AllThingsD » D: All Things Digital

Bill Gates on Steve Jobs on "60 Minutes"

Kara Swisher — Mon, 13 May 2013 07:57:51 +0000

This week, CBS news program “60 Minutes” had an interview with Microsoft co-founder and now major philanthropist Bill Gates, called “Bill Gates 2.0.”

It also included some discussion of his longtime relationship with the late Apple legend Steve Jobs.

Here’s the interview in full, in which he talks mostly about eradicating diseases like polio by improving vaccine delivery and his other efforts to alleviate suffering worldwide.

And here’s a special report by “60 Minutes,” in which CBS’s Charlie Rose talks about the Gates-Jobs part, which includes parts of the joint interview the pair did at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007:

To Infinity and Beyond: Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla Motors Added as Second-Night Speaker at D11

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:39:15 +0000

Earlier this week, we posted on the addition of Apple CEO Tim Cook as our opening night speaker at the 11th D: All Things Digital conference.

Now we are thrilled to announce that Elon Musk will take to the stage on our second night. For those who have not been paying a lot of attention, Musk is the founder of both electric-car maker Tesla Motors and SpaceX, a private space-exploration pioneer.

The South African-born entrepreneur is someone well known for shooting for the moon in his huge ambitions, and he also doesn’t mind getting into it to defend his efforts (his epic PR brawl with the New York Times over the cold-weather performance of the new Tesla Model S electric car was riveting).

At SpaceX, in addition to being CEO, he is listed as the chief designer, “overseeing development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets.” At Tesla, he is CEO and chief product architect. Musk is also the largest investor and chairman of SolarCity, a major provider of solar power systems.

Previously, Musk was one of the co-founders of PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002; he also co-founded Internet media software provider Zip2.

In other words, the visionary Musk has been a very busy man, so there’s a lot to talk about regarding innovation, pushing forward change, and a whole lot more.

Along with Cook, Musk will join a long list of stellar speakers slated to appear onstage at D11 from May 28 to May 30, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Jeff Immelt of GE, new Android chief Sundar Pichai, Sony’s Kaz Hirai, ABC’s Anne Sweeney, and more.

And we still have a few more speakers to announce, so stay tuned.

(D11 takes place May 28 to May 30 in Palo Verdes, Calif., and is sold out, although we will provide coverage and videos here throughout the conference.)

Apple's Tim Cook Returns to D Stage to Open 11th Annual Conference

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:36:08 +0000

Although we are only about a month out from our 11th D: All Things Digital conference, we still have a few big speakers to announce, not the least of which is Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Cook, who made his debut at D10 last year in his first major interview as the new leader of the iconic and powerful tech giant, will be kicking off the proceedings with an interview with us on the opening night of the conference.

There’s lots to talk about, from the explosive growth of the mobile market to intense competition from a range of rivals, most especially Google’s Android, as well as innovative offerings from Korea’s Samsung. It will also be interesting to talk about the changes at Apple under the leadership of Cook, who took over from the late co-founder and industry legend Steve Jobs, as well inquiring about what new products are in the pipeline and how the company is faring in an increasingly high-pressure market.

Cook joins a long list of stellar speakers slated to appear onstage at D11 from May 28 to 30, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Jeff Immelt of GE, new Android chief Sundar Pichai, Sony’s Kaz Hirai, ABC’s Anne Sweeney and more.

But we are not quite done yet, so stay tuned for announcements of out final speakers. And, while we never reveal them before the event, our D11 demos are among our best ever. (Special note: D11 has been sold out for months, but we provide coverage and videos from it throughout the conference.)

Until we get them all in person, here’s the full Cook interview from D10 to peruse:

[ See post to watch video ]

More D11 Speakers: Sinofsky, Staggs, Sweeney, Pichai, Ricci and a Pretty Little Liar

Kara Swisher — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:13:04 +0000

A few weeks ago, we posted our initial list of speakers for the 11th D: All Things Digital conference, which takes place May 28 to 30 in Palos Verdes, Calif.

Already, we have an amazing gathering onstage, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, GE’s Jeff Immelt and many more.

And, today, we’re adding more names to the already action-packed list of top media and tech names — although we’re still not done unveiling all of them yet, with some big ones yet to come.

But the latest group should continue to provide some news-packed interviews onstage, given their varied careers at some of the most important tech and media companies around.

