The Atlanta-based company’s mobile app tries to be a resource to consumers who are looking for local merchants and events, sort of like the Web’s original CitySearch service from years ago — except that it’s on mobile. The app also distributes coupons to restaurants, but instead of charging consumers for the deals, like Groupon does, they are free, and merchants pay a flat rate to Scoutmob each time one is redeemed.

Investors in the company’s second round include AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, Capital Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises and Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. To date, Scoutmob has raised $5 million, which means that even if it wanted to, it doesn’t have the resources to go up against Groupon and LivingSocial.

In an interview, Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the company gets lumped into the daily deals category, but said that from day one, “we tried to differentiate ourselves and to be more of a mobile company.”

So far, the strategy has worked.

The app, which is available free on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, has 1.2 million users who have redeemed one million offers. To date, the company has launched in 10 cities, with varying success rates. Some markets, like Seattle, don’t have many deals yet, while other cities, like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., are used more.

Because of its emphasis on mobile, the company was also able to to score a partnership with payment processing company First Data Corporation.

“It’s crazy, we are a two-and-a-half year-old company, and every week we have the largest payment companies in the world contacting us,” Tavani said. ”They are worried that if they don’t have mobile engagement, then what do they have?”

First Data processes about 55 percent of all transactions in the U.S., and will help Scoutmob close the loop of offering a discount, making a purchase and earning loyalty points.

The new funding will be used to support the company’s next wave of product development, which will include building out a mobile rewards program with the help of First Data and other payment companies it signs up.

Tavani said it will work like this: When users make a purchase at a Scoutmob location using a credit card, they’ll accrue points automatically. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be redeemed at any Scoutmob retail location.

Unlike traditional loyalty programs, which require consumers to go to the same coffee shop 10 times in order to earn a free coffee, Scoutmob will let consumers earn and redeem points by visiting any merchant in its network. It’s similar to frequent flyer programs, where miles can be earned at a variety of merchants and then redeemed at a handful of airlines.

“We want to be the equivalent of an airline reward program, but for local,” Tavani said. “That’s exactly what we want to be.”

Scoutmob has landed in a sector spanning local businesses and mobile payments, which is ripe from innovation and extremely crowded by well-funded start-ups and massively large incumbents. But Tavani argues that it’s a level playing field.

“There’s going to be multiple players and lots of winners,” he said. “Groupon and LivingSocial are two with a gigantic lead. But we can go out and visit merchants today — there’s no one preventing us from having those conversations.”

Let’s begin by drawing the distinction between a tool and a robot. Tools enable us to work more efficiently. Robots do the work for us (in fact, the original word robata means “hard work” in Czech). The vast majority of the Web sites and apps we use today are tools that enable us to work, play and share more efficiently. Over the last few years, through advances in artificial intelligence and data science, Web sites and apps are evolving. There is a new breed of applications focused entirely on working on our behalf. As humans, we constantly seek means to reduce the amount of work needed to reap rewards from a system. While the tools of today allow us to work less, the robots of the future will eliminate much of the work in the first place.

This incredible transformation is happening right before our eyes.

Your Search Robot

A long time ago, we would search for information by painstakingly looking up sources in a card catalog and reading a book. As much of that knowledge moved online, the directory (like Yahoo!) enabled us to browse and find content of interest. In time, the amount of information flowing online overwhelmed the directory — it would simply require too much work to browse the entire Web. Fortunately, a revolutionary tool, search — Google, really — made it very easy to find the documents that contain the answers we’re looking for. But while search presents us with a huge set of choices, it still takes a lot of work to find the answers.

Today, a new technology is eliminating that work by acting on our behalf to find the answers and even solve our problems. Siri is an artificial intelligence client that turns our devices into a virtual assistant. It removes the steps between searching for answers and finding them. Have a question about converting metric units? Ask Siri. Need to order your mother flowers? Let Siri handle that. Need to make dinner reservations for your date Friday? Let Siri do the work for you. And we’re just scratching the surface. We possess the vastness of all human knowledge in our pockets, yet much of our usage is limited to Angry Birds. This transformation to intelligent machines means we no longer have to work as hard to apply the knowledge locked in our devices; they’ll do the work for us.

