10:18 am: Walt greets Gore by noting that he has just come from Steve Jobs’s memorial service. What was that like?

10:18 am: “A beautiful and moving event … It’s a terrible loss, of course, for the entire world. We’ll all miss Steve.

But for all of his inventions — “among them all, I actually think his greatest work was Apple itself.”

“He created an organization — and inspired it — that literally creates technology that people love … and that’s going to continue. There’s so many things in the pipeline, and the team that he built is hitting on all cylinders.”

10:20 am: Walt: So, no offense to Tim Cook, at what point does the lack of having Jobs at the helm of the company become apparent? There’s a pipeline, “but at some point that pipeline runs out, and then what happens?”

10:21 am: Gore: Steve cultivated a team, “and we had discussions at every single board meeting, for several years, about cultivating that team.” No one will replace him, and he’s totally unique. “And yet, he also served on the board of Disney … and he used to talk initially about how, after Walt Disney died, the company always got in trouble about asking ‘what would Walt do in this situation?’ And he made it very clear: ‘I don’t want that.’ He made it clear to Tim Cook and everyone else. ‘Don’t ask what Steve would have done. Follow your own voice.’”

10:23 am: Walt: So you still expect risk-taking and game-changing?

10:23 am: Of course. Everyone on that management team could be CEO of a world-class corporation.

10:23 am: Walt: Isn’t that a problem? That people come after them?

10:24 am: Gore: Of course. But that’s not new. And I’m on the compensation committee, and we pay real close attention to that.

10:24 am: Walt: You’re also a Google adviser, and those two companies are competing. How do you handle that?

10:24 am: Gore: After Eric Schmidt left the Apple board because of conflicts, I pulled back as well. I still talk to Larry and Sergey, but never about anything where there’s competition. It’s not really a problem, but “I don’t have as many conversations with them now. And I miss that.” I’ve known them since they were 27 years old.

By the way, I think Larry is doing a great job since he became CEO.

10:27 am: Walt: America has been the big tech innovator for a long time, and in Asia they are still mostly imitating what we’ve done. But Asia is coming up fast. “How much longer can this be an advantage for the United States?”

10:28 am: Gore: That depends on choices we make. “I think our political system is now badly broken.” We’ve been able to use the political equivalent of massively parallel processing to make great decisions over the past 200 years.

Let me digress for a minute: The U.S. formed its superior decision-making in the wake of Gutenberg and the evolution of the print press. Allowed “the rule of reason” to let citizens and their reps make good decisions. Then, 60 years ago, TV surpassed print. And unlike the public square of print, the TV public square is controlled by gatekeepers, and access to that square requires a lot of money. So now we’ve seen a huge degradation of the conversation.

10:31 am: Walt: Hasn’t the Web fixed that?

Gore: Not yet. Right now, TV is by far the dominant medium. If you take primetime out of the picture, the activity on iOS and Android is now rivaling TV. But you include primetime, 7 to 10, TV “blows everything else away. Still.”

“Television is still the big kahuna. It’s because people like to sit back, and the relationship between the television and the human brain is extremely close.”

It’s part of evolution — back on the savannah, the people who didn’t notice the leaves moving suddenly didn’t become our ancestors. We’re hardwired for this stuff; “it becomes a quasi-hypnotic state.” It’s why lead-in shows are so important. (Peter Chernin disagrees — see earlier.)

So that’s why so much political money goes into TV, and that helps explain why the system is so broken.

10:35 am: (Sorry, tech issues here.)

10:35 am: And we’re back. Gore is talking about companies who can take advantage of the innovator’s dilemma, Metcalfe’s law, etc.

Gore: 5.6 billion of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones. Less than one billion are smartphones. “But that is going to change dramatically” … “Moore’s law makes it inevitable that the low-end phones are going to get smart.” And as those 5.6 billion get smarter and smarter phones — remind me to mention the climate crisis, by the way — that’s going to unleash amazing creativity.

