I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

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!

Silicon Valley’s Silver Lake and DST Global of Russia, as well as Chinese private equity firm Yunfeng Capital, are leading a $1.6 billion tender offer for privately held employee and shareholder stock of China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources close to the situation.

Yunfeng, by the way, was co-founded by Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma, as well as other prominent Chinese entrepreneurs.

Along with DST, Silver Lake and Yunfeng, Singapore-based investment firm Temasek is also participating in the tender offer as an investor, but in a smaller way.

The deal, which has been discussed for some time, was signed earlier today and will be presented to its employees in an internal company blog, which will be in Chinese.

To get around persistent foreign ownership issues in China, sources said, DST and Silver Lake are ceding voting control of their stakes to Alibaba management.

If the tender is fully subscribed, that would mean a stake of just under five percent for the group, sources said, and it gives Alibaba a $32 billion enterprise valuation.

The impetus for the tender offer, which begins today, appears to be trying to address a cash-out, paper-rich issue for Alibaba employees.

There are no active secondary private markets in China, as is the case for tech start-ups in the U.S., and there is also no IPO in the foreseeable future for Alibaba. Thus, management has been looking for a way to give its employees and also other shareholders some liquidity.

This tender offer is not a capital raise by Alibaba and is only aimed at eligible employees and shareholders. The purchase of the Alibaba shares is expected to close before the end of December.

It will be done via a special investment vehicle, specifically aimed at this purchase, that includes a spate of investors. Giant Interactive Group, a Chinese online game developer, for example, said it had committed $50 million to the fund.

It’s not clear what the implications are for Alibaba’s biggest shareholder, Yahoo, which sources said is not selling shares in the tender offer. Yahoo’s fully diluted Alibaba 39 percent stake is now worth $12.5 billion in the deal.

That’s discounted due to tax issues and also the inability of the Silicon Valley Internet giant to sell its Alibaba shares.

In other words, investors will likely welcome this higher valuation, but realize a public offering is farther away than ever.

But it is interesting in that it clearly shows a strong relationship between DST and Silver Lake, which have jointly been mulling a possible bid for Yahoo along with Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as I previously reported.

Some will speculate that Silver Lake and DST now have an in with Alibaba, which is important, since a large slug of Yahoo’s market valuation is due to its Alibaba and also Yahoo Japan! assets.

If Yahoo is sold, of course, the disposition of the Alibaba asset is an important part of the deal.

More to come, including the implications for Ma, who has been under siege of late around his spinning out of Alibaba’s Alipay payments service and the noisy battle that later ensued with Yahoo. Yahoo and Alibaba, as well as its other large shareholder, Japan’s SoftBank, settled that dispute earlier this summer.

His involvement in Yunfeng, which is buying the company’s shares in a special fund that Ma is not in, will likely attract some scrutiny, anyway.

Sources said Ma is a minority investor in Yunfeng itself, has no control rights and is not a director. In addition, Yunfeng has no relationship with Alibaba.

In another interesting twist, Alibaba rival Tencent has close ties with DST’s Internet affiliate that used to share the same name, having invested $300 million last year in the affiliate that holds major Russian Internet properties.

In a message on Twitter, Microsoft developer evangelism team head Brandon Watson pledged all manner of support to any programmers who make the switch.

“To Any Published WebOS Devs: We’ll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl.free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,” Watson said in a tweet late on Friday, a day after Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to discontinue developing webOS-based hardware, such as the Pre phone and TouchPad tablet.

HP has said it is exploring options for webOS as a software platform and has indicated being open to all options, but it is not clear how many viable options it has.

Maybe because it is a Friday in August, it’s natural that the Apple iPhone 5 rumors would get jacked up again.

Today, it was an erroneous report that Apple would hold a media event on Sept. 7, which was soon countered by another post by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that said the company would not.

The second is the right one, because — as John Paczkowski has previously written — October is when Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Several sources we have rechecked with today underscored that the later time frame — some had thought Apple would launch its latest products sometime in September, as they had done in previous years — was accurate.

There are always a myriad of rumors around the exact dates of basic events for Apple, a company which attracts an unusual amount of attention from consumers and the media, unlike any other tech company.

As we noted in our report, which many have also written about, “the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.”

Apple will also unveil its iCloud offering to consumers then too, which it has already released to developers in beta.

