In another high-profile parry in its increasingly aggressive proxy fight against Yahoo, activist shareholder Third Point has launched an extensive Web blog to support its case with investors called “Value Yahoo.”

Along with a long statement — a blogifesto of sorts — about what it will take to fix the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Value Yahoo also tries to keep up the pressure on Yahoo’s board and management.

The purple-themed site — this is Yahoo’s well-known color — features a humorous take on Yahoo’s now dearly departed neon sign in San Francisco, with the banner: “Yahoo Shareholders Deserve Overdue Representation!”

It includes a section on “Failed Leadership,” info on its “Road to Recovery” slate of alternate directors and even an FAQ and mission statement.

“We believe in Yahoo!, its loyal users, committed employees, dedicated partners, and the potential of the brand,” it reads, in part. “Yahoo! shareholders, employees, and partners have suffered for too long with a revolving door of management teams and Directors who have been unable to seize opportunities despite the Company’s enduring role as the premier online source for news, sports, business, entertainment and email.”

By the way, in a clever dig, there is also a Facebook site for Value Yahoo — patent lawsuit or no, you can “like” Third Point’s effort.

Here, for example, is one of Value Yahoo’s charticles:

The goal of all this, presumably, is to get Yahoo to give in to demands for several board seats using its directors, including Third Point’s Dan Loeb. So far, ongoing discussions between Loeb and Yahoo have failed to stop the shareholder battle, which comes in the midst of the company’s wrenching restructuring.

Last week, Yahoo said it had appointed three new directors to its board. In a pointed slap at Loeb, the company said it had rejected him specifically, although Yahoo added that it was willing to accept one of his current choices and another that was mutually agreed to.

Loeb reacted to that, um, badly, with another letter last week that said Yahoo leadership was living in an “illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world.”

The war of words continues with the new site, which Third Point said it will maintain actively like a blog, with updates, charts, filings, outside news stories and more.

(Since Yahoo has apparently banned me from its internal news offering to employees, according to more sources than you can shake a stick at, I hope they can see my work here!)

In its newest post — titled “Why Are We Running for Election to the Yahoo! Board?” — Third Point presents an argument for other shareholders to act, even though Yahoo has actually made a lot of the changes that Loeb has been pushing for already.

(In fact, that’s an FAQ question on Value Yahoo, natch: “Yahoo! has made changes to its Board. Hasn’t Third Point already gotten what it wanted?” Short answer: Vigilance, since they are well-known backsliders over there!)

As the firm notes in its reasons-why essay, with the original bolding on the Value Yahoo blog:

“After years of failed leadership and poor governance, Yahoo! shareholders have a chance to inject experienced, independent voices aligned with their interests. The “Shareholder Slate” — Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson, Michael Wolf, and Jeff Zucker — seeks a voice and a choice for Yahoo! owners hurt by the current “Legacy Board’s” track record of value disintegration, and wants to prevent the Board from simply nominating their handpicked replacements — the “Insider Slate” — for Yahoo!’s board.”

A great deal of this campaigning takes place in the traditional media forums: TV, radio, local newspapers, and voters occasionally get to meet the candidates in person.

But even more of this takes place on the Web. Practically every political ad that runs on a television screen anywhere in the country is also placed on YouTube and promoted on Twitter and Facebook. So are speeches and debates. This is good for voters who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can go back and evaluate what candidates says and make a judgement about them on their own time.

That is, if you can get to them. For most Americans, access to a solid broadband Internet connection is as readily available as an electrical connection, and only a phone call away. But for roughly a third of the country, it’s not so easy. That means that about a third of the nation’s population is less able to participate in the democratic process the way the rest of us do.

That, to me, is a troubling thought, when I consider the nation’s broadband-adoption problem. It basically comes down to this: Lower-populated rural areas and some inner-city areas don’t have the same access to the Internet that most Americans take almost for granted. Cable and phone companies often opt not to build the infrastructure needed in certain lightly populated areas, because they can’t justify the investment.

When he came into office in 2009, one cornerstone of President Obama’s technology policy concerned correcting this via grants included in the economic stimulus package. In 2010, Obama delivered the National Broadband Plan. And last year, the president talked to Congress about his hopes to bring broadband to 98 percent of the country, and using wireless technology to do it.

Little has worked. A new study, out today from TechNet, a tech-industry lobbying group, says that broadband adoption at the national level has plateaued at 68 percent of the population, only slight higher than the 65 percent it was when Obama became president.

What happened? Lots of people and organizations with great ideas emerged to try and tackle the problem, the report finds. But they all suffer from a severe lack of coordination, and wildly different visions of what the outcome should be. “Stakeholders are flying blind when it comes to understanding best practices to improve broadband adoption …” the report reads. It goes on to say, “To the extent that poor policy coordination hampers efforts to increase broadband adoption, we run the risk of having a less inclusive society, a smaller domestic market for tech goods and services, and a less innovative economy.”

One problem is simple demographics: A 2011 survey by the government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that only 43 percent of households earning $25,000 or less had broadband at home, and that only 46 percent of those with less than a high school diploma have it.