10:38 am: Walt: Okay, let’s talk about the climate. This ties into tech: We love all these devices. Walt gestures to writers sitting in the front row, and Gore notes “All Apple — almost all Apple.” But it seems like people in the developed world have all these great devices, but people in the rest of the world deal with the pollution. Here in Hong Kong, there’s a lot of smog, and I’m told that much of it comes from over the border in mainland China, where much of this stuff is made.

Gore: About two percent of global warming comes from this stuff. “It’s a nontrivial factor.” But the good news is that the IT sector has been really good about addressing this stuff, much more so than other industries. And the other good news is that the information revolution that comes from this tech makes it easier to combat this, as well.

Except for this massive disinformation campaign — reminiscent of the tobacco industry in the 1950s telling us that smoking didn’t cause cancer — that tells us this stuff isn’t a problem. One hundred million people died unnecessarily because of this, because of smoking.

In this case, the largest carbon polluters — starting about 19 years ago, in the U.S., Europe and Australia and other countries — these polluters and their ideological allies “have put out a massive campaign to put out false doubts … they know that they don’t have to prove” anything, “all they have to do is put out enough false doubt.” Meanwhile, there’s nearly unanimous consensus on climate change.

If you had chest pains and you consulted 100 leading doctors, and 98 of them told you to take care of your heart, that’s what you’d do. You wouldn’t pay much attention to the other two.

So now you have more pollution than ever, etc.

10:46 am: Walt: But wait — isn’t a Democrat in the White House? Isn’t that your party?

Gore: I’ve expressed disappointment.

10:46 am: Walt: What do you tell Obama?

Gore: I give him advice, and most of the problem is in the Senate, which is totally broken. But the White House has pulled back from environmental reform, and that’s disappointing.

10:48 am: Gore: Meanwhile, look what’s happening in Pakistan, Thailand, Russia, Colombia, all facing terrible crises because of the climate. Colombia has had five times its normal rainfall this year. The Philippines have had a massive series of downpours for the past two years. Nashville, my hometown, just had “once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall … at some point, there has to be a reality check.”

10:49 am: Walt: And this is all because of pollution?

10:49 am: Gore: Yes.

[Long explanation of how massive downpours are a result of pollution] “It will get a lot worse. Until we take action. Even after we take action, it will be a problem.” And the same factors creating all this rain are also creating droughts. Double, triple whammy.

“I’ve been trying to communicate about this. And I wish I could communicate more effectively about this.”

“This is a global issue … we’re now being assaulted by this 90 milllion tons of global-warming pollution every day … it’s not okay.”

Questions From the Audience

Q: Back to the print-TV-Web conversation. Please keep talking about the evolution of TV, in connection with your involvement with Current TV.

Gore: We’ve done creative stuff at Current TV with Twitter. It’s one of a series of experiments. Last year, we had a drama series with the Sims’s Will Wright, where he had an online story-creation engine online, where people could have input on story line. Many other examples.

But when you look at the opposite direction — TV on the Internet — you run into a broadband capacity problem. In the 1970s, there was only ARPANET, and twisted copper pairs. And we wanted to increase capacity via the information superhighway. But now, with video, the number of digits in a 30-minute video “is like a year’s worth of email.” And even with compression, etc., “there is a crunch coming” and “that is what has impeded the migration of TV proper onto the Internet.” For the majority of people, in the majority of the world, it is still going to be a while before we get full TV on the Internet.

Q: Back to the environment. What’s actually feasible for policymakers to do?

Gore: With individuals, start by “winning the conversation” — like the civil rights movement in the ’60s. Don’t put up with pollution. Then we can make changes on the consumer side.

For politics: Number one, we can start putting a price on carbon. Right now we tell people it’s okay to use the global commons as a sewer. It’s not. The market is telling polluters it’s okay to pollute, so of course they will. A carbon tax and cap are important.

Number two: Governments should create a green bank of development for renewables. Moore’s law is not a law of physics. It’s a law of investment. Chip power grows fast now because investors invest in R&D to make it grow fast. Same thing can be true for green R&D like photovoltaic electricity.

