If you have even a minute of time, please enjoy this fantastic segment from TeamCoco, in which Conan O’Brien does videogame reviews in a way a non-videogame person would.

Enjoy this take on Tomb Raider:

What with Hurricane Sandy here in the East and the management upheaval swirling around Apple in the West — complete with the ouster of its mobile software head Scott Forstall and retail chief John Browett — excuse us for taking so long to get up this latest adorkable video from John Elerick.

It came out earlier today and is the second of the “Banned” mockumentaries, which spoof the slick Apple commercials using top execs chattering on about its products.

Also below is one Conan O’Brien’s TeamCoco just put out that will air tonight about the many sizes of the iPad mini.

Forstall was one of those Apple execs, though he was not featured in these videos. But he was ousted earlier today from the tech giant for a range of problems, including refusing to sign a company apology letter about how bad the new mapping software that Apple recently released to replace Google’s maps was.

Here’s the new one on the recently released iPad mini and the first on the iPhone 5, as well as the TemCoco one:

(Warning: 30-second pre-roll before the clip.)

Conan O’Brien pokes at the similarities between Samsung and Apple products — and seems particularly on point considering yesterday’s Samsung internal design document release.

Conan’s new motto for Samsung? “Think slightly different.”

Meanwhile, CollegeHumor takes down Google X and its wild augmented reality and autonomous car product demo videos:

“Now we know these projects look a little half-baked, but give us a break. We’re an Internet search company — we don’t know how to make cars or magic glasses!”

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

It needs no explanation except to say, apparently, email overload is a national disaster:

Here’s the two-minute version:

And if you’ve got 10 minutes (remember, if you live in the U.S., you get a bonus hour tonight), here’s the whole interview. And here, via the New York Times, is more on his plan to stream his next concert from his own site, passing over not only pay cable but Netflix and iTunes, too.

Conan announced the stunt during his show, lauding the 25 LCD TV monitors (no HBO), a fully stocked kitchenette with intern and a shower shared by the four members of the house band.

It is available Oct. 10 to 13 for $1 a night for a total of three bucks.

The studio, which can accommodate up to four guests, lists sleeping accommodations, such as “celebrity-rubbed” sleeper sofas and an air mattress that needs repair. Linens are included, although it’s recommended bringing your own for undisclosed reasons.

What else? There’s free Wi-Fi, and it’s great for families!

Recently, Airbnb instituted a $50,000 guarantee in case anything goes wrong during a stay, but I’m not sure if that would cover the havoc that someone could create on a TV set that once filmed such classics as “The Goonies” and “Karate Kid Part 2.”

Conan declined to say whether the guests will be featured on the show, but you can pretty much bank on it. Jokes TBD.

Facing a barrage of negative press about its upcoming IPO, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason took up a pen to counter critics of the social buying service.

Especially under scrutiny has been the Chicago-based Groupon’s accounting of its finances — along with worries that its torrid growth is slowing — both of which Mason addressed in detail in a pugnacious email memo to his thousands of employees.

Specifically referencing a recent article speculating that the daily deals site was running out of money, Mason said, in part:

“While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.”

Mason also took on the controversial ACSOI — or adjusted consolidated segment operating income — metric that Groupon used in its initial filing and later stepped back from.

“The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state — we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics,” wrote Mason.

Mason also took some aim at competitors, such as LivingSocial and Yelp, in the email.

As for the public offering, which is expected next month:

“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.”

Then again, that is exactly what a dad-to-be would say about his baby, whatever it looked like.

Mason, when asked about the memo, declined to comment.

There is a lot more than that, so here’s Mason’s full email for all you pencil pushers to peruse:

Dear Groupon,

This weekend, I did a Google News search on our company — my first in awhile. The first story that popped up was called The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily Deals Site Running Out of Cash? I laughed when I read the headline (in the car by myself, weirdly). First — with this article, the degree to which we’re getting the shit kicked out of us in the press had finally crossed the threshold from “annoying” to “hilarious.” Second, I was struck by the irony — I had just finished a board meeting last Wednesday saying this to myself: I’ve never been more confident and excited about the future of our business.

I realize that this sounds like the kind of thing that CEOs say when they’re trying to pep people up. First of all — I’m all about not pepping people up. If you don’t believe me, just ask my fiancée, Jenny “why don’t you ever say anything nice about me” Gillespie. Want another example? Look at the magazine covers in our lobby, which are there to make you sad by reminding you of the impermanence of success.