Your Location Robot

In the 20th century, an enormous yellow book was delivered to our doorstep every year. We would heft this behemoth and flip through hundreds of pages to find a local business or restaurant of interest. Eventually, that process gave way to more efficient tools as local information moved online through apps like CitySearch and Yelp. Recently, via the mobile check-in, we can be presented places of interest and people near our current location. This new layer of geographical context is great, but checking in is still work.

Today, ambient location apps like Foursquare, Radar and Highlight are beginning to do that work for us. By passively monitoring our locations, they alert us to interesting people and places around us. Over time, as they learn our preferences, they’ll be able to filter these places and help us discover the best restaurants and people wherever we are. At last, we are within reach of the “Danger, your ex-girlfriend is in the area!” robot.

Your Personal Robot

Not that long ago, the primary way we would discover new media was through browsing a printed newspaper, magazine rack or record store. As this content moved online, it became much more accessible and real-time. As the option pool grows, we have to put in more and more work to find the content that’s interesting to each of us. There are more and better options than we could ever imagine. But it would take an incredible human effort to find all the needles in the growing haystack.

To address this, many Web sites have offered customization tools for users to focus their experience. But manual customization also requires a lot of work, and it usually fails to paint the rich, dynamic picture of who we are and what we like. Fortunately, a solution is emerging from companies like Pandora (and, full disclosure, my own company, Gravity). Using machine learning, these platforms get to know you based on the things you read about, listen to, or share. They can then move way beyond customization by generating adaptive, personalized experiences that bring the best content on any website or app right to the top. It completely shifts the paradigm from you having to search for information to information searching for you. It’s like having a personal robot who thinks just like you do reach across the Web and return the best music, stories, videos, even daily deals everywhere you go. “Welcome back to ESPN, Amit. The surf report in Venice tomorrow is 3-4 feet, and the Lakers are leading by 10 points at the half.”

All of this paints just a small picture of what’s to come. Imagine the applications in fields like education, health care, or personal finance (wouldn’t you love a robot that does your taxes?). As the Internet starts to work for us, it will enrich our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. I, for one, am very excited that my childhood dream of owning my own robot is finally coming true.

Amit Kapur is the CEO and co-founder of Gravity, a company that makes the Internet adaptive and personalized. He was formerly the COO of Myspace. As an early Myspace employee, he led the development and growth of Myspace Music and Myspace Mobile.

For his full-time job, Miller is the vice president of new business initiatives at LivingSocial, where he’s all about trying to replicate those kinds of experiences for others.

Under his close watch, he’s helped to expand the daily-deals company into two new niches, broadening its scope from restaurants and spas into vacations and activities.

LivingSocial Escapes offers weekly discounts on vacations in the U.S. and around the world. And then there’s LivingSocial Adventures, which came about from the company’s acquisition of Urban Escapes.

Recent offers range from a bed and breakfast in New York to a Vancouver Island retreat–complete with a seven-course dinner–to a five-night tour in Panama that takes you to two different resorts. LivingSocial Adventures, which has launched in 30 markets, offers deals on such activities as a mixology class, where you learn how to whip up various cocktails, to an experience called Shootin’ and Drinkin’, which features a trip to the shooting range followed by drinks (and not in the reverse order).

To be sure, LivingSocial is not the only one trying to sell vacations at a discount. Other group-sales sites have rolled out ambitious plans.

Gilt Groupe has its high-end travel site called JetSetter, which offers very high-end offers for affluent young professionals. More recently, Exclusively.In, a site focused on selling India-inspired clothing, has branched into selling exotic trips to Asia. On the lower end, Overstock has launched a travel site, which offers discounted hotel rooms to a couple dozen locations.

Miller has an ideal background for the job. He most recently spent eight years as a VP at Expedia and had earlier stints at both Ticketmaster.com and Citysearch.