Q: Please talk about Apple. Senior talent there — if you look at their background, prior to joining Apple, they don’t look like world-class guys. Very different background than the resumes of the Google guys. So one’s not better than the other, but how does Apple think about talent? Also: Please talk about the Apple board — lots of folks have criticized the Apple board. (Gore is a member, of course.)

Gore: First of all, the way the executive team at Apple are chosen is not all that different from a lot of other places — they proved themselves in other positions and worked their way up.

As for the Apple board, I won’t talk about what goes on inside. But I will say this: “I have the deepest respect for my fellow board members, we’re all very good friends… I think that people who specialize in kibitzing about these things — I respect them, it’s good for them to think about this kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t change a thing about the way the Apple board has operated.”

We handled privacy and medical issues and succession all correctly there. “If you were running a corporation, and you had a star-studded executive team, would you really think it would be a smart thing to lay out in public your thinking about who’s going to move to what position over the next couple years? Of course not!”

Q: Please talk about impact of tech on the news business.

Gore: I used to be a journalist for the Army. I’ve watched the evolution of the business. The most important part of the problem you’re getting at is that with the transition to Internet journalism you don’t get enough critical mass to throw off enough revenue to create good investigative journalism. Crowdsourcing helps, but that’s not a substitute for real investigative journalists who can make a decent living doing what they do best.

Where will it go? It’s literally impossible to predict. I have a great iPhone 4S and an iPad, but “most of the quality stuff is still produced by newspapers and magazines.”

Walt: You don’t have the model for a new journalism, right? You just want there to be a new one?

Gore: Current TV has won a lot of awards. Those guys do a great job. And “60 Minutes” is great. But, increasingly, shows that used to do news are moving into infotainment.

I turn on the morning news and a program that used to do news is doing a segment about a kid who’s hiccuping. But I do have to confess it’s pretty interesting.

Q: What should Google do in China?

Gore: [Waits a beat.] “God bless you.”

Q: Advice for Obama going into 2012?

Gore: I’ve given it privately.

Q: What about the T-Mobile-AT&T merger. What do you think?

A: My guess is that Justice so rarely takes a move like they made — “I think it’s going to be hard to overturn that decision.” They’ll fight it, but they should think about other plans.

Q: Question about the failing of American education.

A: I’ve tried hard! I have an “our choice” app about environmental education. I had a documentary on TV, etc. But we have a major party embracing the rejection of science, even while the majority of American people believe in the science.

Q: Can you talk about financial reform in the U.S.?

Gore: I think financial reform and political reform are connected. “Money plays such an unhealthy role” in U.S. democracy — “way more than in the past”. There are four anticlimate activists for every member of the Senate.

“We need to move toward sustainable capitalism. Capitalism is the best system for organizing economic activity … but we have to pay careful attention to how those incentives are structured, and what they are applied to. We have to measure the full system of value.” And not just discard things that are difficult to measure — externalities. “So if we’re committed to capitalism, as I am, we have to make it sustainable.” Price tag can’t be the only marker of value.

Lots of conventions of modern-day trading and investing are “functionally insane.”

Q: [Didn't catch.]

Gore: The last century and a half is an exception to the longer history, in which Asia has been the dominant force in the world. China is becoming more competitive, “and I wish them well.” But I also remember when the Soviets were going to eclipse us. Didn’t happen. Japan Inc. Didn’t happen. So, is China’s rise inevitable? I don’t know. Chinese labor costs, inflation are going way up. I’m not so sure that we can predict in a linear way what’s going to happen in the future.

Ends with plug for AllThingsD. Thanks, Al!

Al Gore Session Photos

So why Asia? It seemed the most obvious choice for us, as we looked at the global landscape for tech. While the whole world has now been engulfed in the powerful trends of digitalization, perhaps nowhere else has been as important a place for understanding where it is headed next than this region, which is home to companies critical to the next phase of innovation.

There’s no question that Silicon Valley, which has been the base for most of the key players — such as Google, Apple, Facebook and more — has driven the digital revolution over the past decade. But as we look out onto what’s to come, it’s clear to us and many others that what’s coming next and even the next great company might be born here.

