the deal yesterday and then gave a lot of interviews around it.

In its press release, Specific Media said Timberlake would “play a major role in developing the creative direction and strategy for the company moving forward” and focus on being a premier original content destination.

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place,” Timberlake said in the release. “Art is inspired by people and vice versa, so there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”

Sounds good, I suppose, but maybe they should focus on making products the star first.

Nope, the star is the star first, even though swanning around the appealing singer and actor’s name felt a lot like shilling him.

Justin has a vision! Justin will have a team of creatives around him! Justin is being ironic, having played a techie and now being one!

Justin will even be in the office! Um, sometimes!

Well, whatev, since I have been to these celebrity-meets-the-Internet rodeos before, and they have mostly ended in tears in terms of creating any kind of real Web property.

Remember Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and their LivePlanet fiasco back in Web 1.0? Wasn’t RuPaul around then helping WebEx? Didn’t the much-hyped MC Hammer dance site called DanceJam get sold off in 2009?

And I’m still waiting for several Web efforts by Ashton Kutcher, such as Internet fare for Katalyst Films, to make any ripple. In fact, the new “Two and a Half Men” television star has now seemed to focus more in investing in tech start-ups as a quieter partner.

In Hollywood terms, most of these high-profile marriages of glamour and nerd have been turkeys.

Of course, they will never stop, and I like to rub shoulders against a celeb, too, especially when it’s at the dull geekfests that take place in Silicon Valley.

But the only way Myspace is going to revive itself, even at the bargain basement price that Specific Media paid for it, is to focus relentlessly on figuring out a strategy, hire a team of crack engineers, and inspire them to build a killer product.

I don’t know what that will look like, but I do know the creation of such innovations requires a head-down approach of truly committed people, and not some all-night party of fabulous.

For a long time, Myspace’s creators were very interested in the latter and were not engaged in making the former happen.

And, by the time new managers did, it seemed to be too late and News Corp. was too sick and tired to tolerate it, writing Myspace off as a too-tarnished brand to make thrive again.

So it sold Myspace and who knows what tomorrow and Specific Media will bring.

All I can think of to say is what I wrote on Twitter yesterday when asked what lesson came from the Myspace debacle and what advice I would give to the new owners.

That would be: Don’t suck.

That’s a lot harder to do than it seems.

In any case, at least Timberlake makes really good music videos, as you will see below for his “SexyBack”:

As social games attract large user bases, it is increasingly common for advertisers to sponsor virtual goods to get in front of a very engaged audience.

The most high-profile example lately was this week’s launch of GagaVille, a Lady Gaga-inspired farm on FarmVille, Zynga’s popular social game.

In both cases, the sponsorships have been in older games, which are having a hard time attracting as many daily users as they once did. It’s unclear whether injecting high-profile brands into the games will help players reconnect or attract new players.

In the case of GagaVille, players have the chance to unlock songs from the pop star’s album coming out next week. After launching, FarmVille appeared on Facebook’s list of top performers for the week, reports InsideSocialGames. It gained 88,736 daily users to hit a total of 11.3 million.

As part of the Jamie Oliver promotion, players on Restaurant City will have to collect multiple ingredients in order to make recipes from the celebrity chef, such as Farfalle Carbonara, Asparagus Fettuccine, Basil Pesto Pasta and Meatball Pasta. Virtual goods will include the Jamie Oliver Pasta Maker.

Ultimately, players will be directed to a link to visit Jamie Oliver’s site, where they can learn how to make the recipes at home.

“Really the strategy is two-fold: to provide something fun and engaging with a brand people can feel good about. It’s also an opportunity for us to reach a whole new set of players, who are fans of him,” said Tom Sarris, Playfish’s director of global communications.

Restaurant City attracts nearly six million monthly users and 1.4 million daily users. It registered one notch higher than FarmVille on this week’s list of top gainers, coming in at number 12.

The promotion corresponds with the new TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” which airs in both the U.S. and the U.K., and addresses concerns about obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.