First off, Walt Mossberg and I are thrilled to bring back Steven Sinofsky, who left Microsoft earlier this year after runnings its flagship Windows franchise. (In fact, he demoed Windows 8 onstage in 2011.) As one of the software giant’s most high-profile and voluble execs (his numerous internal blog posts at the company were riveting), Sinofsky has always had a keen view of the entire tech landscape beyond Redmond, Wash. Thus, Sinofsky Unplugged is sure to be a lively thing to watch.

Also interesting will be another returnee, Sundar Pichai of Google. Already head of its Chrome efforts, he has quite recently been thrust onto a bigger stage after the sudden departure of Andy Rubin as head of the search giant’s Android unit. Now, taking over the key mobile unit, the affable Pichai is charged with making sure Google stays strong in the sector.

Among the most important parts of the entire mobile ecosystem is voice, which is why we wanted to get the leader of the most powerful company in the sector — Nuance Communications chairman and CEO Paul Ricci — onstage to talk about where it’s all headed. Nuance powers Apple’s Siri (allegedly) and also owns Dragon NaturallySpeaking, making it a dominant force in the efforts to make devices interact with us all more effortlessly and hands-free.

We’re also convinced that Hollywood is really starting to grok the importance of digital in reaching consumers of its entertainment products. That’s especially true in the television market, which has had to try to figure out how to attract viewers in more innovative ways. None has been more immersive in this effort than ABC Family’s hit teen-aimed show, “Pretty Little Liars,” which has used Twitter, Facebook and much more to keep itself on top in the ratings. We’ll have Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and PLL creator and executive producer I. Marlene King onstage to talk about the ups and downs and ins and outs of it all.

Lastly, also from Disney, we’re adding Tom Staggs, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, whose job it is run what is perhaps one of the most logistically challenging efforts in the world. He’ll be discussing how the parks use technology and innovation to take the entire “guest” experience to a new level. That includes showing off its latest effort, MyMagic+ and the Magic Band, which is aimed at creating a more personalized and customized visit and is being rolled out in the next few months.

That’s a lot of speakers, but we are still not done — so watch this space for more to come soon. (FYI: D11 has been sold out since late last year, but we will be posting lots of videos on the proceedings and perhaps even streaming some sessions.)

Until then, here is a different kind of video of the PLL cast doing the Harlem Shake, um, their way:

Harlem shake PLL style @ashbenzo @shaymitch Tyler Blackburn, Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario

Apr 1, 2013| Source: Keek.com

Let the D11 Speakers Begin: Sandberg, Silbermann, Costolo, Woodside, Immelt and More!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:08:32 +0000

One of the best parts of planning the next D: All Things Digital conference — which is in its 11th iteration this year — is trying to figure out what group of top tech and media players will make the very best combination to bring real insight, news and forward thinking to our amazing audience, at the event and also online.

Some interviews one knows with certainty are going to be epic — such as our joint one with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates at D5 in 2007. Others, like our terrific session with Oracle’s Larry Ellison last year at D10, gave the attendees a new look at someone they thought they already knew well. Some are just plain funny — such as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s famous “death stare” in 2011 at D9.

What’s most clear throughout them all is that Walt Mossberg and I have been lucky in getting high-caliber and engaging speakers who are willing and able to sit in our signature red Steelcase chairs and answer our sometimes thorny questions.

This year’s D11 is no exception. While there are many more speakers we can’t announce quite yet, here’s the start of the list for the 2013 conference, which has been sold out since last fall:

As we did last year, we’ll be having Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker walk the audience through her famous annual Internet report, giving both her observations and prognostications about where the digital space has been and where it is headed next. Meeker’s slides come fast and furious, and often set some of the themes that will doubtless be raised by other speakers.

One speaker who has dominated many key memes this year has been Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whom we last had at D6 in 2008, when she appeared with CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, a lot has happened at the social networking giant — including a tumultuous IPO and a need to quickly develop its mobile business — so there’s plenty to discuss related to Facebook. Of course, there is also a lot to talk about related to her recent book on women in the workplace, titled “Lean In,” which has garnered just a little bit of attention of late.

Another very voluble speaker will surely be Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We felt it was important to bring him back onstage, given all the change at the social communications company over the last year, from its aggressive efforts to build out its advertising business to its tangles with Facebook to its expected IPO in 2014. Twitter has emerged as a key company on the global stage — and it is Costolo’s job to keep it there.