That’s why we have created a conference that mixes both important speakers from U.S. tech and also from all over Asia.

Given that smartphones are in ascendance globally, having Andy Rubin, who runs Google’s Android efforts, is a no-brainer. The longtime mobile exec is at the top of an aggressive push by the Internet giant to dominate the important sector across the world.

Speaking of domination, Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma efforts to make the company a powerhouse in China and elsewhere are hard to ignore. His recent tussle and interest in Yahoo, as he has built a wide-ranging Internet giant, should make for an interesting interview.

Expect a deep dive into what makes the future Web work with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, who is someone breaking new ground as he tears down old digital paradigms. With Twitter, Dorsey redefined the real-time world and how the virtual one communicates; with Square, he is upending the payments arena.

Nvidia is not only a pioneer of graphics chips, but now its processors are widely used in the latest mobile devices. That’s why its founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a lot to say about the future of the fastest-growing sector of computing, from smartphones to tablets and whatever’s next.

Asus Chairman Jonney Shih has presided over the Taiwanese tech giant since the early 1990s. Most recently, the company pioneered the netbook market and is now plunging deeply into the tablet business, making Shih perfect to discuss these key issues in Asia and around the world.

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance in tech, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use?

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind-Google-and-Apple job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia, and Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

We also felt that it was important to hear from Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including: Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site; former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, who is running the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online; and David Goldberg, who is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company.

Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, who will appear with the Internet giant’s Asia head Rose Tsou, needs little introduction. For all of the noise around the company these days, Yahoo has a huge footprint in the region, maintains a big e-commerce business there and holds massive stakes in key firms, such as Yahoo Japan and China’s Alibaba.

And so does LivingSocial, whose CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy, who will appear along with founders of two of its Asian units, Daniel Shin and Paul Srivorakul, which the daily deals site just bought as part of its aggressive move into Asia.

Because of Samsung’s increasing importance as a global player in smartphones and tablets, it was natural to invite Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, who heads global product strategy for the Korean giant’s mobile business. That has surged in the past year to make Samsung a leader in Android-based phones and tablets, and a significant challenger to Apple.

Also key in the mobile arena is Cher Wang, chairman of HTC, the important and innovative handset and tablet maker which has been a key player in Android’s success story. Add to that HTC buying an operating system, which would further strengthen its hand in the competitive market, and it’s clear it is in a pole position on the critical mobile market going forward.

Finally, we are also glad to bring back Al Gore, who had a memorable interview at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006. The former VP and Nobel Peace Prize winner is now chairman of Current TV and also continues as a prominent environmental activist. He is also on the board of Apple, while also being a senior adviser to Google, as well as a partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins.

In total, along with some very cool demos to show off, it’s going to be an exciting AsiaD, and we are thrilled most of all to welcome our first international audience. So get ready for a busy three days here and we hope you will like what we have to show you.

And then there was Schiller and Gore.

That would be Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller and former Vice President Al Gore, who round out the stellar list of speakers at our upcoming AsiaD conference.

Taking place from Oct. 19 to 21 in Hong Kong, the lineup is already impressive, with a mix of speakers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, as well as Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The previously announced speakers include: Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; Asus Chairman Jonney Shih; Sony president and second-in-command Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai; Google+ guru Bradley Horowitz; Hollywood big shot Peter Chernin; Huawei’s North American R&D head John Roese; Microsoft’s Windows Phone head Andy Lees; and a panel of Silicon Valley start-up stars — Joyus’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, SurveyMonkey’s Dave Goldberg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Asia head Rose Tsou; LivingSocial’s Tim O’Shaughnessy, along with founders of two of its Asian units, Daniel Shin and Paul Srivorakul; Samsung mobile head Dr. Won-Pyo Hong; HTC CEO Peter Chou, who replaces Chairwoman Cher Wang.

Schiller, who reports to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook (and before that, Steve Jobs) is a member of the executive team of the tech icon, where he has worked for 17 years. He is responsible for a swath of Apple’s outward-facing businesses, including product marketing, developer relations and business marketing.