There will be more of that, it seems, with the elevation of Yahoo exec Sam Silverstein (pictured here) as head of its special events coverage. Sources said it will be a major area of emphasis, given obvious advertiser interest.

It’s all part of a lot of dramatic changes being made in the media unit at Yahoo, which is run by its newish Audience head Mickie Rosen.

Previous to his new duties, Silverstein has been mostly focused on major sports events for Yahoo, but has also been managing content on its front page and in tech and green arenas.

The move to taking over more comes after Lawrence Yee–who led Yahoo entertainment efforts and was once the managing editor of its omg! celebrity site–headed to TMZ.com, the competing and much sassier celebrity site, owned by AOL. His new job is as managing editor of its TooFab site, TMZ overlord Harvey Levin confirmed to me.

Also gone recently is Annette Cardwell, who was managing editor of Yahoo’s Shine women’s site, who is now working as director of digital content and games at Future US, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Now it will be up to Silverstein, who is well-regarded at Yahoo, to run the upcoming Royal Wedding coverage by himself.

William and Kate, as well as Bartz, will be watching.

Of all the many entertainers in Hollywood, none was more authentically a star than screen legend Elizabeth Taylor.

Ailing in recent years, it’s too easy to forget what a global sensation she was, in the days well before celebrities had the Internet and other digital means to become well known.

Taylor needed none of that to shine, as you can see here from the trailer for BoomTown’s favorite of her many movie roles, as Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

She was buried today at Forest Lawn, of course. Sigh.

AOL will begin rolling out its plans to overhaul its panoply of content sites as early as today, a key part of its integration with the Huffington Post, sources familiar with the situation said.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will be sending out an internal memo on the topic soon, said sources with knowledge of the moves.

He will outline how the New York-based Internet portal, which paid $315 million to acquire the high-profile news and opinion site, will essentially close down dozens of its dedicated content sites–some being shuttered completely and others integrated with existing Huffington Post sites.

One example of the first is Politics Daily, as has been previously reported; it will no longer exist as a brand. Its staff is being integrated into the Huffington Post’s more robust political offerings.

It goes both ways, though–the Huffington Post’s travel site will be closed in favor of AOL’s stronger offering in that arena.

And still other well-known AOL brands, such as its PopEater celebrity site and its StyleList fashion and beauty site, will keep their names but no longer exist as separate destination sites. PopEater will be integrated into HuffPo’s entertainment and StyleList to its similar site.

[UPDATE: StyleList's status was shifted just this morning--it will remain a standalone brand and AOL's Shelterpop will become StyleList at Home, integrating into StyleList. Plus it will all now be called Stylist--losing the "e" and capped "L."]

The changes are causing some tension within AOL, given it is a drastic shift from relatively recent efforts to expand its portfolio of editorial sites.

In fact, some insiders are calling the recent vetting of which content sites to close and which to keep as “death panels,” a somewhat dicey reference to controversies over the Obama administration’s healthcare plan.

Also on deck for tomorrow will be letters sent out to freelancers about new plans to hire some–though not all–of them. According to several sources, AOL content head Arianna Huffington outlined the plan to editors recently, stressing the need to focus on staff-generated and more journalistically focused content.

One thing that is not happening is the appointment of a new editor-in-chief for AOL’s flagship tech news site, Engadget.

BoomTown reported on the recent departure of Engadget’s top two editors, Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky and Managing Editor Nilay Patel.

The news rocketed around the small echo chamber that is the tech blogosphere, which is no surprise since Engadget is one of the largest sites on the Web covering the tech sector.

In the interim, staffer Darren Murph has been appointed managing editor of Engadget. He reports to Joshua Fruhlinger, editorial director for Engadget, Switched and AOL Tech. Brad Hill is the business director for the properties.

Engadget is one of the largest in tech, with 14 million unique visitors a month. Its main competitor is Gawker’s Gizmodo. AOL also owns TechCrunch, another tech news site.

An email to AOL for comment has not yet been returned.