I’m going to spend the rest of this email explaining why I’m so excited. You need some ammo to argue back against your blog-reading “friends” (silently argue in your mind, that is — you can’t actually say any of this yet), and I’ve been told that the “what have you ever done with your life that’s so great?” rebuttal isn’t working as well for you guys as it has for me.

While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.

I’ll summarize my excitement with four points: 1) Growth in our core business is strong 2) Our investments in the future — businesses like Getaways & NOW — look great, 3) We are pulling away from competition, and 4) We’ve built a great team that I would pit against anyone. In other words, all the stuff that one would want to look good? It looks good.

Many of the long-term unknowns of our business are becoming known, and we like the answers. I will now elaborate in a level of financial detail that will give Jason Child a stomach ulcer.

1. GROWTH IN THE CORE BUSINESS

Thanks to a tremendous effort by our sales team, August in the U.S. is shaping up to be a pivotal month. It appears that will revenues grow by about 12% over last month (which is a lot), while we cut our marketing expenses by 20% in the same period.

Beyond their obvious goodness, these numbers are important because they answer one of the main criticisms thrown at us in the past few months, relating to a metric we put in the S-1 called ACSOI (adjusted consolidated segment operating income) to help people understand how we think about marketing expenses. The reason everyone in the world seems to hate ACSOI is that it makes us look magically profitable by subtracting a bunch of our customer acquisition marketing costs from our expenses. The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state –we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics. I think it’s worth going deep on this one more time — brace yourself.

Our internal forecast shows two different types of marketing: what I’ll call “normal marketing” — which is NOT excluded from ACSOI — and “customer acquisition marketing,” which is. The way Groupon spends on marketing is unique in three ways:

1. We are currently spending more than just about any company ever on marketing — in Q2, we spent nearly 20% of our net revenue on marketing, while a typical company spends less than 5%. Why do we spend so much? The simple answer is “because it works.” But thats only part of what makes our situation special.

2. Our marketing — at least the customer acquisition marketing that we remove from ACSOI — is designed to add people to our own long-term marketing channel — our daily email list. Once we have a customer’s email, we can continually market to them at no additional cost. Compare this to Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s, or most other companies. If I’m a Johnson, and I’m trying to sell you a box of Band Aids, I have to keep spending money on commercials and magazine ads and stuff to remind you about how sweet Band Aids are, even after you’ve bought your first box. With Groupon, we just spend money one time to get you on our email list, and then every day we email you a reminder of the sweetness of our metaphorical Band Aid. There is no cost of reacquisition — that’s unusual (and we created ACSOI to point that out). If Johnson wanted to follow the Groupon strategy, he would have to start a free daily newspaper about bandages and then run Band Aid ads in it every day.

3. Eventually, we’ll ramp down marketing just as fast as we ramped it up, reducing the customer acquisition part of our marketing expenses (the piece that we remove in ACSOI) to nominal levels. We are spending a ton now because we’re acquiring as many subscribers as we can as quickly as we can. We aren’t paying attention to marketing budget (just marketing ROI) in the way a normal company would, because we know that even if we wanted to continue to spend at these levels, we would eventually run out of new subscribers to acquire. So our customer acquisition spend drops severely to reflect the fact that eventually we’ll run out of people we can add to our email list. We view this internally as a very large one-time expense and then our job forever after will be to continually convert these subscribers into customers and to make sure our customers keep buying from us. Ongoing, the normal marketing dollars we spend are not something we would remove from our internal calculation of ACSOI.

I tried my best to explain this simply, but it’s not lost on me that if you actually understood this, you probably had to read it three times. It’s not easy stuff. It’s much easier to assume that we’re goons. So people can be forgiven for being suspicious. In fact, feel a little bad about how downhearted the critics will be when we don’t turn out to be a Ponzi scheme — those are good impulses for journalists to have, and I hope our non-evil ways don’t destroy their spirits.

Anyway, there’s a reason that I just went on about ACSOI. One of the questions that skeptics ask is, “when you ramp down marketing, won’t revenues stop growing as well? Aren’t you just buying growth?” Over the past several months we’ve been consistently reducing our marketing spend and yet revenues are still increasing at a significant pace. In Q1 of this year, marketing represented 32.3% of our net revenues. By the end of Q2 it had fallen to 19.4%. And it has continued to fall over the past several months all because we’ve been investing in our own long-term marketing channel — our email list.