Today, in fact, he was onstage at Apple’s iPhone event, outlining some of its new product offerings. In addition, Apple just opened its first retail store in Hong Kong.

Gore, who had a memorable interview at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006, needs little introduction. The former VP and Nobel Peace Prize winner is now chairman of Current TV and also continues as a prominent environmental activist.

Gore is on the board of Apple, while also being a senior adviser to Google, which is a neat trick. At the same time, he is a partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a partnership that is focused on sustainable investing.

And, as most people know, he knows a thing or two about the Internet.

Walt Mossberg and I could not think of two better people to add to the lineup we have for AsiaD, which has very few seats left.

See you in China in two weeks!

Earl will be the company’s chief operating officer and will begin Sept. 6, after wrapping up her job as chief strategy officer and COO at Current TV, the cable station started by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.

In her new job, she’ll be leading day-to-day operations at Ngmoco, and will work closely with the company’s CEO and founder, Neil Young.

The appointment comes ahead of a major growth spurt for the San Francisco company, which was purchased by Japanese-based DeNA late last year. It anticipates adding another 100 staffers to its base of approximately 200 employees over the next four months.

Since being purchased by DeNA, Ngmoco has been busy building a very large mobile game network called Mobage (pronounced mo-bah-gay), which launched on Android devices in all English-speaking countries in July.

While today Mobage consists mostly of a game network that connects players around the world, it aspires to be a much broader entertainment network for next-generation devices, something that has been mainly Young’s vision up until now.

That’s where Earl will be able to step in, having coming from the TV industry. “The more I spoke with Neil and saw where they were headed, there’s a lot of similarities,” Earl said. “I was the first executive to join Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to build a new kind of media company — one that was focused on inviting the audience to collaborate.”

She added that the vision for Ngmoco and Mobage in building a worldwide brand is equally large.

“It’s the scaling of Mobage on Android now, and soon iOS, and then beyond, while also going into more territories. The ambition is big, and there’s a lot to do. Neil is in demand while we are in its start-up phase. He’s asked me to come in and be a No. 2, to take off an operational burden. I’m comfortable doing that.”

The site’s new section joins many other sites’ video verticals which bring you clips from around the Web. But unlike some competitors — see: Gawker, Mediaite and others — the Atlantic is taking a relatively old-fashioned approach to aggregation: It’s asking permission from copyright owners to run their stuff.

TheAtlantic.com edit boss Bob Cohn says his site will get a signed licensing agreement from every owner whose stuff gets featured on TheAtlantic.com’s proprietary video player. (The Atlantic will also feature clips from other sites using their own embeddable players — in those cases, it won’t need to ask for permission.)

That doesn’t mean video makers will get paid — compensation will come in the form of links — but the olde-timey practice highlights the different tack the site is taking here. If you want clips of TV news readers saying embarrassing things, or media magnates getting a pie to the face, there are plenty of places to get those. The Atlantic will instead focus on higher-brow, higher-minded stuff that you probably haven’t seen.

Atlantic editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, a former producer at Current TV who Cohn describes as “an embed in the video-generating community,” is in charge of picking the stuff and will also interview some of the creators.

Here’s a sample of what she’s looking for: An excerpt from “California is a Place,” a slice-o-life documentary series:

Aquadettes from California is a place on Vimeo.

This week: We got all-access passes to Skype for an interview with Julia Hartz, co-founder and president of Eventbrite, the four-year-old Web-based ticketing service aiming to unseat the big guys.

Using the Eventbrite Web interface, organizers can set up ticket sales and publicize their events using social media tools. It’s a labor of love, too, as Julia shares the big office with co-founder and husband Kevin.

Who: Julia Hartz

What: President and co-founder

Why: Hartz said Eventbrite has cracked the code on merging business and the social graph. It enables event organizers to publish events online and sell tickets, then publish the events to Facebook. And if your event is free, so are Eventbrite services. Julia says it is democratizing the ticketing industry, but it can’t all be free. Eventbrite saw $100 million in ticket sales in 2009.