The culmination of the deal–which has already been approved by regulators–is set to be announced by the New York-based company this morning, only one month after it was struck.

And–in a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–sources said the closing will be accompanied by the announcement of the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group unit.

Among the new reporters are some more high-profile grabs from other media giants, including The Daily’s Jon Ward. He has been the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.’s high-profile online newspaper, which only recently launched.

Also set to join AOL is Yahoo’s senior media writer Michael Calderone.

Interestingly, along with more experienced editorial staff, sources said the announcement will also include new hires via the Huffington Post’s Jefferson Program for Young Journalists.

Sources said the new hires are only the beginning of a series of them, as the impact of the leadership of Huffington becomes clearer.

Along with the news and opinion site, the well-known media personality is now in charge of all of AOL’s varied content properties, including its locally aimed Patch.

Huffington, with obviously strong support from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, has been talking a lot in a plethora of interviews since the deal was announced a few weeks ago about the importance of creating a new media organization focused on original reporting.

In a way, AOL is now competing with big news sites such as those on Yahoo, as well as smaller niche content and also mainstream entities.

Even before the deal was struck with AOL, the Huffington Post had been heading down that path of pulling in mainstream journalists. Last year, it hired former New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman and former Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, among others.

The formula? Adding the strong journalism reputation of these reporters to the eclectic mix of socializing, blogging, celebritizing and aggressive aggregating that the site has used to garner huge amounts of traffic in recent years.

As I had previously written, the AOL Way–the same for a strategy document about content on the site–is now the Arianna Way.

Here are Huffington and Armstrong talking about such issues in in an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with them just before they announced the deal on Super Bowl Sunday about a month ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110303/dear-andrew-no-comment-mason-how-about-a-comment-on-that-unfortunate-new-beard/ http://allthingsd.com/20110303/dear-andrew-no-comment-mason-how-about-a-comment-on-that-unfortunate-new-beard/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:25:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41248

That Internet sprite, Groupon Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, continued in his quest to be the cleverest little entrepreneur on the Web with a very funny post on the Chicago-based start-up’s blog yesterday titled: “No Comment!”

Mason is well known for his hipster-ironic-cute no-comment responses to the media, such as one he gave the New York Times recently:

“Andrew Mason, Groupon’s chief executive, declined an earlier interview request, adding that he would talk ‘only if you want to talk about my other passion, building miniature dollhouses.’”

Buuuuuurn, NYT!

In his latest rumination on life as a digital celebrity, Mason more fully outlined what he would not comment on, including everything even remotely interesting you might want to know about the social buying company, including:

* Plans relating to capital-raising, including a possible public offering

* Pre-announcements of new products

* Our competitors or the competitive landscape

* Statements on core business metrics, including margins or profitability

* Any projections regarding revenue, growth rates or other financial metrics

*Strategic transactions or partnerships with other companies

Thank goodness any metrics we want about how many discounted stripper pole lessons Groupon has sold in Omaha is on-limits!

Mason–who appears to want to become the Midwestern version of comic Jackie Mason, except Jackie would have taken the $6 billion from Google–is now styling a very scruffy Jeremiah-Johnson beard on this blog post, which you can see above.

BoomTown’s query on that: Why, dear God, why?

Here is Mason’s full “No Comment!” post:

No Comment!

As press interest in Groupon has grown, I’ve found myself increasingly uttering two words that have always annoyed me: “no comment.” We like to be as transparent with our customers as possible, but, just as people don’t walk around naked, there are some things that we as a company don’t talk about (for obvious reasons).