So for now, we’d like everyone to go back to their beach chairs and chillax to the haunting work of one of Apple’s favorite bands — U2 — called, of course, “October”:

Earlier this week, the online game industry got a jolt of attention after Myspace co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe doubled down his investments in the game space. After purchasing MindJolt in early 2010, DeWolfe acquired two more companies this week: SGN, a developer and publisher of social mobile games; and Hallpass Media, a popular free online game network.

Given all the scuttlebutt, here’s the official list of the top 10 online game properties ranked by unique visitors in March, according to comScore.

In first place is Spil Games, the Netherlands-based company that has localized its games around the world. It continues to dominate the charts, attracting nearly 50 million unique visitors last month to its various girl-, teen- and family-focused properties. In second place is GSN Games, a company owned by DIRECTV and Sony Pictures Entertainment, and in third and fourth places, respectively, are well-known players like Electronic Arts and WildTangent.

But Hi5, the former social network that is trying desperately hard to remake itself into a game destination by luring over popular games from Facebook is a surprise at sixth place.

In fact, this marks the company’s debut appearance.

Hi5 put out the list today to make the assertion that the transformation has been a success. Well, sort of. Truthfully, this marks the first time comScore categorized the company as a game network instead of a social network. Still, with 21.7 million unique visitors, it leap-frogged other well-known properties, such as Nickelodeon, Yahoo and MSN.

Here’s the chart:

Photo credit: Wallyg

The company released new tools for those looking to create apps for the e-reader and said it plans to offer developers 70 percent of revenue generated through its store, with Barnes & Noble getting the remaining 30 percent. Free apps will also be allowed, as well as the ability for developers to offer trial versions of their programs.

The store and Android apps are expected to be available in the next major update to the Nook, due this spring. Developers interested have to apply to Barnes & Noble, with those accepted getting early access to development tools and other information. The company said it intends to review and approve applications, as it does with books, “to ensure the content is appropriate for the Barnes & Noble customer.”

The bookseller said in October that it planned to bring a wave of Android apps to the device, beginning with such titles as Angry Birds, Tikatok and various Lonely Planet Phrasebooks. It shipped with a Web browser and a few apps, such as Sudoku and Pandora.

Not all Nook users have been patiently waiting for the company to open up the device, with some enthusiasts choosing to hack their tablets (known as “rooting”) to get full Android access. Barnes & Noble didn’t have much to say on the practice, though the company notes that doing so does void the warranty.

Meanwhile, there is speculation that Amazon, which recently launched an Android app store of its own, could be developing tablets of its own, though it has not announced any such plans.

Google said today that it will be launching in-app billing next week, allowing developers to monetize by selling chapters, episodes, levels or virtual goods from inside the application. Previously, the only other way to monetize on Android was to sell an application. This opens the door to a whole new way to monetize free applications on the platform.

Google’s Eric Chu made the announcement on the developer blog today.

He did not elaborate on which day the in-app payments would launch; however, we are hearing it is on Tuesday.

The launch of in-app payments will open the door to thousands of applications on the iOS platform, which have been waiting for a way to effectively monetize their applications. Many developers give away their applications for free and then try to get users to purchase additional features or levels once they are hooked.

Social games are a huge proponent of the model, and typically monetize through selling virtual goods.

In the past, very successful companies like Tapulous, which is now owned by Disney, have listed the lack of in-app payments on Android as the reason why they have not yet launched on the platform.

With this impediment lifted, we can expect a flood of applications to hit the store as early as next week. One of the apps expected at launch is Tapulous’ Tap Tap Revenge 4, which has generated 10 million downloads from Apple’s App Store.

“There’s a boatload of pent-up demand from applications that have been successfully deployed on iOS, but haven’t had the means to monetize yet on Android. There’s a deluge of developers who will go live with it,” said Scott Kveton, the CEO of Urban Airship, a company that provides tools to application developers.

Kveton said he’s been working with Google to build additional tools around in-app payments to make the process even easier for developers to build into their applications. Those tools will also be ready at the time of launch.

“We announced we would be supporting it and we have 300-plus developers who have signed up already. It’s mostly our customers from iOS,” he said.

Chu said that, in preparation for the launch, Google is beginning to test apps that use in-app billing. Developers can now upload the applications and set prices for them. But the apps won’t fully launch until next week.

While this will mark one important milestone for Android, another one occurred earlier this week.

Amazon launched a competing app store for Android on Tuesday with 3,800 apps. Applications that prefer to be distributed by Amazon will also be able to leverage Google’s in-app payments platform, the company said.