Then there’s the economy. A Pew survey found that 9 percent of people who at one time had broadband had cut their service off during the previous 12 months because of economic concerns. And that figure rose to more than 16 percent of people earning $30,000 a year or less.

There are apparently historical precedents for this sort of thing. During the Great Depression, telephone adoption dropped from 42 percent in 1929 to 31 percent in 1934. Electrical service leveled off at 67 percent during the Depression, and didn’t resume climbing until later.

A lot of people think that this same demographic just uses smartphones instead, but the data in the report shows that’s not the case generally, and if you added “smartphone-only” users to broadband users, you still end up with only a 73 percent adoption rate.

And this cost of “digital exclusion,” TechNet finds, is more than just participation in the election process. Employers increasingly require that applications for jobs be filed online. Healthcare is increasingly tracked online. Even just taking advantage of good deals on Groupon or LivingSocial more or less implies broadband access.

What to do? Get everyone on the same page, for one thing. The report suggests getting the numerous federal and state efforts pulling in one direction on such aspects of the problem as collecting reliable data, and setting an agreed-upon set of best practices.

There’s also the option of leaving well enough alone. Demographics have a way of shifting over time. Old people who don’t bother with broadband will die, and younger people who can’t imagine living without it will either demand it where they live or move to places where they can get it. As I learned in 2008 when I wrote this story for Businessweek, sometimes that can be as easy as moving to the other side of a street. Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting for the cable company to offer service in your area.

My guess is that this is a problem that’s not going to easily solve itself with a market-based approach, but so far the government-based options aren’t looking so good, either.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

1. The rise of BODM (build once, deploy many) platforms

   Mobile platform fragmentation is growing — the broad range of platforms currently encompasses iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Bada, Symbian, Kindle and Nook, just to name a few. The result has been a wave of “build once, deploy many” platforms to create and distribute mobile applications, which will continue to grow in popularity as developers and content creators simply forgo the onerous task of building something unique for each mobile platform.

   According to a 2011 Nielsen Smartphone analytics report, Android users spend nearly an hour a day interacting with apps and the Web on their phones, with apps (67 percent) accounting for nearly twice the amount of time as the Web (33 percent). Bearing this consumption profile in mind, the economics of mobile content doesn’t encourage investment in new mobile development platforms as long as monetization doesn’t scale with these costs. In other words, developers won’t want to spend more on developing their app while the revenue they bring in is modestly incremental or flat.

   Among the most well-known platforms are PhoneGap, Spaceport.io (a.k.a. Siblingz, Inc.) for games and Appcelerator, the latter of which has already had more than 30,000 apps built using its platform. The approach of some of these services is that they enable developers to unlock the value of mobile web development with native app wrappers. However, a more challenging platform fragmentation problem has been largely ignored: unlocking app development for non-technical consumers and independent content creators through a compelling graphical user interface (GUI).

   Presently, non-technical content creators are disenfranchised from mobile app development unless they invest, usually unprofitably, in mobile web and app development services, or they learn to code outright.

   One company, kleverbeast, is tackling this challenge. Having already signed up prominent beta enterprise customers and non-technical content creators, kleverbeast is empowering digital app publishing across iOS, Android, and other emerging platforms with a compelling native user experience for their app owners’ audiences. The unique technology and market strategy has helped kleverbeast address mobile platform fragmentation, not just for developers, but also for the benefit of the average consumer.

   This new breed of BODM companies will proliferate in 2012, and I expect more than a million apps and game titles will choose this path.

2. Angel funding valve tightens and IPO mafias move into the picture

   Angel investing has risen in popularity over the past two years, but the long tail of unproven individual angels will wane as two events unfold: (1) Many angel-funded start-ups will go belly-up, unable to secure Series A financing or a bridge loan, and (2) institutional investors will adroitly strong-arm early, passive investors.

   Angel dollars widen the capital base available to entrepreneurs in early tech start-ups opening the door to tech innovation. However, many of these new angel investors don’t realize that frequently they will be squeezed down on their ownership percentage in subsequent rounds of financing and face less favorable terms. Many fresh angels have assumed greater risk than is commensurate with their early ownership and expected more upside than they end up getting. Subsequently, some angels won’t have the capital to diversify their portfolios or participate in follow-up rounds of financing.

   Investing can be risky for many fresh angels hungry to keep up with the Joneses and raise their social capital. As these lessons are learned, angel investing will swing back to some rational levels.

   The flipside of this may be the next IPO mafias. Expect a new crop of angel investors to emerge from some of those who benefited from Groupon, Zynga and the much-anticipated Facebook IPO. These IPO angels will take over early-stage deals and fund employees from these successful brands that decide to go it on their own. Ex-Googlers fund ex-Googlers all the time, and the mafias of tech titans will continue to proliferate.

3. One great new mobile social media company will be born out of the U.S. election cycle of 2012

   In 2008, President Barack Obama was widely praised for his mobile marketing prowess, which many political strategists evangelized as contributing to his victory in the election and igniting the youth base to get out and vote.