One of the most explosive startups on the scene recently has, of course, been scrapbooking phenom Pinterest, whose steady CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann will appear at our conference for the first time. Unlike many attention-seeking entrepreneurs, Silbermann has quietly pushed the young company to the forefront of e-commerce and other key digital arenas by creating a unique and elegant way for people to share interests of all kinds. Despite its recent huge valuation, Pinterest has an unusual heft and influence in tech and beyond that few other such companies can claim.

Also of interest is the new leader of Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker that is owned by Google but is being run separately by CEO Dennis Woodside. A longtime exec at the search giant, Woodside is charged with creating world-class hardware for the Android platform that can attract consumers and compete with a spate of rivals — while still maintaining a certain distance from the mothership.

Such an effort will require a lot of innovation, which is why Woodside is bringing along someone well known to D — Regina Dugan. The charismatic exec first appeared at D9 when she was director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and she riveted the crowd with stories of Mach 10 airplanes and other cloak-and-dagger tech. Now she’s an SVP at Motorola Mobility, where she leads the Advanced Technology & Projects group.

How big companies are reacting to the Internet revolution has always been an important topic at our conference over the years, and there is no bigger conglomerate to ask about it than GE and its chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. While the company operates across many segments, from energy to technology infrastructure to capital finance, the changes and impact of digital have been paramount for GE. In fact, Immelt recently wrote a provocative editorial on the “Industrial Internet” and the rise of intelligent machines about leveraging “the power of the cloud to connect machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software to other machines (and to us) so we can extract data, make sense of it and find meaning where it did not exist before.” Heavier stuff than your basic jet engine (which GE makes, by the way).

Change has not been easy for Web-centric companies, either, including Cisco, whose CEO John Chambers has led the networking giant through the growth of the Internet since the very beginning. Still, Cisco has struggled with a number of recent consumer efforts, even as it has been aggressively shifting its focus to the cloud to continue to dominate in the network space and to push the idea of the “Internet of Everything,” where it plays a central role.

To ratchet up the conversation, we decided to pair Chambers with one of the enterprise’s most clever and fast-moving entrepreneurs, Aaron Levie of Box. The cloud services company just raised a mega round of funding and is headed for an IPO next year, but we also invited Levie because he is very, very funny and manages to explain the massive changes moving through the sector in a very, very funny way. We look forward to his take on how smaller upstarts like Box, Dropbox and many others are managing to best the big companies with innovation and chutzpah.

Speaking of that, there is no better tell-it-like-it-is exec in digital media than Barry Diller of IAC. We have had the razor-sharp Diller onstage at D before, but we thought it was time to bring him back because of his aggressive investment in Aereo, the Web TV service that mainstream TV networks abhor. Diller, who has run such a media operation before, is perhaps the perfect person to be disrupting them now, and to talk about the state of the media industry today. He’s also still owner of a lot of key Internet franchises that have had to react to the shift in consumer tastes and desires.

In another pairing, Jeff Zucker will join Diller onstage to debate how media is faring. It’s an important issue for him, since he was just hired by Time Warner to reinvigorate its CNN cable news brand in a fast-changing environment. Zucker has worked everywhere in the TV sector, but rethinking how it creates and delivers its offering in the future — while making more than digital dimes — is a massive task.

Also huge is the uphill battle new Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai faces in turning around the fortunes of the Japanese consumer electronics giant. As he overhauls the once-dominant company, he also must push forward on a number of fronts that include mobile, digital imaging, videogames and network services. There is also the upcoming debut of the PlayStation 4 console, which has yet to be unveiled, all of which has added pressure to Hirai’s quick-moving efforts at turnaround at Sony.

Hirai will be appearing with Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, who is in the midst of building a digitally tricked-out new stadium for the storied football franchise, which is being described as a “large data center.” And more — including addressing the importance of technology in delivering the modern sports entertainment experience. The issue is one that every sports owner on the planet thinks about these days, as fans expect more and more ways to share, communicate and interact.

Using a sports metaphor, it’s a pretty good line-up so far, but the D11 speaker list is far from complete, with more very big names to be announced in the coming weeks. And, especially since we have no more tickets to sell, it’s important to remember that we will be using AllThingsD to bring you the news, videos and more that will allow everyone to experience it all, no matter where they are.

True&Co Co-Founder Ramamurthy Joins Battery as EIR

Kara Swisher — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 05:26:14 +0000

Aarthi Ramamurthy, who co-founded personalized intimate apparel online retailer True&Co, has joined Battery Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence to “pursue disruptive e-commerce initiatives.” Ramamurthy was most recently head of product of True&Co, which launched at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year. She has also worked at both Netflix and Microsoft, and was the co-creator of Bubblegum, a photo-sharing application.