Amazon cites its experience as a retailer and merchandiser as the reason why it thinks it can build a better store than Google has to date.

Caryn Marooney (pictured here), the co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s premier tech communications firms, OutCast Agency, is joining Facebook to lead its tech public relations strategy.

Facebook said Marooney is joining the social networking giant in a newly created position as director of technology communications.

That means she will be in charge of outreach to the technical community, Facebook said, including “our product, platform, infrastructure, and technical recruiting communications–to reach developers, engineers, technology influencers and bloggers who write about our products and technology strategy.”

“Caryn’s experience extends beyond technology communications and I’m delighted that we’ll all have the opportunity to draw on her wisdom and insight,” said Facebook global communications chieftain Elliot Schrage.

Marooney has actually led the Facebook account for OutCast, which she and Margit Wennmachers built and sold to Next Fifteen Communications Group in 2005 for over $10 million.

Marooney said in an interview today that she felt the firm was in good hands with its current team of top managers.

“The opportunity at Facebook was too good to pass up,” she said. “It’s an exciting new challenge.”

Indeed, the social networking giant is preparing to go public within the next year and will need an even stronger PR team for that task.

Marooney follows Wennmachers to a company they served as outside communications advisers. Wennmachers joined the high-profile Andreessen Horowitz venture firm last year to work on marketing strategies with companies in which it invested.

Memo to tech CEOs everywhere: Now that’s how to write an internal memo.

That would be the 1,300-word one that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (pictured here) apparently penned for employees at the Finnish telecom giant, which inevitably leaked to the media (in this case, kudos to Engadget for getting the whole thing, which is below).

Elop uses the harsh but cogent metaphor of a burning oil platform to take a bracing opening shot at turning around Nokia, which has lost market share–and, more importantly, mindshare–to both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system.

This is not breaking news to anyone in the wider tech world, of course. But for the CEO to say it so flatly and brutally to the insular troops at Nokia makes it remarkable.

As you can read, it’s dramatic all right, and just the kind of thing a lot of leaders at troubled companies–Hello, Yahoo!–could learn a thing or two from.

That’s because it’s honest and also genuine, and with enough of a direction and glimpses into pending action–to be revealed later this week at an event to unveil a new strategy–that it’s not just a diatribe by a new manager about how bad the previous managers were.

There is clearly plenty of that, of course, which is no surprise. But with rumors of an imminent significant management overhaul–which few execs ever do enough of at the start of their tenure, when it is easiest–there seems to be teeth to the memo too.

And although the burning platform part will get all the attention, perhaps the most important observation was in one particular passage that outlines exactly the giant challenge Nokia faces to catch up:

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Because, as it has turned out, it is all about ecosystems and using them to provide consumers with the best and most seamless experience possible.

Walt Mossberg and I will be interviewing Elop–the former Microsoft exec, who is neither a Nokia insider nor Finnish–about all this and more at the ninth D: All Thing Digital conference in late May.

Obviously, there will be a lot to talk about.

But, until then, here’s Elop’s memo below in its entirety.

I also reposted a video interview I did with Elop in April of 2009 in which he talked about making Microsoft a more open and innovative place, the changing business model of software and more.

Also below is a video Elop ordered up while running Microsoft’s Business Division as part of an “Envisioning” series.

These see-into-the-future videos were done by Microsoft Office Labs as part of a “Productivity Future Vision” series that sketched out a landscape of smartphones, touchscreens everywhere and a whole lot of cool interacting.

It would be nice if he can drag Nokia back into that world–although Elop’s memo is a good start.

Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times–his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion–we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally–taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward–a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/nokias-stephen-elop-didnt-start-the-fire-but-his-burning-platform-certainly-lights-one/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110202/microsoft-goes-after-google-again-this-time-on-web-video-formats/ http://allthingsd.com/20110202/microsoft-goes-after-google-again-this-time-on-web-video-formats/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:00:15 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3351

The war between Google and Microsoft is clearly heating up.

After being accused of copying Google’s search results on Tuesday, Microsoft is now going after Google, accusing it of injecting inconsistency and legal uncertainty into the Web video arena by natively supporting only the newly open-sourced WebM video format in its Chrome browser, rather than the H.264 format preferred by Microsoft and Apple.

In response, Microsoft said it will build a Chrome plug-in that will restore support for H.264, an older and more commonly used video format. Microsoft said it plans to support H.264 in the next version of Internet Explorer, although it will also allow plug-ins that enable WebM support.