   Campaign managers utilized a combination of social and mobile media vehicles, with several businesses benefiting as a result: from ad networks like Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple in 2010), to start-up companies like CommerceTel, which powered the President’s interactive voice applications.

   Adding weight to this trend are emerging consumer behaviors over social networks and the power of indirect, viral outreach. A study conducted by SocialVibe revealed that “94 percent of social media users of voting age engaged by a political message watched the entire message, and 39 percent of those people shared it with an average of 130 friends.” Powerful, period.

   The power of social technology to empower and persuade won’t be ignored by today’s candidates, and we’ll likely see the emergence of at least one great company out of the 2012 election.

If the rest of this year is anything like the last one, we’re in for a wild ride of fragmentation, consolidation and innovation.

Dinesh Moorjani is the founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile start-up incubator creating new platforms and applications to improve mobility for the wireless generation.

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

The first was last year in Hillsboro, Oregon, and during the visit, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the new chip plant, or “fab” as they’re usually called, would be built in Arizona.

The main reason that Obama loves Intel is that it’s an example of the kind of manufacturing work that he’d like to see more of in America. As such, the sight of Intel spending $5 billion to build a new plant and adding 4,000 jobs is the sort of thing that any president would like to stand close to, especially at the onset of what looks to be a tough re-election campaign. It’s also one of those rare companies that’s riding high despite an uncertain global economy.

One thing Obama certainly didn’t mention was that Intel added plants in Israel and China in the last year as well. He’s also in no hurry to remind the audience that the chips that Intel makes will be shipped to China and inserted into computers and servers, many of which will be shipped into the United States.

We also learned this week from the New York Times, Obama seemed vaguely baffled by the notion that Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in China, and in a meeting in Silicon Valley last year asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs why they couldn’t be made in the U.S. Jobs’s answer, which is correct: Those jobs aren’t coming back. David Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage strikes again.

Anyway, the only video of the full speech that I’ve found came from the local TV station, ABC15, and thankfully they have made it embeddable.

In his remarks, the president is impressed both with the grand scale of things involved in building chips — he remembers seeing an electron microscope at Intel’s plant in Oregon that was powerful enough to display atoms, which is certainly impressive. In Chandler he’s impressed with what he says is the world’s largest land-based crane, which is being used in the construction effort. Enjoy the speech.

(Image is a screen grab from earlier in the video.)

But some social media analysis of politics is going beyond that. A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Visible Measures says it has attracted more than 1 million views since last night. I can tell you with almost clinical precision that his debate gaffe occurred around 10:18 pm Eastern time, because it was all over Twitter as soon as it left — or didn’t leave — his mouth.

Still, it’s not Perry’s biggest Web video hit (yet). Visible Measures reminds us that his first big campaign ad racked up more than 2 million views earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, for ad/tech/biz types: Note that the moment occurred on CNN’s broadcast, but YouTube attributes the bulk of the views to Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed, which got the clip up with alacrity. [Ugh. As Ethan Mandel notes, this was actually CNBC's broadcast -- easy enough to spot had I been paying attention -- and now CNBC has removed this particular version. Still easy enough to find on YouTube, though.]

The state is testing Apple’s tablet to help those with disabilities more easily cast their ballots.

Although the iPad is being used to assist with the election, those using it aren’t casting their votes electronically. Rather, the iPad allows those with visual and other challenges to better see the ballot and make their selections. Their choices are then printed out on a paper ballot, according to an Associated Press report.

Apple has donated five iPads to help with the pilot project, according to the report.

The state decided to try out the iPad because its current crop of adaptive technology is aging. According to the AP report, the iPad-based approach has the potential to lower election costs, even if the state has to purchase significant numbers of Apple tablets.

Arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, in the heart of the tech industry, with the leader of the free world talking jobs and digital, you might expect fantastic wireless access.

You might, but not so much if you are a “local” reporter and can’t jack into the extra-secret-special wireless link the national White House press corps apparently has reserved for itself. (They also get a lovely noshing buffet, whilst we tech reporters have been instructed not to touch the pineapple and scones or else!)

Famished for coffee and carbs, we’re left with glomming onto the museum’s slowish wireless service — there are lotsa geeks here today jamming up the lines — and every now and then getting some juice from Google. The search giant blankets the Mountain View, Calif. area near its HQ with free Wi-Fi, but it fades in and out.

I am now reconsidering the antitrust investigations that the Obama administration is conducting against Google, as long as its signal is good enough to check Twitter.

So this liveblog of President Barack Obama’s LinkedIn Town Hall — which will center on jobs and is titled, “Putting America Back to Work” — could be glacial with not much news, much like what I am expecting from the event itself.

I’d certainly like to work, as long as the wireless does! (Plus, limited power outlets in the room, so it’s every reporter for herself!)

But bygones, while we await the Prez!

10:18 am: One thing that made me flee Washington, D.C., when I worked for the Washington Post, was all the rigmarole that surrounded the appearance of and access to politicians.

I get it, the security and all, and am all for it on a general safety level. But, no matter how you slice it, it hinders any kind of movement or genuine interaction, like being stuck at a really dull opera. All the world’s a stage and we are all merely waiting in traffic.

