Microsoft's Man in Silicon Valley, Dan'l Lewin, Speaks!

A few weeks ago, BoomTown had lunch at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View with Dan’l Lewin, the software giant’s corporate VP for strategic and emerging business development. In other words, Microsoft’s friendly face in the Valley, in charge of its operations there, which has about 2,000 employees. Most of them work for other Microsoft divisions, leaving Lewin primarily responsible for the company’s relationships with start-ups, venture capitalists and industry partners. In other words, hoping that Google now seems scarier than Microsoft used to be. Here’s a video interview with him about all that and more.
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An American (Well, Lots of Them) in Paris for Le Web

BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

The Video I Forgot to Post From the Web 2.0 Summit Last Week

I blame post-election exhaustion for rendering me comatose after Tuesday, which is how this video I did at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week got stuck in my to-do-later pile. Well, it has since been fished out, including interviews with conference organizers, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, as well as Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt (who is apparently scared of me, which is just the way I like it) and Microsoft’s man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin.

Kara Visits the VentureBeat Party!

Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat‘s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog. Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and [...]

Two GigaOm Shows: Andreessen, Gadgets, Long Tail and a Charming Microsoft Dude

However we missed a week of posting the GigaOm Show on Revision3 escapes us–it had something to do with tequila and Britney Spears, but we are foggy on the exact details. Nonetheless, here are two for the price of one (and, by price, we mean free) for your techie enjoyment. Last month, Om Malik and [...]