“Our point of view is totally clear,” Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch writes in a blog post being posted on Wednesday. “Our support for H.264 results from our views about a robust web and video ecosystem that provides a rich level of functionality, is the product of an open standards process like the W3C’s HTML5 specification, and has been free from legal attacks. Microsoft is agnostic and impartial about the actual underlying video format for HTML5 video as long as this freedom continues.”

For its part, Google has said its decision to base its HTML5 video support around WebM is due to the royalties associated with H.264.

“We acknowledge that H.264 has broader support in the publisher, developer, and hardware community today (though support across the ecosystem for WebM is growing rapidly),” Google said in a blog post in mid-January.

However, it said, “To use and distribute H.264, browser and OS vendors, hardware manufacturers, and publishers who charge for content must pay significant royalties–with no guarantee the fees won’t increase in the future.”

Google added that, to companies like itself “the license fees may not be material, but to the next great video startup and those in emerging markets these fees stifle innovation.”

Hachamovitch, meanwhile, encouraged more discussion on the topic.

“Web video is still, in many ways, in its infancy,” he said. “Working through these questions is part of moving the web forward. The web is a product of consensus and open dialog. This post is meant to be part of the dialog.”

Your move, Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110202/microsoft-goes-after-google-again-this-time-on-web-video-formats/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/pixelmator-co-founder-mac-app-stores-30-percent-cut-definitely-worth-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/pixelmator-co-founder-mac-app-stores-30-percent-cut-definitely-worth-it/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:20:51 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=56346 Here’s a hell of a developer testimonial for Apple’s new Mac App Store. Pixelmator just hit the million-dollar milestone. And it’s been available in the App Store for only 20 days. Quite a feat for an indie image-editing app competing with some leviathan rivals.

Pixelmator co-founder Aidas Dailide told me the company sold about 33,000 copies of the software at $29.99–a limited-time discount from its standard $59 price–to gross $1 million. And he said he had no problem paying Apple the 30 percent cut of sales it demands of App Store vendors, something critics have labeled “the Apple Toll.”

“The 30 percent cut is definitely worth it,” he said. “The increase in sales and exposure is worth much more than that. Especially in our case.” And just how much of a sales increase from the pre-App Store days did Pixelmator experience? Dailide wouldn’t say, though he did remark that “the jump in sales was dramatic.”

Which is a point worth noting, because earlier this month Pixelmator made the Mac App Store its exclusive sales channel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/pixelmator-co-founder-mac-app-stores-30-percent-cut-definitely-worth-it/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20110103/exclusive-news-corp-online-gaming-head-sean-ryan-to-head-facebooks-gaming-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20110103/exclusive-news-corp-online-gaming-head-sean-ryan-to-head-facebooks-gaming-platform/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:47:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39067

Sean Ryan (pictured here), who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources.

Currently, Facebook does not create social games, but hosts third-party publishers of them on its king-making platform. Its most stunning success has been Zynga, maker of Farmville and CityVille.

The move seems sudden, since he just got his latest position. But sources said Ryan and execs at the Silicon Valley social networking giant had been talking about a job there before he went to News Corp.

Thus, at this point at least, Ryan’s main job will be a high-profile developer relations dude–in essence, keeping Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in line and also, presumably, happy.

Translation: Adventures in babysitting former Facebook COO and now Zynga COO Owen Van Natta!

Ryan, whose title will be director of gaming partnerships, will report to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Facebook is clearly building out its gaming talent bench.

Ryan will work closely with Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers–who joined Facebook after the acquisition of their social gaming start-up Walletin in November to head platform games engineering efforts.

Sources said that News Corp.’s efforts will now be taken over by John Welch, who came to the media giant after Ryan acquired his casual games company Making Fun.

At the time, Ryan said he was working on a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Apple’s iPhone Google’s Android mobile operating system and News Corp.-owned Myspace.

Ryan got to News Corp. a little after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer. He had the title of EVP and GM of Games at News Corp. Digital.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown is awaiting comment from Facebook and News Corp.