I sat down with Miller, who joined the company in August and commutes between his home in Seattle and the company’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to discuss how LivingSocial is changing travel and what he might be investing in next. A big part of his job will be to explore new areas that fit in well, and help maintain the company’s crazy growth rates.

Miller also discussed the importance of social media and how he believes it is important for us all to unplug once in awhile (after, presumably, buying an $1,800 trip to Panama).

I caught up with him at LivingSocial’s Seattle offices, coincidentally on the same day that the Justice Department approved the merger between Google and ITA Software.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

On the subject of whether social networking is making us less social:

“What I love about LivingSocial is that it harnesses social media and encourages us to get out and travel and experience life in some new way, including dinner, spas, or go-karting. We sold 5,000 vouchers for sky-diving.”

What they are doing is true social commerce because they help people get out into the world and experience new things. It’s not about Facebook all of the time. ”I’m optimistic that Millennials will take control of the tool and won’t let themselves be controlled by the machine. We need to wrestle back control from devices and not the opposite.”

“I am therefore I update,” vs. “I update therefore I am.”

On being a tour operator:

There’s a natural intersection between daily deals and travel, or what he calls “near-cations,” which are trips within two to three hours away.

“There’s not a great platform on the Web today. LivingSocial Escapes is a weekly collection of offers across the country and world. In the first five months, we booked 200,000 room nights for 200 properties, or roughly 1,000 room nights per property. In some cases that equaled to 25 percent of a destination’s annual occupancy.”

On offering a point of view:

Miller says their approach is “approachable sophistication.” They don’t just offer a discounted room. They are packages and experiences he calls “weekend in a box.” That means a hotel room plus cooking classes, or a hotel room and tickets to a water park for the whole family.

On whether it competes with his previous employer, Expedia:

“That would be very egotistical for me to think I will disrupt a $20 billion business. We are in very different spaces. We are trying to inspire and speak to you about something you didn’t know you wanted. Expedia reacts to demand with dates and an origin and destination. I’m upstream. You see a deal to Mendocino, and all of the sudden I say, ‘I want to go to Mendocino, but I didn’t know I wanted to go’.”

On storytelling:

Miller said he’s in the storytelling business.

Expedia and Ticketmaster were revolutionary because they gave consumers access to information that had never before been transparent (it used to be you went to a ticket vendor or a travel agent). What he thinks LivingSocial is doing is turning a very logical and rational experience you find online into a very emotional experience, full of rich imagery and well-crafted explanations that sell a destination.

“Google is responding to a query, whereas I’m pitching something to you that you didn’t know you wanted. That’s different from the OTAs and Google’s of the world.”

On lessons learned in local commerce between his days at Citysearch and now:

He said CitySearch represented the first platform that aggregated local commerce information, which had been very fragmented. “But the market wasn’t ready and our model was wrong. I also think the rise of social media is important.”

First came Escapes, second came Adventures, what’s next?

Miller declined to say, but hinted that “there’s an opportunity in live entertainment,” which would leverage his time spent at TicketMaster. “You can only imagine what we can do when we are the producer, and we have a massive marketing channel of 26 million people.”

Amy Banse, currently the president of Comcast Interactive Media, is shifting into a job as head of a new Silicon Valley-based equity fund aimed at making digital investments for the television cable giant, as well as its new NBC Universal unit, according to sources with knowledge of the plans.

While most of the attention related to the soon-to-be-completed merger of Comcast with NBC U has been on the musical chairs of its high-profile news and entertainment divisions, this move is potentially significant for the companies by putting a stake in the ground–and a presence–for it on the West Coast.

As part of the shift, sources said, Banse will be charged with combining two existing corporate investment funds: NBC U’s Peacock Equity and Comcast Interactive Capital.

The New York-based Peacock Equity is a $250 million fund that was founded as a joint venture in 2007 by GE Capital and NBC U.

Its investments have ranged from $3 million to $25 million each, including a lot of online advertising start-ups such as Adify and the Rubicon Project.