Gaming the Clouds: Here Are the D Demos of Otoy (Still Standing) and OnLive (Who Knows?)

Kara Swisher — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:27:55 +0000

At our D: All Things Digital conferences, we’ve taken an interest in the cloud, including showing off two of the leading game streaming services — Otoy and OnLive.

(That’s OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman in the photo, demoing the service at D: Dive Into Mobile in 2010.)

Earlier today, in an epic fail of communication by Perlman, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based OnLive drastically reformed itself — mysteriously laying off its staff and then saying a new company had bought the pioneering start-up’s assets and could be hiring an unknown number of employees who had just been dinged.

Said OnLive, in perhaps one of the most ridonkulous statements I have ever seen:

“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services. We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.”

Forgive us if we can’t begin to understand the pointless machinations that went on.

On the other side of the coin is Otoy, an innovative Los Angeles-based software provider, which demoed its cloud-based 3-D rendering service called Octane Reader at D10 this summer, along with its game-streaming offering.

Otoy was founded in 2008 by Jules Urbach, Alissa Grainger and Malcolm Taylor — and they seem to be doing just fine as an independent start-up in the space.

Here’s the Otoy demo, as well as the two times OnLive came to D:

Otoy at D10 in 2012:

[ See post to watch video ]

OnLive at D8 in summer of 2010:

[ See post to watch video ]

OnLive at D: Dive Into Mobile in late 2010

[ See post to watch video ]

Boxes and a Bar: OnLive Employees Pack Up After Cloud Gaming Company Obfuscates About Fate (Photos)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:24:18 +0000

According to multiple reports I have received, some employees of OnLive have been walking out of their Palo Alto, Calif. offices over the last few hours laden with boxes.

And some, no surprise, are headed to a nearby bar — The Patio — presumably to drown their sorrows.

The departures from the online cloud-gaming service came after a meeting this morning in which its top execs told staff that it would be letting almost the entire staff go, but without a lot of explanation of what that meant.

While founder and CEO Steve Perlman runs a number of other digital efforts — via his own Rearden Labs — at its Silicon Valley HQ, sources said only fraction of staffers will be left to keep the servers running until a resolution for the assets is found. Kotaku reported that OnLive would be filing an “alternative to bankruptcy called an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, or ABC, in the state of California.”

It is not clear who actually owns the pricey technology and patents for OnLive, which has raised $56 million in funding from investors such as Maverick Capital, Time Warner and HTC. HTC, the Taiwanese telecom giant, invested $40 million of the total in early 2011.

That’s a lot of dough, so it is not clear what has happened or if Perlman is poised to sell off the entity.

Sony recently bought one of OnLive’s rivals in the space — Gaikai — for $380 million to turbocharge its cloud-gaming service efforts.

One thing is entirely clear: While egregiously denying it was doing so, the gaming and virtual desktop software start-up is effectively shutting down OnLive as it has been previously run.

Earlier today, an OnLive spokesperson denied the obvious situation.

“We don’t respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down,” OnLive said, while also bizarrely flacking their games.

Last week, I heard a rumor of just this thing happening and asked a spokesperson last Friday via email: “I hear via very good sources it is closing down or cutting back.”

This was the disingenuous response: “The latest rumors have been around acquisitions — this is a new one! Not the case, but officially we never comment on rumors.”

No need for comment, as you can see from the photo above and also here that was just sent to me.

OnLive launched in 2010 as a Web portal for streaming games, which it demoed here, from the D: All Things Digital conference in 2010.

As Lauren Goode wrote earlier: “In addition to its cloud-based gaming platform, which runs on PCs, tablets and now Google TV products, OnLive also offers [Microsoft] Office-based, virtual desktop software for [Apple] iPads and [Google] Android tablets, which got the Palo-Alto-based start up in some hot water with Microsoft earlier this year.”

Mashable first reported on the possible layoffs earlier. Let’s upgrade that to actual.

Hey Internet Girl: Aaron Sorkin's TV News 2.0 Show Gets a Second Season (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:05:10 +0000

Hollywood super-writer Aaron Sorkin has already gotten his new show on the struggles of creating a new television news show in the Internet age renewed for another season.

The successful Sorkin made light of the struggles to attract a big audience for the HBO program in a recent onstage interview at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

Not so hard, as it turns out for the voluble scribe, whose “The Newsroom” got 2.1 million viewers in its opening two weeks ago, which is just behind HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and “Game of Thrones.”