The least we can do is be transparent about the things we won’t be transparent about, which are listed below:

* Plans relating to capital-raising, including a possible public offering

* Pre-announcements of new products

* Our competitors or the competitive landscape

* Statements on core business metrics, including margins or profitability

* Any projections regarding revenue, growth rates or other financial metrics

* Strategic transactions or partnerships with other companies

While we’ll clam up when asked about the above business-y stuff, we’ll always be straight forward about things that affect the experience we’re creating for customers and merchants.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110303/dear-andrew-no-comment-mason-how-about-a-comment-on-that-unfortunate-new-beard/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-huffington-post-wont-go-to-11-but-it-does-make-sense/ http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-huffington-post-wont-go-to-11-but-it-does-make-sense/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 11:30:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29392 There are lots of Web M&As that don’t make much sense. But after you get past the “OMG!!!!!” novelty of AOL’s $315 million Huffington Post buy, this one has a straightforward logic to it: Old, big, slow company buys new, small fast company, hopes some of the zippy mojo rubs off.

Steve Case is right to point out that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “one plus one equals eleven” logic didn’t pan out during the first boom, when Case was running AOL and engineered the disastrous Time Warner deal.

But here, at least, both companies are trying to do the same thing: Make a lot of Web stuff at a low price, and sell ads against it.

So maybe AOL + HuffPo won’t equal 11. And maybe 10x Huffington Post’s reported 2010 revenue is a very pre-Lehman multiple. But the broad strokes here make sense to me:

AOL is pushing its workers very hard to make more content it can sell. HuffPo is a content-making machine:

Huffington Post still has the reputation as a left-leaning political site written by Arianna Huffington’s celebrity pals. In reality, it is most concerned with attracting eyeballs anyway it can. Sometimes it’s with well-regarded investigative journalism, and much more often it’s via very aggressive, very clever aggregation. And sometimes it’s by simply paying very, very close attention to what Google wants, which leads to stories like “What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?“

However they’ve done it, it’s worked–much more efficiently than AOL, which is headed in that direction as well. AOL reaches about 112 million people in the U.S. every month with a staff of 5,000. The Huffington Post, which employed about 200 people prior to the deal, gets to about 26 million.*

AOL can start selling this stuff immediately:

HuffPo reportedly generated around $30 million in revenue last year, but that was done using a relatively small staff that sales chief Greg Coleman had just started building. AOL’s much bigger sales group, which has just about finished its lengthy reorg, should be able to boost that performance immediately.

AOL can afford it:

Tim Armstrong’s company ended 2010 with $725 million in cash, much of which it generated by selling off old assets. This seems like a relatively easy check to write and one that shouldn’t involve a lot of overlapping staff–AOL figures it will save $20 million annually in cost overlaps, but that it will spend about $20 million this year on restructuring charges. HuffPo is about four percent of AOL’s size, and several of its top executives are already stepping aside. (This is the second time in two years that sales boss Greg Coleman has been moved out of a job by Tim Armstrong.) The biggest risk here will be in the way that Huffington, who is now editor in chief for all of AOL’s edit staff, gets along with her new employees. On the other hand, morale is low enough at many AOL sites that it will be hard to make things worse.

AOL Gets a Really Big Brand:

There’s some downside risk to attaching Arianna Huffington’s name to a big, mainstream media brand, as her politics and/or persona might scare off some readers and/or advertisers. But two years after Armstrong arrived from Google, AOL still doesn’t have a definable identity, other than “the Web site your parents might still pay for even though there’s no reason to do so.” Being known as “the guys who own Huffington Post” is infinitely better than that.

HuffPo’s “pro” list is much shorter, but only because there’s not much to think about for them: Huffington, co-founder Kenneth Lerer and their backers get a nice return on the five years and $37 million they put into the company. And those who stay on get to leverage the benefits of a much larger acquirer–access to more eyballs and more advertisers. Easy enough to understand.

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Uploaded by TZA. – Click for more funny videos.

*(Something about these numbers, culled from AOL’s and Huffington Post’s own releases, doesn’t add up, as AOL now says the combined company will have 117 million uniques. But it’s close enough for now.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-huffington-post-wont-go-to-11-but-it-does-make-sense/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apprats-can-make-you-huge-on-youtube-it-hopes/ http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apprats-can-make-you-huge-on-youtube-it-hopes/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:05:34 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34530

It’s been a long time since Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer ruled Hollywood and decided on the fates of the legion of stars under their strict command.