Where: eventbrite.com (Web site); @eventbrite (Twitter); San Francisco, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: Eventbrite services put it in competition with most of the ticket-selling world, especially Ticketmaster, which is now owned by Live Nation (LYV). But Hartz said most of the people using Eventbrite for the first time are switching from using spreadsheets.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I was an intern on the set of “Friends.” It was this awful experience taking place in this wondrous environment. There was a serious level of paranoia there. And basically, my job was to hold a phone and anytime it rang, I had to go find that person on the set. My second worst job was as a barista at The Ugly Mug in Santa Cruz. I would drink like three mochas and eat some pastries during my shift and then be depressed for the rest of the day.

Her Big Event of 2010: I’m really looking forward to Chirp, the upcoming Twitter conference. That and maybe F8, the Facebook conference.

Gadget of the Moment: My new iPad…just kidding. I guess just my Apple (AAPL) iPhone. We’re kind of a gadget family. Our two-year-old has a Pleo, because we can’t get a puppy in our place.

Wants to Be When She Grows Up: I want to be a great mom.

Fails At: Being a working mom and running the start-up. I feel like I’m never doing 100 percent in either. I feel 80 percent in everything. Kevin would say I fail at taking big risks–stuff like skydiving or petting a spider at the children’s museum.

Bio in 140 Characters

Hartz grew up in Santa Cruz. She went to Pepperdine for a degree in being a TV exec. She was at MTV, FX, then left for the start-up world.

The Five Questions

You started Eventbrite in 2006–why this and why then?

Well, I’ll just be honest; it had a lot to do with logistics. I’d just moved up here and Kevin and I had just gotten engaged. I was about to go to Current TV and didn’t know if that was the right move. We got to talking about all the events we heard about after the fact, and all the event “postcards” we got on our car windshields. There was little to no innovation in the events market. Unless you were using Ticketmaster, you really had no access to tools and technology that could help you as a smaller events planner. Also, Kevin was very close to PayPal, so we were looking at what we could do based on the PayPal API. The transaction is where it began.

So, you and Kevin have sort of made Eventbrite your baby. How does being a start-up couple change things?

Well, in working with somebody you know quite well, we sort of divide and conquer. We sort of have our own areas of the business that we strive to excel in, and we try to support each other. We received some really great advice early on from Michael and Xochi Birch, who co-founded Bebo. When we asked them how they worked together, they said divide and conquer–don’t work on anything together. That’s sorta what we do. And we do really well on a day-to-day basis. But if you get us behind the same spreadsheet, we’ll definitely be fighting for the mouse.

What sorts of mistakes have you guys made doing this?

I think we’ve been pretty good on avoiding most big mistakes, but I do think we’ve been too focused on making decisions around customer reactions…that sounds a little weird. Let me give you an example. So, we were a free service early on, then we were freemium. The problem was that our basic service was so robust that our premium service was only a little better. We were toying with the idea of going all paid for too long. When we finally bit the bullet and did it, we had very little decrease in use. We think it’s because event organizers don’t have to make an additional choice now about which service to use. The cost just scales with the ticket price. We just took too long to make the decision, I think.

You guys are building a pretty interesting picture of who attends what events. Are you planning to tread further into the social graph and begin recommending events to people based on past attendance?

Yes. We see that to be something that’s very exciting, but we want to do it in the right way. Hyper-relevancy is key to us, so, um, I can’t say how we’ll do it, but when we do it, we’ll definitely take into account what’s out there right now and try to innovate on that. I’d say that will happen in the broad window of the next two years.

What are your major moves going to be in 2010?

How about this? How about the fact that in five years, Eventbrite will be the only place that you will ever go to buy a ticket for any event that you would ever attend. I truly believe that, and I can actually see how we’ll get there. We are a smaller business and can move quite quickly. We don’t have a bullseye in your office with the Ticketmaster logo in the middle. We aren’t a Ticketmaster killer, but we see our model as becoming the status quo for all ticketing.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100216/almost-famous-julia-hartz-of-eventbrite/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091117/what-current-tvs-moves-signal-for-citizen-journalism/ http://allthingsd.com/20091117/what-current-tvs-moves-signal-for-citizen-journalism/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:20:24 +0000 Andy Jordan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17993 Current TV began with a promise to be the great democratizer of media. Some four years into the experiment, it has a new chief executive who is shifting it away from short videos to more traditional cable programming.