Sorkin did manage to attract some controversy recently when he said in a tense interview with Sarah Nicole Pickett of Canada’s Globe and Mail:

“Listen here, Internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”

The fab line did result in an even funnier Tumblr on the kerfuffle.

Here’s the full video of Sorkin’s interview with Walt Mossberg at D10, as well as another very funny recent viral video, titled “Sorkinisms,” in which the writer uses his best lines over and over, compiled from a variety of his shows.

[ See post to watch video ]

Skype's Tony Bates Talks About Talking Online: The Full D10 Interview

Kara Swisher — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:02:38 +0000

When Microsoft bought the global Internet communications company Skype for $8.5 billion eight months ago, there was some worry about it being well-integrated into the software giant.

But, as Tony Bates — the former Skype CEO who now runs the Microsoft division — said onstage at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, the service now has 250 million monthly connected users, up from 170 million then.

Among the many topics he covered in this interview with me: Mobile efforts with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, prospects for video and, of course, how integration is going with Microsoft’s slew of products, such as Windows 8 and its mobile platform.

“We’re on that journey,” he said. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

Until then, here is the full video of the interview at D10:

[ See post to watch video ]

FTC's Jon Leibowitz Takes Your Privacy Very Seriously: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:00:18 +0000

It’s clear — especially from this interview with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference — that the federal government is going to spend more time scrutinizing Internet companies and their behavior.

“The more protection these consumers have, the more they trust it, and the more commerce they do,” Leibowitz said in a wide-ranging interview that focused a lot on “privacy by design” and transparency in the face of ever-growing power by digital-data-sucking companies like Facebook and Google.

Leibowitz could not say much about an ongoing antitrust investigation of Google, except to note that he had just hired his own outside big legal gun to keep up with the search giant’s, in case of, well, you know.

Here’s the video of the full interview with Walt Mossberg:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mayor Bloomberg Wants You to Supersize Your Health: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:34:38 +0000

It was fortuitous for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference that the larger-than-life New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had just banned giant servings of sugary and high-calorie supersized sodas in the city.

Because of duties back in the Big Apple, the electronic news entrepreneur was broadcast to D10 via satellite, but he managed to strongly defend his latest effort to fight bad health practices by his constituents — whether they like it or not.

Even remotely, the interview was lively and covered a wide variety of topics, including Bloomberg’s thoughts about technology in the classroom, and the reasons he’s not going to run for president.

Among the reasons — he backs gay rights and, “I believe in science.”

Don’t miss this great interview with me and Walt Mossberg:

[ See post to watch video ]

Hollywood's Ari Emanuel Has Strong Opinions About Content: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:55:16 +0000

Without further ado, here’s one of the more controversial interviews of the 10th D: All Things Digital conference — Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel unplugged.

Actually, he is usually a very live wire, which the crowd at the event did not get to see burning hot until the very end, in a testy exchange with The Verge’s Josh Topolsky.

This exchange caused some level of debate online over Emanuel’s brusque manner, including some cursing. But — however riveting it is to watch their argument devolve from initially like a funny wrestling match to really pissed-off — there’s a lot more to the interview to pay mind to.

Emanuel — who co-heads William Morris Endeavor, one of Hollywood’s most important talent agencies — talked about a range of issues, from a recent investment by private equity firm Silver Lake to spur more digital initiatives, to the state of the entertainment industry, to crowdfunding movies.

But it was the topic of intellectual property piracy that got Emanuel’s content-loving juices flowing, taking particular aim at Google for not doing enough to filter out stolen copyright-protected material.

Here’s the video of the full interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Exclusive: Google Commerce Exec Tilenius Departs for Kleiner

Kara Swisher — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:02:45 +0000

Stephanie Tilenius, the eBay exec who Google hired away to jumpstart its commerce and mobile payments efforts, is departing the company to become an executive-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The pace of innovation is so unprecedented, especially in social and mobile,” she said in an interview this morning. “I wanted the ability to help scale a few start-ups, instead of building products in a large company.”

Tilenius has much experience in both arenas, having co-founded and led PlanetRx.com in Web 1.0, as well as working at software start-up Firefly, AOL and Intel before that. She holds a BA and MA from Brandeis University and an MBA from Harvard.

Tilenius joined eBay in 2001 and worked across a wide variety of its businesses, including running the merchant service group of its powerful PayPal payments unit and also on its key Marketplace offering.