In contrast, and one of the joys of Silicon Valley, is that anyone can get up right up into the grill of the various billionaire potentates littering the landscape, engage in a debate and get a possibly real answer.

Thus, I am hoping for a lot here from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who is going to moderate the hour-long session with the President.

By the way, while he is busy running the business-focused social networking site, Weiner is looking good in a fancy suit, almost as if he could be Secretary of the Internet. I’d vote for him.

10:28 am: Some painless but hip music is playing now, as we wait, wait, wait for Obama, who is set to begin in 30 minutes.

I wonder if the President is ever early. Wouldn’t that freak the peeps out?

(Obviously, I am bored, so I shall now go monitor Twitter to catch up on the latest in the new bad-marriage-or-not cat fight between Brad Pitt and his ex, Jennifer Aniston — as if we need him to tell us Angelina Jolie is more interesting. Frankly, Angie’s midday snack is more interesting than Jen.)

There is now what appears to be a Secret Service dude next to me, giving me a hairy eyeball. If I am jailed over my wireless protest, please give generously to my defense fund.

Free the Internet! Free the Internet!

10:35 am: Finally, the production guy is up giving out the rules. Turn off the cellphones, no making noise.

The head Secret Service guy then takes the stage. No getting out of your seat. No sudden movements. And no crossing the blue line in the front row.

“All joking aside,” he says, he will take you down. He also notes that if the President moves toward you to shake your hand, “do not move toward him.”

I love Secret Service agents — especially when played by Clint Eastwood — and wish I had one to give a few people in tech a little smackadoo on my behalf. And not only if they moved toward me!

10:47 am: This little frisson of excitement is followed by more waiting, as the final seats are filled up in the room, which is an unusually (and welcome) multi-racial and gender-balanced crowd for Silicon Valley.

Various White House aides skitter back and forth like nervous ground squirrels — I would imagine their life is one big effort to avoid any gaffe — so the Prez must be near.

I am actually looking forward to seeing him, as I never have in person and am looking forward to seeing the famous Obama charm and techie cred.

Indeed, he is probably the most fast-forward tech president there has ever been. That said, buffeted by more serious issues facing the nation, his administration has delivered on few — by which I mean none — of its promises around the digitization of the U.S.

Our high-speed broadband, for example, is still woefully slow, inordinately expensive and not easily available nationwide.

And I will not even go into the need for increased focus on math and science education or the importance of our broken visa policies.

But the topic today is jobs, which is an arena where Silicon Valley and tech shines in the U.S., even as manufacturing of it has mostly moved overseas. How tech can help improve in the creation of jobs will be issue No. 1 here.

10:55 am: Total silence with five minutes to go. I need the President around to quiet my kids.

Now, LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman comes in, so the event is probably about to begin.

And, indeed, Weiner emerges to cheers, to give a little speech on “changing the way we work … and connecting talent to opportunity.”

11:01 am: Then, the session starts right on time with President Obama.

He begins with a rote speech on jobs, which is nonetheless the most important issue he faces going into next year’s election.

11:14 am: Ah, wireless glitch! Back!

President Obama is inexplicably in the middle of a Medicare question, which gives him an opportunity to talk about the need for the rich to pay more taxes.

And pass his American Jobs Act, of course.

11:17 am: More on proposing legislation for retraining workers, such as the questioner’s mom.

Now to a group of email questions. The first is about when small businesses are going to get a break from onerous regulations and taxes.

President Obama says since he has been in office, he has cut taxes 16 times for those who create a business.

But he is not going to apologize for some regulations, such as those for the financial industry over the mortgage crisis.

“There are some regulations that have outlived their usefulness,” he says, but others not so much.

11:24 am: The next question is from a Chicago IT employee. Except she is not employed.

She is asking a question about keeping her skills up and what programs are needed.

“The best thing we can do for you is that the unemployment rate goes down,” said President Obama, but also adds that making it easy to go to school while waiting on a job is also important.

“Just looking at you, I can tell you are going to do great,” he tells her in an awkward effort at reassurance.

Thanks, Barack, but she needs a job!

11:28 am: A veteran is asking a question about transitioning out of the military.

Obama launches into a story of a medical technician who faced all kinds of experiences, but had to start over again with new classes when out of the military. He suggests some level of credentialing based on experience.

11:33 am: Obama gets to pick out someone from the crowd and manages to pick out a dude who is a former Googler — although he only says that he works down the street — and is out of work by choice.

He asks: “Will you please raise my taxes?

A plant? I wish!

President Obama asks the name of the start-up. “A search engine,” says the ex-Googler-in-disguise, who is Doug Edwards, an early marketing exec there who actually wrote a book on being an ex-Googler.

“That worked out well for you,” kids President Obama.

Everyone likes a rich-guy joke!

He is soon onto the idea that we’re all dang lucky and declares he does not want it to turn the debate over taxes into a rich-poor war.

Bottom line, he notes that we have to raise taxes on the very wealthy. Frankly, if we raised taxes on a bunch of folks in this room, it would help a lot.