Comcast Interactive Capital–founded in 1999 and based in Philadelphia, where Comcast’s HQ is–has $500 million under management.

It has focused on broadband, interactive and enterprise businesses.

According to its Web site, “early successful investments” include About.com, CitySearch, Half.com, TiVo, and VeriSign.”

Current investments include SB Nation, BlackArrow and JiWire.

It is not clear how much more money the new still-unnamed equity fund will raise, but it will be aimed at early-stage companies, said sources.

The combined fund will debut by the end of the year or early next year.

Banse’s shift to become a VC comes after many years of leading Comcast’s online strategy, which has included the acquisition of the Fandango movie ticketing site and Daily Candy, an email newsletter.

She has also been in charge of the development and management of Comcast’s many Web sites, including Comcast.net, Xfinity.com and Fancast.

MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka recently reported that the high-profile Banse was moving out of her post, which was being split up into two jobs.

Many thought she would likely depart the company, but it appears she will stay for a while longer at least.

As it happens, Banse will be in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 conference, so please be sure to give her a warm welcome and explain “Fear the Beard” to a likely Phillies fan-atic.

And just to get acquainted in advance, here is her bio from the Comcast Web site:

Amy Banse serves as President of Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a division of Comcast Corporation that is responsible for developing and operating online tools and businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication.

Since founding CIM in December of 2005, Ms. Banse has led Comcast’s online strategy, overseeing the acquisition of Fandango (the movie ticketing site), Daily Candy (the popular email newsletter), Plaxo (the smart contacts site), and thePlatform (the industry-leading provider of digital media publishing solutions) as well as the in-house development and management of, Comcast.net and xFinity.com(Comcast’s portals), Fancast, (a leading tv entertainment site), xFinitytv (Comcast ‘s online video portal), and Swirl (Daily Candy’s sample sales site). In this role, she has grown CIM into an 800 person team with significant digital capabilities and has played a key part in the industry’s development of its TV Everywhere strategy and in Comcast’s execution of that strategy, Fancast/xFinitytv.

Ms. Banse joined Comcast in 1991 as an in-house attorney responsible for programming acquisition. Most recently she served as Executive Vice President of Content Development where she oversaw the development of Comcast’s cable network portfolio including the company’s investments in E! Entertainment Television, The Golf Channel, and VERSUS and the development and launch of G4, PBS KIDS Sprout, TV One and Comcast’s sports networks.

Ms. Banse has represented CIM and Comcast as a featured speaker in venues around the country discussing the rapid evolution of content consumption in a digital world and the opportunities and challenges facing the cable and entertainment industries. She has been named among the “Most Powerful Women in Cable” and the “Top Programmers to Watch” by CableWorld magazine. She has also been named among the Cable 100 by Multichannel News and the Digital Power list, by The Hollywood Reporter. She was honored as a “Wonder Woman” by Multichannel News and Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) in 2004, received WICT’s Geraldine B. Laybourne Fearless Award in 2009 and ProMax’s Brand Builder Award in 2010 Ms. Banse sits on the Board of The Morris Arboretum and Springside School for Girls. In 2007 she received “The Distinguished Alumni Award” from Springside School, and in 2006 she was honored by Girls, Inc. as an outstanding role model for girls during their annual Celebration Luncheon. Ms. Banse is also a member of The Forum of Executive Women, the Philadelphia region’s premier women’s organization.

Ms. Banse received a BA from Harvard University and a JD from Temple University Law School. She and her husband and their four children live in Philadelphia.

This week: We walked down University Avenue to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Booyah Games to talk with co-founder and CEO Keith Lee. Booyah is the maker of MyTown, an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app that combines Foursquare and Monopoly into a novel kind of augmented-reality game. The start-up has added about 100,000 news users a week over the last two months.

Who: Keith Lee

What: CEO and co-founder

Why: Keith was a lead producer on Diablo III at Activision Blizzard (ATVI), but left with some colleagues to start Booyah and dip his feet into the social-gaming space. He wanted to explore ways to connect the real world to the game world. After some trial and error, he decided to build an experience around the iPhone GPS platform.