Tilenius took an even more prominent operating role when she joined Google and ended up shepherding Google Wallet, one of the search giant’s most significant efforts in commerce. Tilenius’s first job at Google was leading its commerce efforts and in product search, but she founded Google Wallet as a kind of skunkworks within the company.

It is now part of an integrated offering, in which users have a one-payment account to cover purchases across Android Market, YouTube, Google+ Games and other of the company’s properties.

“We have built one wallet in the cloud,” she said.

Tilenius was one of the main executives to unveil Google Wallet at an event in New York last year. She also demonstrated the product at our D: All Things Digital conference in 2011.

Tilenius had also been the key player in Google’s unsuccessful attempt to buy Groupon. After that, Google then launched Google Offers to compete with the daily deals site.

The various payments initiatives by Google also attracted controversy, when PayPal filed suit against Tilenius – as well as Osama Bedier, Google’s VP of payments and former PayPal executive. The payments unit of eBay claimed they and Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated contracts involving recruiting agreements.

In January, Tilenius shifted roles to oversee Google’s commerce efforts internationally.

Perhaps by coincidence, since the firm has been talking about bringing her in for months, Tilenius is the second major hire of a woman at the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, in the wake of a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by a woman partner, Ellen Pao. A month ago, Kleiner hired former Square product exec Megan Quinn as a partner to focus on consumer Internet investments.

Kleiner recently filed an answer to Pao’s legal action, maintaining it was her own performance that kept her from advancing at the firm.

Tilenius declined to comment on the case.

At Kleiner, Tilenius will be working closely with a number of partners, although she will be focusing on late-stage companies in its $1 billion Digital Growth Fund. She also might be incubating some ideas of her own, she said.

Kleiner partner Ted Schlein said Tilenius would be a “tremendous resource” for the firm.

“When talent becomes available to focus on different opportunties in portfolio, we jump at that,” he said. “Stephanie has the experience in some of the largest scaling of businesses in the Valley, as well as an entrepreneurial background, so it is ideal for us.”

Tilenius said the move was “less about Google than working on the next generation of companies.”

She said she had some ideas in mobile commerce, especially given her experience at Google and eBay, as well as in the healthcare area.

“I think it is really early days in mobile and retail is going to be transformed,” said Tilenius. “There are a lot of players, but it is a marathon.”

Indeed.

Here’s a video of Tilenius in action, showing off Google Wallet at D9:

[ See post to watch video ]

Larry Ellison Tells It Like It Is: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16:04 +0000

Perhaps more than any other tech figure in Silicon Valley, Larry Ellison — now also trying to become the proud owner of Hawaii’s Lanai — is, for lack of a better word, the man.

It’s a bit about endurance (he’s been at it since 1978, when he founded Oracle), a bit about success (the database giant still remains a very powerful force in the industry), a bit about spoiling for a fight (Hewlett-Packard, SAP, any small cloud company that irks him) and a lot about style (America’s Cup sailing, his gazillionaire Ironman persona and, for goodness sake, he is planning on buying an entire Hawaiian island, presumably for a lair). Ellison has the kind of long-term and powerful perspective that is rare in the app-happy Web 2.0 era of small ideas and too-big valuations.

In other words, he’s the real deal.

So please pull up a chair and enjoy what turned out to be one of the highlight interviews of the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, which is essentially Ellison very, very unplugged:

[ See post to watch video ]

Viral Video: Remember When Surface Was Just a Big-A*#&d Table?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:42:20 +0000

At the fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first demoed the Surface table to Walt Mossberg in an onstage interview.

At the time, the “PlayTable” was not ready to bring it to market, but it had some cool moves, such as moving photos and videos around the surface with your hands. (The table offering is now called “PixelSense,” by the way.)

While the new Surface tablets introduced yesterday by Microsoft are much different beasts, it is still interesting to see the inspiration for them.

Here’s the D5 video of the Ballmer interview, including the Surface table demo — as well as a funny mock video that CollegeHumor did about the ungainly device:

[ See post to watch video ]

CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

Spotify's Sean Parker and Daniel Ek Make Music -- And Some Noise: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:55:07 +0000

At the 10th D: All Things Digital earlier this month, we paired online music’s best known entrepreneurs — Daniel Ek and Sean Parker.

They now work together at Spotify — Ek as CEO and Parker as investor/adviser (he played a similar role in the early days at Facebook).

While they discussed a lot — from the importance of social on the sector to the virtues of playlists on the service — Parker also got off the best zinger against Apple, noting that it might have kept Spotify from landing on U.S. shores for two years.