Today, of course, it’s a mess out there for talent, as the media landscape continues to fracture into ever tinier bits.

Thus, the curtain rises on AppRats, a start-up out of i/o Ventures that is taking an aggressive approach to helping YouTube’s top 100 celebrities build their fan bases on Facebook.

How aggressive?

AppRats isn’t asking for permission, even from clients.

I met with AppRats’ only two employees, CEO Charlene Kuperstein and CTO Ryan Moriarty, near their new Santa Monica, Calif. headquarters to talk about the market opening they think needs filling.

And, when asked what they were doing exactly, Moriarty–who recently became Dr. Moriarty after finishing a PhD in computer science and cryptography from UCLA–was quick to answer: “We’re hacking Facebook.”

After a recent round of seed funding, led by George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, and joined by the likes of Twitter’s head of Geo-Othman Larakai, AppRats now has another $230,000 with which to be disruptive.

Currently, a YouTube celebrity often interacts with fans using the Google-owned video site’s comments box directly below the video player.

A channel page–such as this one from MysteryGuitarMan–will list all the videos published by the producer’s account, and allow a some customization by the owner.

Fans leave comments, post response videos and follow along with the two to three videos most of YouTube’s top 100 channels post in a week.

AppRats has created FaceBook apps for each of the YouTube 100. They act like YouTube channel pages, but drop them inside Facebook and shake in some soft-core game dynamics.

“We make a branded spot to hang out with your favorite YouTube celebrity. It allows users to rate themselves as fans,” said Moriarty. “They can see how many videos they’ve watched, which ones they’ve missed, and get alerts about when the next video is published.”

Kuperstein said there was a three-week period around Thanksgiving when AppRats was adding 100,000 users a week, or three times its typical traffic, which is usually generated by YouTube celebrities linking to the AppRats Facebook app from elsewhere on the web.

The reason: AppRats started adding posts to a Facebook users’ wall every time they viewed a video.

But would that be essentually spamming all of a user’s friends?

“Exactly. And then Facebook shut that down,” admitted Kuperstein. “Now, we are emailing people whenever a new video from a subscribed channel comes out.”

For all its bravado, a great many questions remain for AppRats’ services, which its founders only seem to regard as a workaround.

That includes a major move into social from YouTube or, more likely, a major video push from Facebook might, overnight, fill in the crack that currently incubates AppRats.

Whether AppRats can hack its way out of these kinds of jams, of course, remains to be seen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apprats-can-make-you-huge-on-youtube-it-hopes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101209/viral-video-let-it-be-with-d-list-celebs-in-norway-really/ http://allthingsd.com/20101209/viral-video-let-it-be-with-d-list-celebs-in-norway-really/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:05:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38361

Here is one of the oddest videos out on the Web right now.

It’s a six-minute ad for a Norwegian television talk show called “Gylne Tider” in which a strange collection of some very whatever-happened-to celebrities lip-synch to the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

There is former James Bond, Roger Moore; former George Costanza, Jason Alexander; former skating thug Tonya Harding.

And many, many more:

Gylne Tider – Let It Be Vidéo stars_trash sélectionnée dans Musique

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101209/viral-video-let-it-be-with-d-list-celebs-in-norway-really/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/viral-video-bermanbraun-doesnt-just-make-web-sites-the-cape-on-nbc-debuts-soon/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/viral-video-bermanbraun-doesnt-just-make-web-sites-the-cape-on-nbc-debuts-soon/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:15:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37953

Here is a new teaser trailer for a midseason replacement television show on NBC called “The Cape.”

It’s from Hollywood multimedia production company BermanBraun, which is known in tech for the handsome content sites it makes for Microsoft’s MSN portal, such as the celebrity-focused Wonderwall.

And partner Lloyd Braun also ran Yahoo’s media unit for a bit.

“The Cape” is about a good cop who is framed and has to turn himself into a crime-fighting hero to regain his old life and family. With a cape, natch.