But Ryan and George Kliavkoff throw their 17th Annual “After-After” Party at the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas at 11:59 PM Thursday, so come by and say congrats!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110103/exclusive-news-corp-online-gaming-head-sean-ryan-to-head-facebooks-gaming-platform/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/microsoft-weve-sold-1-5-million-windows-phones-if-you-must-know/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/microsoft-weve-sold-1-5-million-windows-phones-if-you-must-know/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:20:38 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1202 Redmond decided to finally come clean on Windows Phone 7 sales, announcing on Tuesday that its partners have sold 1.5 million units since its new phones hit the market six weeks ago.

“We know we have tough competition, and this is a completely new product,” Vice President Achim Berg said in an article on the company’s press Web site. “We’re in the race–it’s not a sprint but we are certainly gaining momentum and we’re in it for the long run.”

Until now, Microsoft had said that it was “happy” with sales, but had refused to say how many devices had sold. AT&T and T-Mobile had also declined to say how many models had sold since U.S. sales started Nov. 8. Windows Phone 7 models went on sale in Europe in late October.

Berg repeated that the sales have met Microsoft’s expectations.

“Yes, and I think our expectations are realistic for a new platform,” he said, noting that the company is essentially starting over with Windows Phone 7. He also cautioned against comparing it to the competition. “It’s a bit of apples and oranges comparison; our numbers are similar to the performance of other first generation mobile platforms,” Berg said. “We introduced a new platform with Windows Phone 7, and when you do that it takes time to educate partners and consumers on what you’re delivering, and drive awareness and interest in your new offering. We’re comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run; Windows Phone 7 is just the beginning.”

Microsoft is expected to announce an update for Windows Phone 7 in January that will add a copy-and-paste function as well as support for CDMA carriers. That will allow Verizon and Sprint to offer Windows Phone 7 models. Both carriers have said they will, but Microsoft made the decision to delay CDMA support until next year in order to meet its goal of having the initial version out by this year’s holiday season.

Berg also noted it plans to have phones at a variety of price points next year. Nearly all of the models that went on sale in the U.S. were priced at $199, although there has been some significant discounting.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa said in a note that he is particularly impressed by the speed with which Windows Phone 7 applications have hit the market.

“The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace reaching 4,000 apps two months after launch has to be one of the most rapid ramp-ups in recent times,” he said in a note to reporters. “Of course with both iPhone and Android app stores being much bigger, Microsoft still has its work cut out for it. However, reaching this milestone faster than Android which took from Oct 2008 to March 2009 to reach about the same level, it is not bad!”

Hilwa also said that Microsoft hasn’t done bad in having 10 phones on the market in 30 countries.

“Windows Phone 7 has changed the conversation and I would not be surprised if Microsoft had the third largest app portfolio in the industry by the middle of next year,” he said, pointing to the company’s strong set of developer tools.

Update: It is worth noting that the 1.5 million units represent “sell in”–that is, the phones that device makers like Samsung and HTC have sold to carriers, not the number of phones actually purchased by consumers. We’ll have to wait a bit to hear about those “sell through” numbers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/microsoft-weve-sold-1-5-million-windows-phones-if-you-must-know/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101215/heres-your-itunes-in-the-cloud-for-your-iphone-but-from-mspot-not-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20101215/heres-your-itunes-in-the-cloud-for-your-iphone-but-from-mspot-not-apple/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:00:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27066 At this point it seems pretty safe to say that we’re not getting any “iTunes in the cloud” music service from Apple in 2010. But you can get a version of that concept, on your iPhone, today, for free.

Apple has approved developer mSpot‘s music app, which does what Apple hasn’t done yet but may well do at some point: It takes your music from your PC, moves it to a server and lets you pull down tunes to your iPhone whenever you want.

Or at least in the immediate future. Given that mSpot has yet to reach any licensing deals with music labels or publishers, I’m not sure how long the service can keep going. But we can get back to that in a minute.

First the details: MSpot lets you synch up to two gigabytes of music from your hard drive to its servers, and then stream it via another PC’s browser, or download it to your phone via 3G.

Because mSpot compresses your files, those two gigs will translate into a lot more music on your phone (at a much lower fidelity) than they do on your computer. But if you want more storage you can get another 40 gigs for $3.99 a month.

This is roughly the same idea that both Apple and Google have discussed with the music industry for much of 2010, but neither of those two heavyweights has the licenses it needs to launch. How can mSpot pull it off?

Good question. The answer is that mSpot CEO Daren Tsui argues that he doesn’t need a license, for a variety of reasons.

I’ll spare you the technical details, but common sense supports his position–why shouldn’t you be able to move your music from one machine to another? And the law, via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may be on his side as well.