In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week. The announcement has prompted questions about citizen journalism’s future, though Mark Rosenthal, Current’s CEO and a former president and operating chief at MTV Networks, said that it isn’t in doubt.

“Current’s mission has not changed one iota,” he said in an interview. “Citizen journalism is far from dead.”

The moves are among Current’s first big changes from Mr. Rosenthal, who helped take MTV from videos to reality and entertainment programming in the ’90s. And while he said the network is still committed to viewer-created content, the format still faces plenty of skepticism as a business model.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091117/what-current-tvs-moves-signal-for-citizen-journalism/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090119/web-videos-one-day-obama-stimulus-how-to-watch-the-obama-inauguration-live-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20090119/web-videos-one-day-obama-stimulus-how-to-watch-the-obama-inauguration-live-online/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:20:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3267 Why is every media outlet in the world showing Barack Obama’s inauguration live on the Web on Tuesday?

Because they can, of course. And because the presidency-to-be has already provided a short-term boost for media companies who’ve been able to feed the public’s appetite for all things Obama. The New York Times, for example, says it generated $2.3 million in much-needed extra revenue via the sale of its commemorative election day edition and other paraphernalia.

So it will be nearly impossible to boot up your browser on Tuesday and not end up watching a live stream of the pomp and circumstance; the actual swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for noon Eastern Standard Time.

But just in case your online venue of choice gets the hiccups, here’s a list of sites that promise to provide coverage; I’ve also embedded a stream from Hulu (which is using the Fox broadcast’s feed) at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer to stay right here.

I’m sure I’ve probably missed several dozen options: If you’ve got a site you want to add to the list, do so in comments below or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.

Presidential Inauguration Committee (Microsoft-haters beware: This stream will require the company’s Silverlight player)

Joint Congressional Committee

New York Times

Washington Post

ABC News

CNN (features obligatory Facebook tie-in)

C-SPAN

CBS News

MSNBC

Fox News

Joost (Joost would like to point out that unlike some of the options listed here, its feed will be available for  international audiences).

Current TV (features obligatory Twitter tie-in)

Livestation (requires download; player allows viewers to flip between coverage from Al Jazeera, C-Span, BBC, euronews, France 24, Russia Today).

One major video outlet that apparently won’t be streaming the event live: The biggest–Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But YouTube’s Inauguration Channel is serving up plenty of video during the run-up.

And if you couldn’t score tickets to the Huffington Post’s pre-inaugural ball Monday night with the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and, um, Ashton Kutcher, don’t fret: The news aggregator promises to provide both live video and live blogging of the event.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090119/web-videos-one-day-obama-stimulus-how-to-watch-the-obama-inauguration-live-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081111/take-me-away-from-all-these-layoffs/ http://allthingsd.com/20081111/take-me-away-from-all-these-layoffs/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:00:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8245

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081111/take-me-away-from-all-these-layoffs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080403/hey-we-like-our-soothing-marimba-intro-riff/ http://allthingsd.com/20080403/hey-we-like-our-soothing-marimba-intro-riff/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:23:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080403/hey-we-like-our-soothing-marimba-intro-riff/ I meant to get this very funny video about the Web sites of financial publications–from Current TV, by Viral Video Film School–posted sooner, as it made me spit up my coffee several times.

The shaggy Brett Erlich perfectly reviews the sites for the Web 2.0 crowd, making fun of WSJ.com’s soothing video intro music, and the online video stars on Forbes and Fortune (one of whom, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer is an old classmate of mine, in fact).

The best bit is his take on the “Information Highway Traffic Jam” at the end among all us MSM types, driving like teens gone wild on the digital freeway.

Here’s the video:

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