There is a lot of broodiness and moodiness and there are also carnival misfits in the show, which premieres January 9.

Here is the trailer for the show:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/viral-video-bermanbraun-doesnt-just-make-web-sites-the-cape-on-nbc-debuts-soon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/myspace-modernizes-mobile-site-and-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/myspace-modernizes-mobile-site-and-app/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:13:48 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=859 Remember when there was a whole phone–in fact a whole carrier–oriented around the booming social network Myspace? It was just a few years ago that the Helio MVNO came out, but it’s since been bought by Virgin and discontinued. These days, Myspace has had more basic and sparsely updated mobile offerings, but even so, the company says “a third of Myspace’s Gen Y users [are] interacting with the site on mobile devices every day.” Today Myspace announced it’s modernizing its mobile offerings.

A new Myspace mobile site at http://m.myspace.com launches today, formatted for iOS, Android, Palm and “select Nokia and BlackBerry devices.” It channels Myspace’s recent focus as an entertainment destination, with features emphasizing music and celebrity news and access to video content, but no music streaming.

An overdue iPhone app update is also set to arrive “in the coming weeks,” Myspace said. The company’s existing iPhone app hadn’t been updated since January 2010, and doesn’t include push notifications, instant messaging or status updating, according to vocal user complaints in the iPhone app reviews section. The new app will indeed include all those features, said a Myspace spokesperson.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/myspace-modernizes-mobile-site-and-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101129/twitter-gets-a-hollywood-guy-omid-ashtari/ http://allthingsd.com/20101129/twitter-gets-a-hollywood-guy-omid-ashtari/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 03:58:54 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=835 Twitter has hired its first official liaison to the stars: Creative Artists Agency veteran Omid Ashtari. His first day at the microblogging service was today.

Ashtari told me he is “going to be Twitter’s L.A. person” and will be dealing with media companies and celebrities. His role is not yet fully defined, but he said he sees opportunities for famous people to better use the Twitter platform.

Twitter confirmed the hire tonight, saying in an email that Ashtari’s assignment is “Entertainment Business Development” and that he “will lead efforts to assist the entertainment industry, including actors, musicians, and athletes, to make sure they are getting the most out of their use of Twitter. Omid will be based in Los Angeles, CA, but the scope of the job is global.”

Celebrity usage is a huge part of Twitter, of course, with well-known tweeting stars like Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber employing the platform to give millions of followers a real-time window into their lives.

That has happened mostly organically. Twitter has hosted many visiting celebs and dignitaries at its offices, and participated in tweet integration for events like the MTV Video Music Awards, but it has never dedicated personnel to famous people.

Ashtari left CAA late last year, after serving as an agent and a business development exec for nearly 10 years. At CAA, he negotiated deals for high-profile original Web video projects, such as Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” and “Gemini Division,” starring Rosario Dawson.

After that he caught the digital media bug and sought to get more involved in the tech world. This fall he joined ScreenTribe, a social television company trying to build on its early success with an Apple iPhone TV guide app.

Ashtari joins Twitter’s media and business development team led by Chloe Sladden and Robin Sloan.

You can follow him on Twitter here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101129/twitter-gets-a-hollywood-guy-omid-ashtari/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/viral-video-meryl-streep-on-lisa-kudrows-web-therapy/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/viral-video-meryl-streep-on-lisa-kudrows-web-therapy/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:01:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36843

BoomTown is a big fan of Lisa Kudrow’s Internet-only series, “Web Therapy.”

In the all-improv three-minute episodes, the former “Friends” star channels a prickly and decidedly odd therapist named Fiona Wallice, who does her sessions via online video chat.

It is destined to be a cable television show, but, so far, Kudrow has managed to attract a spate of celebrities to “Web Therapy.”

And she scored big tonight in the third-season premiere, with a guest appearance by Meryl Streep.

She plays Camilla Bowner, a sexual-orientation therapist.

The pair are, needless to say, a match made in Web heaven.