Internationally we see the same trends — marketing is down, but revenues are up — every country is either losing less or making more. Even in young markets like Korea, where we’re still making massive investments, we’re seeing unprecedented growth. We started building our Korean team this January, despite the presence of two competitors that were larger than any we’d previously battled from behind. Thanks to the brilliant execution of the Korean team, we are set to be the market leader within months. We’ve never had a country grow as fast as Korea!

What about our joint-venture with Tencent in China? Did you read the article that Gaopeng’s CEO has kidnapped the first born children of all our employees and is putting them to work building a laser beam he’ll use to slice the moon in half? It turns out that that one isn’t true either. China is definitely a different market, but every month we inch closer to profitability. As has been our strategy in launching other countries — Germany, France, and the UK, included — our China growth strategy was to hire quickly and manage out the bottom performers. So far, that strategy has improved our competitive position in China from #3,000 to #8. Will we one day reach the dominant status we enjoy in most (come on, Switzerland!) other countries? It’s too soon to tell, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re building a business that will be around for the long haul.

2. NEW BUSINESS LINES ARE BOOMING

Travel and Product are enormous opportunities. After only a few months, they’re already making up 20% of revenue in some countries. We sold $2M worth of mattresses in the UK — in one day! Groupon Getaways will do $10M in its first calendar month — which you might think is awesome, but we’re actually disappointed with those results because we know how much better we’ll be doing soon.

While there’s still a ton of work to do, Groupon Now! continues to see weekly double digit growth. The model works and I believe it will play a major part in the future of our global business as more merchants and customers join the marketplace.

3. WE ARE PULLING AWAY FROM COMPETITION

If there’s a question I’ve received from Groupon skeptics more than any other, it’s, “how will you fend off the competition — especially massive companies like Google and Facebook?” I could give a dozen reasons to bet on Groupon, but it’s impossible to predict the future or the actions of others. Well, now the sleeping giants have woken up — and the numbers are showing that what was proven true with literally thousands of other competitors is just as true with the incumbents of the Internet: it’s kind of hard to build a Groupon. And since anyone with an Internet connection can track the performance of our competitors, I can be more specific:

Google Offers is small and not growing. In the three markets where we compete, we are 450% of their size.

Yelp is small and not growing. In the 15 markets where we compete, our daily deals are 500% of their size.

Living Social’s U.S. local business is about 1/3rd our size in revenue (and smaller in GP) and has shrunk relative to us in the last several months. This, in part, appears to be driving them toward short-sighted tactics to buy revenue, like buying gift certificates from national retailers at full price and then paying out of their own pocket to give the appearance of a 50% off deal. Our marketing team has tested this tactic enough to know that it’s generally a bad idea, and not a profitable form of customer acquisition.

Facebook sales are harder to track, but are even less significant at present.

My point is not that our competitors will fail — some may actually develop sustainable businesses, or even grow — after all, local commerce is an enormous market. The real point is that our business is a lot harder to build than people realize and our scale creates competitive advantages that even the largest technology companies are having trouble penetrating. And with the launch of NOW, I suspect our competition will have an even harder time in light of the natural barriers to entry that are needed to build a real-time local deals marketplace.

4. OUR TEAM

This is the fluffiest of the four points, but maybe the most important — we’ve built a global team of hungry entrepreneurial operators and seasoned executives that rivals any team I know of. Almost every day, I find myself in a scenario where I silently think, “I can’t believe I got this person to work for me — that failure of judgement is perhaps their single flaw.”

I point out the team because while today the business is strong and it appears we must endure success for awhile longer (despite its impermanence), we will inevitably be challenged with issues we didn’t predict — and when that happens, the quality of our team will be a deciding factor in our ultimate long-term success.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wrote this email because when I read some of the press this weekend, I realized a rational person could read this stuff and wrongly conclude that we’re in trouble. The irony is hopefully clear: We’ve never been stronger.

And while we’ve refrained from defending ourselves publicly, you’ve continued to create our best defense, with every department innovating new practices that are taking our business to the next level. Thanks for staying tough, determined, and agile throughout this process. For now we must patiently and silently endure a bit more public criticism as we prepare to birth this IPO baby — a breed for which there are no epidurals. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.