But so far the big labels have argued that the big guys do need licenses to offer cloud services (short version–they say that moving music to the cloud and back constitutes a new use). And Tsui has in fact been trying to get an agreement with the labels for much of this year.

He’s already had this service running on Google’s Android platform since late June without a legal problem, so that can give him some confidence that the labels won’t take him to court. But that’s not a guarantee.

For starters, the labels are already suing Michael Robertson’s MP3tunes, which uses a similar concept. And it’s not uncommon for the labels to negotiate with music start-ups, then move on to lawsuits if things hit an impasse.

And if Tsui does strike a deal, that means he needs to start paying the labels. How’s he going to do that and keep offering the service for free? By offering new paid options and cutting the music guys in on a piece of that revenue, he says.

So we’ll see! Note that Spotify, which has a lot of buzz, 700,000 paying users and some deep-pocketed investors, has yet to get its music service licensed in the U.S.

And mSpot is a much smaller fry. The Android app has a million downloads so far and some 500,000 registered users. And the 6-year-old company raised $2.3 million in 2005, and that’s it. But Tsui says mSpot is profitable on revenue from other media services it sells.

Here’s hoping he gets to spend that money building cool stuff, not hiring lawyers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/heres-your-itunes-in-the-cloud-for-your-iphone-but-from-mspot-not-apple/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-gives-gingerbread-for-the-holidays/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-gives-gingerbread-for-the-holidays/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:05:10 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=373 The rumored new Gingerbread-based Nexus phone from Google is rumor no more. In a blog post on Monday, Google announced the Nexus S, a phone co-developed by Samsung and Google.

As it did with the initial Nexus One, the company said the phone is designed “to highlight the latest advancements of the Android platform.” However, the company’s goal appears to have shifted from turning the economics of the cellphone business on its ear to just showing the potential of Android.

“As part of the Nexus brand, Nexus S delivers what we call a ‘pure Google’ experience’: unlocked, unfiltered access to the best Google mobile services and the latest and greatest Android releases and updates,” Google’s Andy Rubin said in the blog.

You can hear much more from Rubin when he speaks at D: Dive Into Mobile tonight. In the meantime, here are the highlights.

Key features include a 4-inch “contour display” designed to fit more easily in the hand, a 1Ghz processor, front and rear cameras and 16GB of internal memory, as well as a Near Field Communications technology that allows the device to read information from tags placed in nearby objects. (If you haven’t heard much about NFC yet, you will soon.)

The device will go on sale Dec. 16 online and at Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores in the U.S and at Best Buy Carphone Warehouse in the U.K. The phone can be purchased either unlocked or with a T-Mobile service plan. In the U.S. it will sell for $199 with a T-Mobile service plan and $529 without.

As for Gingerbread (a.k.a. Android 2.3), a software development kit is now available for developers. Gingerbread features support for the aforementioned NFC as well as a new keyboard and text selection tool, improved copy and paste, and gyroscope support. All the nerdy details are on Google’s developer site.

Google put up a pair of videos, reposted below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/google-gives-gingerbread-for-the-holidays/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101112/foursquares-crowley-talks-about-a-real-ny-marathon-badge-coming-soon-to-a-d-dive-into-mobile-near-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20101112/foursquares-crowley-talks-about-a-real-ny-marathon-badge-coming-soon-to-a-d-dive-into-mobile-near-you/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:57:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37200

So what did Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley do when he was running the New York Marathon last week?

Three guesses and the first two don’t count: He checked in to the popular geolocation service from every mile marker on the 26-mile route.

Of course he did. (And you can see how here.)

It was, I will admit, somewhat charming, as Crowley most certainly was when I interviewed him onstage at a mobile conference earlier this week.

He also gave a very interesting talk about the future of Foursquare, painting a picture of a virtuous ecosystem of third-party developers helping to take the start-up into a place that’s much more than just a badge game and check-in service.

I have definitely given Crowley a bit of a hard time about a bunch of stuff, including taking the New York-based service from a hot mess of a trend to a cool necessity for consumers.

And, in the video below, he’s starting to make a very credible argument about how the company will evolve, even as it fights off intense competition from other rivals and, most especially, social networking giant Facebook’s Places offering.

I will be interviewing Crowley again at D: Dive Into Mobile on December 7 in San Francisco, where we will delve into Foursquare’s future even more.

Until then, enjoy the video interview I did, including Crowley showing off his real New York Marathon prize:

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