Here is a preview of the show, which posts in its entirety later today:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/viral-video-meryl-streep-on-lisa-kudrows-web-therapy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101105/viral-video-the-american-jewish-world-service-is-funny/ http://allthingsd.com/20101105/viral-video-the-american-jewish-world-service-is-funny/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 07:20:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36726

Here is a very charming PSA for the American Jewish World Service, which appeared on FunnyorDie.com.

It was done by Hollywood directing and writing phenom Judd Apatow and a passel of celebrities, celebrating the organization’s 25th anniversary.

BoomTown’s fave, as usual, is Lindsay Lohan, who–as washed up as she is now as an actor–really could still be a contender.

Enjoy:

Judd Apatow’s All-Star Video from Judd Apatow

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101105/viral-video-the-american-jewish-world-service-is-funny/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101025/tricia-duryee-hired-at-allthingsd/ http://allthingsd.com/20101025/tricia-duryee-hired-at-allthingsd/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:42:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/20101025/tricia-duryee-hired-at-allthingsd/

And the hit reporters/bloggers keep on coming at All Things Digital.

Today, we are honored to add Tricia Duryee to the staff of our site, where she will be covering commerce, online payments, gaming and more.

In other words: She’ll show us the money.

Or not, in some cases.

The broad commerce beat is important to ATD, as we focus on what we think is another key space on the Web–a topic that straddles retail, mobile, social and virtual, as companies old and new try to come up with sustainable business models online.

While Amazon and eBay, as well as new upstarts such as Groupon and Square, are the obvious candidates for Tricia’s coverage, how commerce is innovating on the Internet is a wider-ranging story we aim to cover closely.

And Tricia is just the kind of superb beat reporter we were looking for to pioneer the coverage for us.

She comes to ATD from her recent job as Editor of mocoNews.net, an online site dedicated to covering the wireless industry. MocoNews is a sister publication of paidContent.org, and both are owned by the Guardian News & Media.

Tricia joined mocoNews in February 2008 and has written about how the Apple iPhone has changed the cell phone industry, how ringtones are giving way to mobile TV and how the carriers are building out the next-generation of networks.

Prior to mocoNews, Tricia spent eight years at the Seattle Times. In her first five years, she covered venture capital and Seattle’s start-up scene.

And, in her final three years, she wrote about the regional wireless industry, which included stories such as Cingular’s $41 billion acquisition of AT&T and how T-Mobile’s Sidekick was a must-have among celebrities, including NBA All-Stars such as Ray Allen.

The Seattle native attended the University of Oregon, where she received a degree in journalism and a minor in business.

Tricia is located in Seattle still, in a 102-year-old house, with a 10-year-old dog and a more recent husband.

We’re also thrilled Tricia is reporting from there and hope she’ll give our readers a flavor of what’s going on in tech in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the key digital hubs in the U.S.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101025/tricia-duryee-hired-at-allthingsd/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101025/atd-adds-tricia-duryee-who-will-add-it-all-up-for-our-readers/ http://allthingsd.com/20101025/atd-adds-tricia-duryee-who-will-add-it-all-up-for-our-readers/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:42:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36108

And the hit reporters/bloggers keep on coming at All Things Digital.

Today, we are honored to add Tricia Duryee to the staff of our site, where she will be covering commerce, online payments, gaming and more.

In other words: She’ll show us the money.

Or not, in some cases.

The broad commerce beat is important to ATD, as we focus on what we think is another key space on the Web–a topic that straddles retail, mobile, social and virtual, as companies old and new try to come up with sustainable business models online.

While Amazon and eBay, as well as new upstarts such as Groupon and Square, are the obvious candidates for Tricia’s coverage, how commerce is innovating on the Internet is a wider-ranging story we aim to cover closely.

And Tricia is just the kind of superb beat reporter we were looking for to pioneer the coverage for us.

She comes to ATD from her recent job as Editor of mocoNews.net, an online site dedicated to covering the wireless industry. MocoNews is a sister publication of paidContent.org, and both are owned by the Guardian News & Media.