I’ve been as candid as possible — hope this sheds some light on things. Reply with your questions if anything remains unclear. Amidst all this, I hope you remember what we’re doing here — we are making history together. I guess you don’t get to build something that reshapes the local commerce ecosytem without getting a few bruises. I’m so proud of the work we’re doing, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to work on what I think is the best thing that’s happened to small businesses since the telephone We’ve invented something that is catalyzing millions of dollars of local commerce every single day in 45 countries and fills the lives of millions of customers with unforgettable experiences — it’s pretty remarkable.

Looking forward to getting this behind us!

Andrew

P.S.: I almost forgot to address the nonsense about us running out of money in the article above. If you apply the same logic used in the article, you’d have concluded long ago that companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart were running out of cash too. Both have often had payables far in excess of their cash. Finance geeks call this a working capital deficit. It’s normal, manageable and a lot of folks actually believe it’s good thing and would kill to get paid from their customers long before they have to pay their suppliers. We are generating cash, not losing it — we generated $25M in cash last quarter alone, adding to the $200M we had before. In other words, we’re doing the opposite of running out of money.

Speaking of “it looks good,” here is Conan O’Brien with a Tourette’s version of Mason’s new catchphrase:

This year’s commemoration is more muted. Basically, just a blog post that notes that the site is really, really big.

How big, you ask?

• YouTube users are now uploading 48 hours of video a minute. That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions.
• YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.

But if you really want context for YouTube’s growth, go back and check out what it was doing in its first year: In December 2005–when Lazy Sunday first hit, and the site had become a mainstream success–viewers were watching 2.5 million videos a month.

And since we’re going back in time, here are three historically important YouTube videos:

Here’s the first clip ever uploaded to the site, back in April 2005, from little-known co-founder Jared Karim:

And here’s the clip uploaded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in October 2006, announcing that they’d sold the site to Google:

And here’s Tillman the dog, a 2007 video that showed up in Apple’s early iPhone commercials, and ended up becoming shorthand for the site’s user generated content.

This is very funny from Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco–except not to the folks at Myspace (who could actually use a good laugh right about now):

Ah–here’s one of the places I heard about it: Conan O’Brien’s newish show, where co-founder Biz Stone popped in for a chat. (O’Brien, you may have heard, is really into Twitter these days.)

Stone, who is on TV a lot, is good at it, too.

Stone’s appearances are fun, but Twitter’s real embrace of TV is happening a little bit offstage, where the company is working hard to get itself integrated into TV shows.

It’s still unclear exactly what TV can really mean for Twitter, but the company is smart to try to get itself into the industry, whose $70 billion-plus in annual revenue still makes the Web ad business look puny.

Twitter’s media blog, for instance, is touting Comedy Central’s use/promotion of the service during its kinda-unwatchable Donald Trump roast.

Comedy Central ran a Twitter hashtag on the bottom left corner for the duration of the show, prompting people to use it, which helped make the term appear on Twitter’s “trending” list, which presumably prompted more people to check out the show.

That’s a cool virtuous cycle, though I wonder if that’s a novelty that goes away. More important: Even if that strategy works long-term, how does Twitter turn Comedy Central’s use into revenue?

Still, if the Twitter team can convince the networks–and their advertisers–that Twitter helps bring more eyeballs to shows, and/or helps keep them there, then that’s going to be worth a lot, to someone. Twitter just has to figure out how to get a slice of that.

But yesterday, the Internet was up in arms about Groupon’s commercial, which uses the situation in Tibet to sell a half-price plate of fish curry. The Chicago daily-deals site has since pulled the spot and backpedaled, saying it was also trying to raise donations for the cause but didn’t make it obvious enough.

Last night, Conan revealed an even more over-the-top version involving the Hindenburg disaster and a discount on a Blimpie’s sub sandwich. It ends with “Oh the Frugality.”

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101109/viral-video-team-coco-is-back-though-bullet-riddled/ http://allthingsd.com/20101109/viral-video-team-coco-is-back-though-bullet-riddled/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:10:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36991

Here is the very funny opening video for the premiere of late-night host Conan O’Brien’s new talk show on TBS.

It’s got a “Godfather”/”Mad Men”/Larry King tone.

Exactly.

The first line of O’Brien’s monologue was about his Web popularity: “Thank you and welcome to my second annual first show. Yes, I know what you guys are thinking–’Hey, it’s the guy from Twitter.’”