11:42 am: A teach-training question, especially math and science teachers.

President Obama is all for it.

He is meaning well here, but all he seems to offer is a lot of bromides about the importance of education and errant related anecdotes.

Like one from IBM, where the company hires the kids in the program at the end.

President Obama wants students to see a direct connection between learning and jobs.

Then, he kind of says it again. Gosh, he can talk. How does the well-fed and wirelessly connected White House press corp take it? Lotsa donuts, I would imagine.

President Obama also wants us to turn off the electronics and video games for kids, too, thereby instantly losing the votes of my two sons!

Another laid-off guy is up at the mic. He had 22 years in IT management and is disheartened.

He wants a statement of encouragement from the CEO of America.

President Obama assures him that his track record of success gives him a leg up, but that the problem is the economy and the global meltdown, too.

It’s systemic, apparently.

“The problem is not you, the problem is the economy as a whole,” says President Obama.

That was the last question. Weiner, who has been sitting quietly (I know it was hard, Jeff, but good job), thanks the President and tells him that this is a big issue.

President does his thanks, too, for being able to speak, although not really that much was actually said.

And then a genuine moment, finally, of clarity.

“Look, we’re going through a very tough time, but we have gone through tougher times before,” he says. “But the trajectory we are going on is one that is more open, more linked …”

He talks about the need for being ready to take advantage of that opportunity.

“Things have gotten so ideologically driven, putting party above country,” he adds, that nothing is getting done. That’s why the people, the voters, have to demand leadership from their elected officials.

Or, presumably, fire them and let them try to find another job, too.

It might turn out to be the best idea yet, if these pols don’t agree on something and quick.

Eric Hippeau (pictured here), longtime Yahoo board member and one of its earliest investors, will be stepping down as a director, according to sources close to the situation.

In a related move, sources said Akamai President David Kenny will be joining the board of the Internet giant.

The changes become official at Yahoo’s regular board meeting on Tuesday, although Hippeau will not step down until the summer.

Rather than quit immediately, as previous board members have, he will not stand for election at its annual shareholder meeting in June.

The departure of Hippeau and the arrival of Kenny comes at a critical time for Yahoo, which has been under great pressure from investors to revive its growth and re-ignite innovation in the face of more nimble competitors.

Under CEO Carol Bartz, the company is still in the midst of a turnaround, and Wall Street has been losing patience with her and also its somewhat ineffectual board.

Hippeau has been on that board since 1996, which is approximately 132 years in Internet time.

The longtime Web investor and publisher–at Softbank and Ziff-Davis–has a lot of online experience.

Sources said Hippeau felt he had been on the board long enough and it was time to go. It has certainly been a wild ride, from insane Web 1.0 hypergrowth to a bruising takeover fight with Microsoft.

The addition of Kenny to the board is a welcome one. As BoomTown has previously reported, Yahoo had tried to bring him on before and he declined.

With both tech and advertising experience, Kenny is also a natural possibility for a board leader, as well as a potential top exec if Yahoo keeps going sideways.

According to his bio at Akamai, which he joined last fall, he is “responsible for leading Akamai’s business operations, including the company’s product groups; global sales, services, and marketing; engineering; and networks and operations.”

Before Akamai, he ran VivaKi and was a member of the management board of its parent, Publicis Groupe, the huge ad and marketing company.

Kenny ran Publicis’s overall digital and interactive strategy. He came to Publicis after it bought Digitas, where he was chairman and CEO.

Before that, the Harvard Business School graduate worked at consulting firm Bain & Company and also in marketing and strategy at General Motors.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment and Hippeau did not respond to an email query. And an email to my new bestest friend Kenny also got no response.

The restoration of communications comes a day after President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president in the forthcoming September election. Though that seems not to have satisfied the protesters who are eager that he step down right away.

Messages on @Speak2Tweet, the Twitter account created by Google and Twitter, have grown to 1,197 overnight, though with the Internet returning to normal that may stop.

The Internet may be returning to something resembling normal, but it’s clear that Egypt itself has quite a ways to go. I heard again this morning from my friend Abdalla in Cairo via text message. He wrote:

I am close to Tahrir Square. Pro-Mubarak rallies are taking place. They are not huge crowds but many of them are complete thugs. Thank goodness I got out of there with my camera in one piece. I am seeking refuge in a hotel lobby for now. I talked to a video journalist here who had his camera spray painted by someone in the crowd. Today is going to be a really ugly day :(

Even those who are voting in favor are doing so holding their noses. Of the five voting members of the commission, only one, Democrat Michael Copps, had been considered remotely likely to vote with the two Republicans who had pledged to vote against it. When he announced he would vote in favor yesterday he said he was doing so with reservations.

Republicans, both on the commission and in Congress, sense an opportunity, the size of which you can discern by the size of the headlines topping the Drudge Report during the last few days. Genachowski is being portrayed in 80-point type as the villain “Julius Seizure” out to ruin the freewheeling Internet by shackling it with a list of bureaucratic rules and regulations. The irony is that the current proposal on the table is a dramatic step back from a far more ominous one: Immediately after losing a court case brought by the cable company Comcast over the extent of its legal authority to regulate the Internet, Genachowski considered reclassifying the Internet under the FCC’s Title II authority, which governs regulation of the phone system. This was an extreme response, thankfully abandoned, that would have certainly warranted the nickname. The current proposal is by no stretch of argument so extreme that it amounts to a seizure.