“There was a sense in which Apple was threatened by what we were doing,” he said.

Here’s the full video of the interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Aaron Sorkin on Jobs Movie, Zuckerberg as Antihero and More: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:43:09 +0000

One of the most engaging interviews at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference was with well-known Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

Best known for television hits such as “The West Wing” and movies like “A Few Good Men” — and, of course, the controversial film about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called “The Social Network” — he is now about to launch a new HBO show called “The Newsroom.”

But most intriguing to the crowd gathered was his work on an upcoming project: To turn Walter Isaacson’s book about Apple’s Steve Jobs into a movie.

Sorkin had a lot to say about that, and also about the way his digitally distracted audience watches all his work, in this talk with Walt Mossberg.

Here it is:

[ See post to watch video ]

Nathan Myhrvold Will Not Apologize for Patent Trolling: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:55:46 +0000

At the 10th D: All Things Digital conference earlier this month, well-known tech exec Nathan Myhrvold wasn’t taking any guff about his controversial patent-portfolio company, Intellectual Ventures.

“I never was a popular kid in class,” the former Microsoft executive told the audience of tech players. “I’m not going to be popular in this class.”

No, indeed, but he is very smart about the issue that has pitted digital companies against each other at an ever-increasing rate.

Here’s the video of the onstage interview Walt Mossberg did with Myhrvold:

[ See post to watch video ]

Zynga's Mark Pincus on Facebook Conundrum and More: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:55:17 +0000

Yesterday, stock in the online gaming site Zynga dropped to new lows, in part caught in the downdraft after the troubled Facebook IPO.

In this interview at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, CEO Mark Pincus talked about that key relationship with the social networking giant upon which Zynga’s success was built; he also discussed its mobile aspirations and how the company is doing since its own public offering late last year.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mary Meeker Explains Internet 2012 in 17 Minutes: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:55:19 +0000

Walt Mossberg and I have a longstanding rule against PowerPoint presentations at the D: All Things Digital conference — mostly because they usually bore the bejesus out of us and the audience.

So, letting longtime Wall Street analyst turned venture capitalist Mary Meeker loose onstage with a clicker and a mess of slides with to debut her annual Internet Trends report means that we think what she had to say was pretty entertaining and very informative.

And, indeed it was, with a lot of focus on important trends in social, commerce, media and, most especially, mobile monetization — or lack thereof.

But there’s more than that, as well as a quick interview we did with the Kleiner Perkins VC about where the digital industry has been in the last decade, and where is it going.

Here’s Meeker at D10, as well as the slides to follow along:

[ See post to watch video ]

Apple's Tim Cook Says Hello: The Full D10 Interview (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:55:00 +0000

As promised, we will begin the posting of all the videos from the 10th D: All Things Digital conference today, starting out with the opening night speaker: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Aside from a few short interviews and an investor conference, Cook’s session with Walt Mossberg and me was his first extended public talk as the newish leader of perhaps the most important and definitely most influential company in tech.

So, getting to see Cook in action is probably the most important part of this interview. While clearly playing it close to the vest, he ranged over a wide number of topics, from secrecy at Apple (it’s now apparently been doubled!) to the iPhone to controversies in China to a possibly more social partnership with Facebook to more television efforts to, of course, the legacy of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last year.

Cook will be onstage again later today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco — which the crack AllThingsD team will be covering — where he will be unveiling product updates and perhaps more in a keynote speech at 10 am PT.

And here’s a very good primer for that:

[ See post to watch video ]

(Over the next two to three weeks, we’ll be posting the full videos of D10 interviews in the order that they were presented at the conference.)

Patent Peace: Yahoo and Facebook in Advanced Negotiations to Settle Fractious Infringement Lawsuits

Kara Swisher — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 19:08:07 +0000

Top execs at Yahoo and Facebook have been hammering out the outlines of a deal over the last several days to end their contentious patent infringement litigation, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

While that could change, sources said a settlement could happen in the coming weeks and that the advanced negotiations will put aside the lawsuits and counterclaims between the one-time close partners and return them back to what could be an even closer relationship.

The key terms being discussed, said sources, include a massive cross-licensing of patents between the Internet giant and the social networking kingpin and an even deeper integration of Facebook into Yahoo and vice versa, which has been a key element of improved engagement of late on Yahoo.

One possible glitch: While Facebook has indicated a willingness to perhaps buy some of Yahoo’s valuable patents, sources said the company is not likely to fork over a massive cash payment to Yahoo as part of a deal.