It is indeed, and BoomTown could not be more thrilled he is back on television:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101109/viral-video-team-coco-is-back-though-bullet-riddled/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/conan-obriens-american-express-ad-2-minutes-1-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/conan-obriens-american-express-ad-2-minutes-1-million/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:30:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25614 Just in case you weren’t clear on this: Conan O’Brien’s new show starts tonight.

Also, Conan O’Brien has embraced the Internet.

With that out of the way, we can now enjoy O’Brien’s latest digital foray. This American Express ad isn’t technically a new-media event, since you’ll start seeing the spot on good old-fashioned TV today. But given that Amex has bought out the front page of YouTube, odds are very high that you’re going to encounter the clip on Google’s site, or somewhere else on the Web:

Worth noting: While the ad is timed to run in conjunction with O’Brien’s debut on TBS, note that there’s no explicit tie-in. The WSJ reports that Amex paid O’Brien–and not TBS owner Time Warner–”more than $1 million” for his services.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/conan-obriens-american-express-ad-2-minutes-1-million/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101020/conan-obrien-keeps-courting-the-internet-next-up-24-hours-of-live-coco-cam/ http://allthingsd.com/20101020/conan-obrien-keeps-courting-the-internet-next-up-24-hours-of-live-coco-cam/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:07:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24885 Conan O’Brien didn’t really embrace the Web until he was just about out of his last job at NBC. But now he’s in a well-documented digital bear hug: O’Brien and his team use Twitter, Tumblr and viral videos to promote the man and his new show on Time Warner’s TBS.

The newest venture–a 24-hour live “behind the scenes” Webcast, produced in conjunction with Google’s YouTube (another recent Conan ally).

It kicks off at 1 pm ET today on O’Brien’s YouTube channel, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. But if you want to read about it, you can check out this YouTube blog post, or just watch this clip.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101020/conan-obrien-keeps-courting-the-internet-next-up-24-hours-of-live-coco-cam/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/viral-video-cocos-back/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/viral-video-cocos-back/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:51:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35084

With only a few weeks to go till the debut of his new late-night talk show on TBS, Conan O’Brien is taking his marketing to the Web.

And it’s very explosive, both personally and in a crazy stunt kind of way, as you will see in the two videos that the television funnyman has released in the windup to his November 8 launch.

The popcorn was a nice touch.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/viral-video-cocos-back/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101004/conan-obrien-really-really-wants-some-twitter-followers/ http://allthingsd.com/20101004/conan-obrien-really-really-wants-some-twitter-followers/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:43:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24116 I follow Conan O’Brien on Twitter. So do 1,677,799 other people.

But that’s not enough for O’Brien. Or, more likely, it’s not enough for Time Warner’s (TWX) TBS channel, which is paying big money to bring O’Brien back to TV next month. In any case, someone is paying Twitter* to make @TeamCoco a “Promoted Account”–one of the first that Twitter has rolled out today.

Here’s what that looks like (via my “New Twitter” homepage):

A little redundant, and I’m probably not going to follow two different Conan accounts. But whatever. It doesn’t have any material impact on the way I use Twitter, which remains both free and useful to me. (Except when it breaks, as it seems to have done just now.)

My hunch is that I’m going to feel the same way as Twitter starts to carve out increasing amounts of real estate for ads and other revenue-generating products on its platform. That’s what media companies do, after all.

And in fact, here’s another small ad move coming out of Twitter at the same time. It has moved up its “Promoted Trends” product from the bottom of its topics list to the top, where I’m more likely to see it.

Or at least it says it has: My Twitter Trends feature, which is set to “New York,” doesn’t show me any Promoted Trends at all. If and when they do show up, the fact that they’re up higher won’t make much difference to me, because I almost always ignore Trends in general.

And that’s the real risk for Twitter here–not that users will be turned off by ads, but that they’ll ignore them, just as they do throughout most of the Web. When’s the last time you clicked on, or even looked at, a Gmail ad from Google (GOOG)?

*It is possible that no one is actually paying Twitter to promote TeamCoco, and that the company is throwing it in as a promotional freebie, as it did in some cases when it rolled out “Promoted Tweets.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101004/conan-obrien-really-really-wants-some-twitter-followers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100903/viral-video-its-co-nan/ http://allthingsd.com/20100903/viral-video-its-co-nan/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:50:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33381

Earlier this year, the travails of late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and his epic battle with the inept suits at NBC became a gold mine of Internet-fueled comedy mayhem.