Tricia joined mocoNews in February 2008 and has written about how the Apple iPhone has changed the cell phone industry, how ringtones are giving way to mobile TV and how the carriers are building out the next-generation of networks.

Prior to mocoNews, Tricia spent eight years at the Seattle Times. In her first five years, she covered venture capital and Seattle’s start-up scene.

And, in her final three years, she wrote about the regional wireless industry, which included stories such as Cingular’s $41 billion acquisition of AT&T and how T-Mobile’s Sidekick was a must-have among celebrities, including NBA All-Stars such as Ray Allen.

The Seattle native attended the University of Oregon, where she received a degree in journalism and a minor in business.

Tricia is located in Seattle still, in a 102-year-old house, with a 10-year-old dog and a more recent husband.

We’re also thrilled Tricia is reporting from there and hope she’ll give our readers a flavor of what’s going on in tech in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the key digital hubs in the U.S.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101025/atd-adds-tricia-duryee-who-will-add-it-all-up-for-our-readers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101018/viral-video-a-dilemma-solved-and-also-for-perez-hilton/ http://allthingsd.com/20101018/viral-video-a-dilemma-solved-and-also-for-perez-hilton/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 07:20:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35266

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming movie “The Dilemma,” minus a joke that used the word “gay” in a negative manner.

Universal Pictures replaced the original teaser trailer after there were protests about it. In it, actor Vince Vaughn said: “Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars…are gay.”

With the recent spate of bullyings of gay teens that have ended in tragedy, such a move is probably wise and not too surprising.

More surprising was the video below it, in which gossip blogger Perez Hilton vowed to stop being so mean on his popular Web site.

Since a lot of his repertoire consists of nasty drawings and comments scrawled over photos, along with cruel nicknames for celebrities, it will be interesting to see how this change impacts his dubious success.

Here are the videos:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/viral-video-a-dilemma-solved-and-also-for-perez-hilton/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ad-ly-promises-to-get-more-celebrities-pitching-more-stuff-in-your-facebook-feed/ http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ad-ly-promises-to-get-more-celebrities-pitching-more-stuff-in-your-facebook-feed/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:37:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24422 Facebook has a big ad business. But its display ads tend to get ignored by the overwhelming majority of its users.

Ad.ly says it can fix this, with a time-tested method: Celebrity endorsements.

The social media ad start-up has already been doing this for some time, via its core product, which pays social network “influencers” to give products and brands a thumbs-up. That message appears in the celebrities’ news stream, where their followers are supposed to pay more attention than they would if they saw a conventional ad.

Now Ad.ly is rolling out a second ad unit, specifically for Facebook–a display ad featuring the celebrity’s endorsement. The start-up is packaging the two ads together to advertisers as the “Facebook Bundle” and promises that it can deliver eyeballs for less than $5 per 1,000 views.

It’s a pretty simple concept, as you can see from the materials the company has been sending to advertisers. Here’s the original “in-stream” Ad.ly ad unit (click to enlarge):

And here’s the new display unit that’s supposed to run in conjunction with the in-stream ad:

Don’t know if they’ll work, but they can’t be worse than many of the display ads Facebook sends my way right now. It routinely thinks, for instance, that I may be interested in joining the CIA, after I spend 18 to 24 months getting my Criminal Justice Degree. The social network is also insistent about getting me to whiten my teeth.

There’s always a risk that Facebook finds the new ads problematic for some reason (see: Twitter), but Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh says he reached out to Facebook last week and they sounded enthusiastic. I’m waiting for Facebook PR to confirm that with me, but for now we’ll take Gullov-Singh at his word.

I do have one worry, though. I keep looking at this Sgt. Peppers collage that Ad.ly put out to show off the “influencers” it has on its roster, and I don’t think I can recognize more than half of them. But that may have more to do with my impending old age than anything else. Right?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ad-ly-promises-to-get-more-celebrities-pitching-more-stuff-in-your-facebook-feed/feed/ 0