Where: Booyah.com (Web site); Search “MyTown” (iTunes); Palo Alto, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: Booyah’s MyTown competes directly with Foursquare and Gowalla as a location-based game for the iPhone.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Game of the Moment: I’ve just started playing Demon Soul, and it’s probably the hardest game I’ve played in the last five years. It’s very stats-based, so stuff like the weight of your sword or knowing how a halberd (a type of battle ax) works matters. It’s full of some real innovations for player interactions as well.

Has a Geek Crush On: Rob Pardo. He’s the creator of Starcraft, Warcraft and World of Warcraft. His philosophies have really influenced how I build games.

Gadget of the Moment: I was really disappointed in the Kindle. I got one for Christmas. I had to subscribe and pay to read TechCrunch or Kotaku. It didn’t make sense.

Best Gamer High: It is about doing the hardest thing in the game, reaching the extra goals and doing it faster than everyone. So, when people are talking about that goal or feature I can be like, “Yeah, I already got that.” I played Mass Effect twice, just to get the highest score in our group. It’s all about the bragging rights.

Fails At: I’m a total fail at a lot of things–basically everything that involves real life. I have, like, zero common sense. A perfect example is this one time I was supposed to take care of my girlfriend’s little dog. Without thinking, I set the dog down on the top of this high speaker, and I went off to do something else. Well, the dog decided to jump down and she broke her leg. When I called my girlfriend, she knew what I’d done. She just picked up the phone and said, “What did you do to the dog?” It’s all the normal-living stuff I can’t do.

Bio in 140 Characters

Globetrotted growing up. Educated at Exeter and Stanford. He went into finance at parent’s request, but his internal gamer won out.

The Five Questions

You seem like a pretty hardcore gamer. Where does that come from?

We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was born in Hong Kong, then we moved to the Netherlands, lots of other places. My parents were very strict. I was forced to play piano and violin two hours a day. We never had any videogames; I could only play them over at friend’s houses. I wasn’t allowed to read sci-fi or fantasy books either. I was only allowed to read biographies and classics….I think because I was never allowed to read that stuff, that’s all I ended up reading when I went to Exeter and college, and why I needed to be a part of making games.

So, what makes MyTown worth playing?

From the very beginning, we wanted to get into this to forge a new category of social games. We don’t really see ourselves as being in competition with Farmville or any of the others because the games are so different, but maybe just in terms of mindshare. We want to be the leader in location-based gaming, or real-world gaming. With MyTown, we’ve created a way, by partnering with Citysearch, to let people have virtual ownership of real places. Our strategy moving forward is about widening the gap between us and our competitors in certain metrics and trying to be very agile. It’s sort of like in World of Warcraft. You can work methodically on something until someone comes and scouts you and sees what you are doing. Then, you have to build like mad so you can rush them.

What are you making that hasn’t been scouted yet?

As for future stuff, I’m pretty sure we’re going to be doing something music-related. We have a few products that are already in the works for Facebook that are a totally new type of social game. They have real-world tie-ins like MyTown. We could leverage GPS from a smartphone, but also focus on tie-ins with music, celebrities and businesses.

We’re actually 70 percent done with that, and we are pretty close to announcing. Probably early Q2. I really feel like [in this arena] there are a lot of Atari-style games, in that everyone is just cloning each other. I think we have the opportunity to be a Nintendo and bring that killer Super Mario Brothers game that changes everything.

How heavily are the personalities of the developers here affecting the products?

Yeah, I mentioned the music thing before. I don’t know it you saw when you came in, but that was my DJ equipment in the corner. I’m really into the house and electronic music scene–I fly down to Los Angeles to DJ pretty frequently. That’s a pretty direct link.

There are a lot of interesting people here. We have a developer who used to be a Buddhist monk and then became a sort of Indiana Jones figure. He has this amazing skill to think not just deeply but laterally and connect things in games that wouldn’t normally be thought of as associated with each other. That alternative way of thinking lends itself to our strength.