Well, Team Coco is back in November on TBS, and it has a name.

And it’s a good one, as you will see in the video below.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100903/viral-video-its-co-nan/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100715/viral-video-everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-is-happy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100715/viral-video-everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-is-happy/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:09:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30673

Here’s a video of comic Louis CK, in an appearance with television talk show host Conan O’Brien, which was flagged to me by Tech N’ Marketing blogger Hillel Fuld as the all-time funniest.

And it indeed is, due to Louis CK’s perfect riff on technology, in which he correctly notes “everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.”

My fave part is his observation of how impatient people are with their cell phone connections: “It’s going to space, can you give it a second to get back from space?”

Well said, especially with all the various controversies around Apple (AAPL), Facebook and more.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100715/viral-video-everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-is-happy/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination-2/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:30:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21396 Who knew Hollywood had such a wry sense of humor? But here’s the evidence: The TV industry folks who vote for the Emmy awards have nominated Conan O’Brien for a statuette.

As in Conan O’Brien, the former NBC employee whose brief stint as host of “The Tonight Show” ended badly, and expensively, for the network. It seems to have worked out okay for O’Brien, though–he got a very big severance check, an infusion of online adoration and, eventually, a well-paid gig at Time Warner’s Turner (TWX).

And while it would be a little, um, awkward if O’Brien actually won the Emmy for best “variety, comedy or music series” (he’s up against Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and “Saturday Night Live”), there is some upside for NBC here. The GE (GE) unit is broadcasting the Emmys in late August, and the potential car-crash nature of the award show might bring in some more eyeballs.

Here is where I’d show you a clip of the award-nominated show, but NBC has scrubbed O’Brien off of its site, Hulu and much of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So you’ll have to settle for this bit that O’Brien did specifically for YouTube, where he introduces his favorite viral clips.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination/ http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:30:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21396 Who knew Hollywood had such a wry sense of humor? But here’s the evidence: The TV industry folks who vote for the Emmy awards have nominated Conan O’Brien for a statuette.

As in Conan O’Brien, the former NBC employee whose brief stint as host of “The Tonight Show” ended badly, and expensively, for the network. It seems to have worked out okay for O’Brien, though–he got a very big severance check, an infusion of online adoration and, eventually, a well-paid gig at Time Warner’s Turner (TWX).

And while it would be a little, um, awkward if O’Brien actually won the Emmy for best “variety, comedy or music series” (he’s up against Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and “Saturday Night Live”), there is some upside for NBC here. The GE (GE) unit is broadcasting the Emmys in late August, and the potential car-crash nature of the award show might bring in some more eyeballs.

Here is where I’d show you a clip of the award-nominated show, but NBC has scrubbed O’Brien off of its site, Hulu and much of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So you’ll have to settle for this bit that O’Brien did specifically for YouTube, where he introduces his favorite viral clips.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100708/conan-obriens-awkward-parting-gift-for-nbc-an-emmy-nomination/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100517/conan-obriens-angry-youtube-rant-and-his-five-favorite-youtube-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20100517/conan-obriens-angry-youtube-rant-and-his-five-favorite-youtube-videos/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 12:00:42 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19539 YouTube is celebrating its fifth birthday by announcing that it is now generating a staggering two billion views per day. Context: In October, Google’s (GOOG) video site announced it had crossed the one billion views per day mark.

That’s a lot of videos! As usual, no word on financials, profitability, etc. But there is plenty of congratulatory back-slapping here and here.

Best part, by far: A brief anniversary message from Conan O’Brien, in which the comedian connects YouTube’s rise with America’s decline: “Nobody actually makes anything anymore. We’re all watching monkeys in propeller hats flush themselves down a toilet. And that’s why India is kicking our ass. And China, and pretty much everyone else. Switzerland, kicking our ass. Guam, way ahead of us.”

And he effectively sums up Web economics, or lack thereof:
“That’s not the point of the internet. It’s not to make money. It’s for someone you’ve never met, who’s a nerd, in Palo Alto, to make money.”

O’Brien also offers up his five favorite YouTube clips. Here are four of them. To see the fifth (something inscrutable and German) you’ll have to visit the site. If you’re time-pressed, definitely go with the cat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100517/conan-obriens-angry-youtube-rant-and-his-five-favorite-youtube-videos/feed/ 0