But rules they are, and no one likes new rules where none existed before, least of all multibillion dollar corporations like Comcast and Verizon. Having established in the courts that they have the right to control the use of certain applications that impact the performance of their network–or, more precisely, the fact that the FCC has no legal authority to tell them not to exercise such control–they’re now going to be required to disclose how and why they exercise such controls.

The rules allow for “reasonable network management” by service providers, which is a squishy phrase. Internet companies like Amazon and Skype, which aren’t service providers themselves, argue that the new rules are weak and don’t protect them from service providers that may “reasonably manage” their products and services out of existence. Get your stopwatches ready, because there will almost certainly be several lawsuits over what constitutes “reasonable network management.”

The scenario is easy to imagine: Embittered broadband customers band together in a class-action lawsuit complaining that their provider refuses to allow them to experience the latest video streaming or video chat application. They argue that the provider favors another inferior application that it happens to own. The provider argues that it’s only engaging in “reasonable network management” allowed under FCC rules, leaving judges to tease out what that means. Lawyers are probably already shining up their Ferragamos as they polish their legal briefs.

These cases are already appearing. Comcast and Level 3 Communications are sparring over the terms under which Comcast conveys to its customers video streaming traffic sent by Level 3 associated with its relationship with Netflix. Level 3 has turned to the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice at a delicate time for Comcast: It wants federal approval for its takeover of NBC Universal, and wants it now.

The FCC’s new rules, rightly or wrongly, make Comcast and companies like it more vulnerable to similar threats by regulators in response to actions taken in their own reasonable self-interest. Until today, this sort of dispute between companies would normally be worked out by negotiators in private, not regulators on the public dime. No matter whose side you tend to favor, the prospect of government gumming up the work with endless busywork isn’t a happy side effect.

The rules themselves may also be challenged. There’s still a huge question–as FCC commissioners Meredith Atwell Baker and Robert McDowell have both argued in recent newspaper op-eds (one in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the other in today’s Washington Post)– about the FCC’s legal authority over the Internet. House Republicans are already making noise about jumping into the policy fray, and another court challenge is probably likely.

The one overarching mission concerning the Internet that the FCC can undertake with some measure of agreement is that of widening the availability of the network to places it doesn’t adequately reach and to people who don’t have broadband access for economic or other reasons. In an age where so much of daily public business–from applying for a job to becoming an informed voter in the presidential election–all but requires a broadband link, far too many remote and rural areas are the victim of market forces where the investment to build infrastructure in sparsely populated areas outweighs the potential for a reasonable return.

Genachowski has argued that by adapting the Universal Service Fund (which helped the telephone network penetrate these same underserved areas) for broadband, providers could get this otherwise impossible job accomplished. Extending broadband availability was one of President Obama’s campaign promises, but the $7.8 billion in federal stimulus funds awarded under the auspices of the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service have not and will not make a significant dent in the problem.

Why not focus on what is clearly the more important problem and without question in the national interest, and leave the finer points of how service providers and Web companies carry content to sort themselves out? Like it or not, a new, more legally complicated Internet is here.

Here’s the list of Twitter’s top “Trending Topics” for the U.S., via a screenshot I took after 6 pm New York time. Unless I’m missing something (Lily Allen didn’t join the Tea Party, right?) there’s nary a political term there:

The folks over at Trendrr, who make a living sifting through social media for interesting data, definitely do show a big surge in political Tweets**. These three charts show the spike in usage for Republican candidates’ names, Democratic candidates and election-related terms in general (click to enlarge):

Roll all that up together, and you’re at perhaps 23,000 mentions per hour. Which is a lot–but it’s no iPhone 4: On the day that Apple rolled out its latest phone last spring, it was generating a peak of 55,000 mentions per hour, says Trendrr.

Still, this data comes from the mid-afternoon on the day before elections, and we can assume it will increase throughout the next 24 hours. The Washington Post certainly thinks it’s worth paying attention to Twitter during the election: The paper is buying the word “election” as a Promoted Trend tomorrow. We’ll check back in with Trendrr on Tuesday for an update….

*Hope I got that right. **That’s right, right?

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

After all Meg Whitman’s moneybagging and all those demon sheep thrown by Carly Fiorina, polls right now are showing that it is unlikely either of them is going to emerge victorious in tomorrow’s elections in California.

While the pair might pull it out, given how the GOP is surging this election cycle, most expect them not to do so.

Whitman has handed over a giant pile of her eBay-generated fortune in an attempt to be the Republican governor of the Golden State, which seemed to have been working–until it didn’t.

In fact, it seems as if her wealth–and various controversies around it, such as IllegalMaidGate–has diminished her efforts to paint herself as CEO of California.

While she was way up over the summer over Democratic rival Jerry Brown, she has been trailing him recently.