What was your “Living in the Future” moment in gaming, when you knew the arena had come of age?

Its hard to say. I think it was probably the first time I played an MMO [massive multiplayer online] game. It wasn’t anything like crazy “Minority Report” technology stuff. It was when I played Dark Age of Camelot and everything afterward. I actually felt like I was completely in the a community environment, like a virtual world. Before, when I went in and came back out of the game, it went with me. But now, even if I’m not there, it keeps moving. Like it was something that would evolve without me. I felt like I had to get back in there, because I wouldn’t even know what it would be like 20 days later.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100208/almost-famous-keith-lee-of-booyah-games/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091027/two-in-a-row-for-iac/ http://allthingsd.com/20091027/two-in-a-row-for-iac/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:34:16 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=27549 Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) racked up its second profitable quarter in a row Tuesday despite a decline in advertising. The company–which runs Ask.com and the Citysearch online city guide, among other things–posted earnings of $21.3 million, or 16 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $15.2 million, or 11 cents a share. Revenue decreased 8.9 percent to $336.6 million. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters projected earnings of 13 cents on revenue of $335 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091027/two-in-a-row-for-iac/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080528/diller/ http://allthingsd.com/20080528/diller/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 18:12:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/diller/

Barry Diller needs almost no introduction–he is one of the best-known executives in the U.S., straddling a number of industries, including entertainment, online and retail. Well known, too, for his biting wit and gimlet gaze, he has recently been embroiled in a high-profile battle for control of IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI) with major investor John Malone, another noted mogul. What’s been at stake are some of the Web’s most famous names, including HSN, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Match.com, Ask.com, CitySearch and Evite.

And then there’s Diller’s other company, travel services outfit Expedia, whose shares are surging this morning on market rumors that Diller is planning on taking it private.

• Describing him as “my favorite mogul,” Kara welcomes Diller to the stage. Is that John “Darth Vader” Malone’s light saber jutting out of his back pocket?
• Tell me what happened with Malone, Kara says, referring to Diller’s recent dust-up with Liberty Capital’s (LCAPA) John Malone
• For both John Malone and me, putting our lives in the hands of a judge in Delaware is not a desire of mine. And it was very painful–too personal. For three months my life was completely interrupted. As a friend of mine said to me, when a lawsuit is filed against you, you’re only as good as you were the day before it was filed.
• Kara presses for more details. I don’t think in their hearts our shareholders felt they could overturn the shareholder agreement that had been in effect for so long, Diller says. But clearly, they felt they could shake me up a bit. Kara recalls one shareholder telling her his goals was to “humiliate Diller.”

  

• “I don’t know how long I’ll be at this,” Diller muses. “Maybe as long as Rupert … certainly not as long as Sumner, however old he is, wherever he is, alive or dead.”

• Diller talking about the difficulties of wrangling employees of a company as large as IAC. Kara: “So what is IAC now?” Diller says come August, IAC will be a series of five different businesses all related to one another through Internet life. He describes IAC as a business-organizing principle.
• Kara asks what benefits that strategy offers. Search engine optimization for one thing, says Diller.
• Shifting gears a bit: What does Diller see himself getting involved in in the future? Diller says he’s been seeking out trouble and trying to solve it, but what he’d like to do is make trouble. “The truth is,” says Diller, “if you have a decent idea and there’s a business model to it, you need to stay with it.”
• Kara asks about the Hollywood writers strike. Diller: Hollywood is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth. … How dumb can you be to allow a writers’ strike during a time when there’s such a huge play being made for the TV audience?