In a slap to Yahoo’s lawsuit, Facebook recently paid Microsoft $550 million to both buy and also license key patents that the software giant had acquired from AOL, and sources said it is unlikely to do the same for Yahoo.

“Facebook paid a lot of money for patents already, just not to Yahoo,” said one person close to the situation.

That could be a tough reality to swallow for Yahoo, especially since its lawsuit was predicated on the notion that it could get a huge payoff from Facebook in any settlement.

That was the argument used by former CEO Scott Thompson, under whose leadership the legal action was first filed, to convince Yahoo’s board to move forward. The lawsuit caused much consternation in Silicon Valley, but Yahoo’s directors had been told that success could mean many billions of dollars from Facebook to end the fight.

But Thompson was recently ousted from his job over a resume-padding controversy, and it appears that Yahoo board members who pushed for the lawsuit are now distancing themselves from its filing.

In other words, it was all Scott’s fault, so now that he’s gone: Bygones!

Let’s be clear: It wasn’t his doing alone by any means, but Yahoo is now facing an uphill and long-term battle in the case to win anything at all.

That’s why its new interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, along with several board members, including Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, have stepped up talks.

(Yahoo’s on a bit of a goodwill mission, recently adding activist shareholder Loeb as a Yahoo director after settling its proxy fight with him, as well as finally completing a complex asset sale deal with China’s Alibaba Group.)

Interestingly, for Yahoo’s side, this negotiation now appears to be more of a group effort — with board members actively involved — than a solo performance by Levinsohn as the company presses for a solution now.

Facebook is also very motivated to get rid of the problem, especially because its recent borked IPO has taken up a lion’s share of the media and investor perception and attention. Sources said execs there hope that a successful settlement with Yahoo — as well as an expected announcement of an integration with Apple’s iOS at the Worldwide Developers Conference in mid-June — will return the focus to forward momentum by Facebook.

To underscore the importance of settlement, the discussions are being led by the social networking site’s powerful COO, Sheryl Sandberg, along with its VP of partnerships, Dan Rose.

Sandberg and Levinsohn (and his posse of hey-can-I-help-too Yahoo directors) talked in depth about the settlement at the recent 10th D: All Things Digital conference earlier this week, after a number of previous discussions had already taken place.

Tony Bates on Skype Becoming the Virtual Kitchen Table (Video)

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:00:57 +0000

Microsoft closed the acquisition of Skype eight months ago for a whopping $8.5 billion.

And today at D10, Skype boss Tony Bates said that the integration of the two companies is going well, and that he’s busy coming up with ways to serve billions of monthly users.

Bates talked a lot about how he was investing in mobile, including phones and tablets, to reach his aggressive growth targets, as well as about solutions for the living room.

During the interview and following Q&A session, Bates repeatedly answered questions about how Skype hasn’t — or has — changed since the merger.

One thing he said won’t change is that he’ll still have the opportunity to build the service on non-Microsoft products, such as Android and iOS. But he was clear about what he wasn’t open to — creating it so users could access Skype with people using different video-calling services.

“It’s critical to what we do,” he said.

Watch those highlights and others in this video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Skype's Tony Bates Says the Goal Is to Get Billions of Active Users

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:59:11 +0000

Skype President Tony Bates, the man behind Microsoft’s largest acquisition, outlined his ambitions for the Internet-calling service at D: All Things Digital.

“If we can get to billions, I’ll be happy with that, and we are on the path to do that,” he said in an onstage interview with Kara Swisher.

Bates announced that Skype is a quarter of the way there, with 250 million monthly connected users, up from 170 million when Microsoft’s $8.5 billion deal closed eight months ago.

To get the rest of the way, Bates said Skype is emphasizing two areas of growth: Mobile phones and the living room.

“I like to think of Skype as the virtual kitchen table,” Bates said. “Ultimately, videoconferencing isn’t defined by one device. We see the world having it where you want and when you want it. The living room is an important area.”

Bates freely talked about the integration of Skype on Windows 8, Microsoft’s touch-based operating system, and on Windows Phone. But when it came to the Xbox and using Kinect, Microsoft’s hands-free motion-controlled technology, he was a little vague.

“It’s one of the most amazing forms of input we’ve seen to date. It’s been associated with games, and my kids love it, but Kinect is not just for games. … I think voice is another input. For us, it would be adding a communication layer using Kinect as a gesture or input device.”

As for when we might see the integration of the two, Bates said to stay tuned.

Full D10 Conference Coverage