And, although the race has tightened up, surveys show Brown is still ahead, such as a Rasmussen Reports survey that showed him up 49 percent to Whitman’s 45 percent.

In the Senate contest, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina seems to be more certainly headed for defeat.

A new Field Research poll gives Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer 49 percent to Fiorina’s 41.

And while both candidates drastically oversold their business credentials as just the thing the troubled state needs, it seems the magic of tech in California does not necessarily transfer to voter enthusiasm quite so neatly.

But, let’s not end this election without another look at the infamous–and accidentally hysterical–”Demon Sheep” television ad by Fiorina against her GOP-nomination opponent Tom Campbell.

That video is followed by a very funny rejoinder, “Demon Sheep II: The Fleecing of California.”

Enjoy:

Here we go with the Yahoo third-quarter earnings call starring CEO Carol Bartz, who has some–in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo–‘splaining to do.

Yahoo turned in a much-needed solid quarterly earnings report, with slightly better-than-expected earnings, although still weak revenue.

Of course, there are all the takeover rumors, the exec departures and fights with partners such as China’s Alibaba Group.

2 pm PT: First on is the lovely investor relations lady, Marta, saying stuff I never pay attention to.

But Bartz came on right away and she sounded subdued and very much on script.

Good idea!

She began by explaining what she has been up to and–once again with feeling–exactly what Yahoo is.

“The key words are innovative, content, media and communications,” she stressed.

Technology is all well and good, but Yahoo is the “largest digital media, content and communications company.”

She also briefly addressed the departure of execs: “Some people leave, some get promoted and some good people arrive.”

Well, you could put such turmoil that matter-of-factly, I suppose.

Bartz then asked the question: “What have we done to re-engineer Yahoo?”

She reeled off a list she has repeated many times before, the point of which was to let us all know she has been mighty busy cleaning up the big mess she had to deal with on arrival.

So lay off, all you naysayers! It’s kind of like what President Barack Obama is saying these days, as he looks forward to huge political losses in the upcoming election.

It’s apparently a disciplined approach. “First you walk, then you run.” Then, she added, you FLY!

Don’t look down, Carol!

She promised to talk about what’s on all our minds–as in the takeover swirl related to AOL, News Corp. and a passel of private equity moneybags circling Yahoo.

2:15 pm: Time for the numbers from CFO Tim Morse, which you can see here.

He was much jauntier than usual. I wonder if that was in the script. Smile with your voice, Tim!

I mostly did not listen to this spiel, as it was a recount of the numbers I already read. But there are some nuggets.

Apparently, for example, revenue for owned and operated search is down because users are clicking on the really good new results from the Microsoft algorithmic search transition, so they are not clicking on paid search as much.

Hmmm….I wonder what happens when they get great.

Then it was on to earnings and stock repurchases, designed to goose the shares, which Yahoo considers undervalued.

So do investors.

Next, he moved on to the outlook, which was weak.

And Morse also noted the uncertainty that has to do with the search and online advertising alliance transition. “Caution is warranted,” said Morse.

“We’re pleased with our third-quarter results,” summarized Morse, seemingly ignoring the revenue issue.

2:31 pm: Bartz was then back on discussing the search alliance and the rocky relationship with China’s Alibaba Group. Rocky is my word and actually is also Alibaba’s.

At least all is well with Microsoft, Yahoo’s one-time nemesis.

It has been a big transition, of course, Bartz noted. Indeed.

Then Bartz went out of her way in praising Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, whom many sources said she has treated shabbily in the past.

It is “a good productive business relationship,” said Bartz.

Other than that, she politely suggested we all butt out of what Yahoo is going to do with the asset, a 29 percent stake of Alibaba.com worth $3.1 billion, according to the company.

Finally, Bartz said Yahoo had “potential” and promised a payoff to shareholders in the months ahead.

That would be nice.

2:38 pm: Time for Q&A.

The first question was about the search revenue growth. Soon!

The next was about search revenue and display advertising and a left-field query on engagement on smartphones.

Same answer, and also people will use Yahoo on any screen.

Next question was on display growth. Same answer.

Will any of these analysts ask the good questions about takeover rumors and other thorny management issues?

Wait, finally there came a sheepish request for clarification about the rumors–well, they are real, so realmors–about takeover plans by private equity folks, along with AOL’s Tim Armstrong.

“As tempting as it is to tell you what I really think, you know I can’t comment,” said Bartz, who really sounded like she wanted to comment.

Give in, Carol! In the words of Oscar Wilde, which is BoomTown’s operating motto: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

Nope, she will not utter a word about “hypothetical this and hypothetical that.”

Instead, the boilerplate: “We like our strategy, we like our progress, and that’s what we’re focused on.”

Next, more questions about revenue weakness. Bartz blamed it all on the drag of search revenue. “The main drag on our growth has been search revenue,” she noted.

She said it will get better once the whole transition kicks in.

Bartz did sound convincing, especially when she noted it was part of a six-year trend in decline in search. By the end of 2011, she promised, it will all be different.