• Moving on to search. How’s Ask.com doing? Diller: Well, we’re not No. 5 …
• Kara asks for Diller’s thoughts on Microhoo. Diller says one party is very smart, the other not so much. Which is which, asks Kara. Diller: I’ll leave that to you to decide. A few moments later, he says he doubts Yahoo will remain independent.
• Kara asks: Is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal a good idea? Diller thinks it is. That said, he also feels Ask is successful, “Google is irrelevent to Ask” and Ask’s product is superior to Google’s. So take that previous comment with a grain of salt. “For us,” says Diller, “Google is not the issue.” He then goes on to note that Google controls about 60% of the search market in which Ask competes. Diller seems to think that someday, when Ask has increased its queries enough it will get an opening, Google will stumble and Ask will triumph.
• Kara asks about Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. Diller says it’s meaningless, but adds that Facebook is a great service. It’s got nice tools that draw you in and keep you engaged. Diller doesn’t like the term most often used to describe Facebook, though. “Social networks … that’s a dumb-ass phrase if I ever heard one.”
• Diller notes that community, which is what drives Facebook, is what has made TripAdvisor so successful.
• Kara asks about Hulu. Diller dismisses it as a distribution tool. it might become something else, but that’s all it is right now.
• Diller goes from talking about “tools” to “post-tools” and something or other converging with something else. He also mentions that micro-payments will have to be instituted as well.
• Moving on to Q and A: How do you distinguish tenacity from stupidity? Diller: I think there is a certain amount of stupidity in tenacity. Once you get something out in the marketplace there is always going to be someone who takes issue with it. It’s OK to be a little bit stupid, as long you don’t bet the farm at the same time.

For more coverage, see Barron’s Tech Trader Daily and The Wall Street Journal.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080528/diller/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071106/barry-diller-shatters-john-malones-stake-into-little-itty-bits/ http://allthingsd.com/20071106/barry-diller-shatters-john-malones-stake-into-little-itty-bits/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:14:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071106/barry-diller-shatters-john-malones-stake-into-little-itty-bits/ Oh, how much do we love when moguls clash?

Much, much, much.

Yesterday, the battle between InterActiveCorp’s Barry Diller and John Malone of Liberty Media (pictured here in cartoon form) got much more interesting.

As luck would have it, I will be interviewing Diller onstage at the Monaco Media Forum in Monte-Carlo this week–yes, it’s as glamorous as it sounds–so now there will be lots more to talk to him about at the digital gathering.

Diller is an excellent interview–he’s appeared at two D conferences–as he likes to parry more than the average CEO and he is good at it.

Very good, as it turns out, when dealing with Malone.

By way of background, Liberty has indicated it wants to rid itself of the 24% of IAC it owns. That stake has 58% super-voting rights, but it’s controlled by Diller via a past agreement.

So, Malone has been applying public pressure, leveling some choice barbs at Diller.

In a previous piece in The Wall Street Journal, Malone came out with this gem: “There was a time when there was, I think, a 20% Barry premium. Today you could argue there is a Barry discount.”

To deal with the pressure, Diller made the move to carve up the $9 billion holding company, made up of a variety of Internet properties, chopping and dicing more than a Ginsu knive demonstrator selling his heart out on his HSN cable-shopping network (see IAC revenue chart below).

It’s a major reversal for Diller, who has spent many years assembling IAC and who even talked about the importance of its synergies. Now, under his proposal, it will be split into five parts, all separately traded, essentially separating the wheat from the chaff.

Faster-growing and more prominent Web outfits Ask.com, Citysearch and Match.com will remain in IAC. HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree would become separate, much as Diller’s travel sites became in a previous deal in 2005.

And under terms of Liberty’s proxy agreement with Diller, Liberty could get its stock power back in the spun companies–the ones Diller does not care about as much.

Even Malone was warily pleased. “It unsticks some things,” he said in another article yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.

Well, at least it’s a both tastily complex horse-trading scheme, typical of Diller, but also has a simplicity to it.

Still, Diller faces some basic Internet issues as he seeks a slimmer future.

For example, Ask, which just re-signed its guaranteed ad deal with Google, is innovative in its search results approach in a way Yahoo should be (we’ll forgive the company its misguided Kato Kaelin ad campaign).

But it is still a small player, with 5% of the U.S. market (although a network of sites it has gives it a bit more clout), which limits its scope and power.

In other words, small may be beautiful, but it’s still small.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071106/barry-diller-shatters-john-malones-stake-into-little-itty-bits/feed/ 2