But, in the immortal words of Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry”: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

Now, a question about a “bloated” work force. Yahoo employee count is up seven percent, although costs are down 12 percent.

Morse: “No, we’re not bloated.”

Bartz took a question about competition in the display market, as in Yahoo is going to get smacked by rivals, such as Google.

“There is always competition and competition only makes us better,” said Bartz. “We’re running very fast and not going to give up this leadership in display very easily.”

Given Google’s inroads here, she better run faster than the Road Runner.

The last question was about monetization of mobile.

Lots of pretty, empty words from Bartz, especially since Yahoo does not have a really competitive offering compared to Google and Apple.

It should be added that both Google and Apple smoked it in terms of revenue growth in their quarterly earnings this week.

Also, I hear that Facebook social networking site is growing pretty quickly.

And it ended, with nary a decent question from Wall Street analysts about the clear turmoil at the long-troubled Silicon Valley icon and answers about what Bartz is going to do to address it.

The media is in listen-only mode for these calls, which is a shame, since I for one would love to listen to what Bartz has to say.

I know you’re busy and all, Carol, but perhaps you can talk over dinner soon?

But while a stock market plunge is a big deal, it didn’t seem to be a wipe-out-the-Web-sized deal. Not even a Michael Jackson-sized deal.

I’ve seen reports of wobbles at some financial sites, but the Internet in general seems to have held up okay. Which makes sense–the swoon was fast and scary, but only if you were the kind of person who pays attention to breaking news.

Akamai (AKAM), which moves bits around the Web and claims to handle 20 percent of the world’s traffic, says today’s surges have been relatively minor. You can see for yourself, at this real-time traffic monitor.

If you click in, you’ll notice that Web traffic is up significantly in the U.K. But no reason to panic over that one–there’s a pretty big election going on.

This morning, BoomTown will be onstage at California First Lady Maria Shriver’s well-known Women’s Conference in Long Beach, to moderate a panel titled “Changing the World Through the Web” for a crowd of 1,800 people.

The panelists for my session at what has become one of the top forums for women’s issues include Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher (pictured above, of course); Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, who leads the social networking site’s elections, breaking news and social change initiatives; Premal Shah, president of online microloan site Kiva.org; and Joe Rospars, founder and creative director of Blue State Digital and new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

In other words, as a group, they are all either prettier, smarter or better for the planet than anything I have ginned up so far.

But, to be safe, send some question suggestions quick that you think I should ask in the interview–via Twitter @karaswisher.

In any case, I shall press on and try to conduct myself with some kind of tech dignity, as I query the group on how the Web–especially social media–can empower people to change the world and be more than just one big pool of mundanities, meaningless status updates, silly apps and online gossip.

Speaking of which, it was a minor shock to run smack into reality show whatever-she-is Kate Gosselin at a speaker party last night, who is here to flack a book about–of course–her kids, titled “Eight Little Faces.”

No, I did not make that title up and I suppose it takes all kinds.

But it was especially surreal, since other speakers include–how shall I put this delicately?–much more serious and substantial women, such as primatology legend Dr. Jane Goodall, women’s rights activist Eve Ensler, Obama Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, a spate of women news legends such as Katie Couric, and even–my personal favorite, for her cheery butter-loving nature–celebrity chef Paula Deen.

For those interested in seeing some of the all-day event online, there’s a live Webcast from the Web site, which you can access here (the Twitter hashtag is #wc09

I will, natch, post a video report later.

Fraud hunters are no newer to elections than conspiracy theorists are to the Internet. But unlike election monitors seeking voter tampering or intimidation, or local experts who critique faulty ballot design or study pre-election polling data, these statistical analysts don’t need to know anything about the dynamics of an individual race. Their toolkit is primarily statistical and can be applied to any numbers, voting or otherwise. The Internet provides quick access to election numbers and speedy dissemination of findings.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Network-security firm Arbor Networks says it has a rough sketch of how the government’s firewall works and that it appears to be selectively blocking Internet applications, particularly online video and email.

In the report, Craig Labovitz includes a graph showing a big uptick in Web video traffic prior to the election — “presumably reflecting high levels of Iranian interest in outside news sources,” — which stops around 6 p.m. Saturday in Tehran “and unlike the Web, never returns to pre-election levels,” he writes.

Email fared similarly, though the data indicates that outgoing messages may have been blocked even before the election was complete.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Reuters: “‘We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,’ said the [unnamed U.S.] official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.”

CNN: “Senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.”

UPDATE: Even the State Department can’t keep Twitter up forever. It’s nighttime in Tehran and Twitter is down — the company’s status blog dedicated to stuff like this indicates it should be shuttered from about 5pm tp 6:30 pm eastern time. UPDATE2: It’s back!

Almost-First Daughter Meghan McCain (pictured here) gave the Republican Party the analog equivalent of an unhappy emoticon :( yesterday in a column in The Daily Beast, predicting the political party will lose power quicker than a faulty iPhone if it does not get more Web-savvy pronto.

BoomTown always liked GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s sassy spawn, who had a pretty good blog–deliciously called McCain Blogette.com: Musings on Politics From a Pop CultureGirl–during the campaign and was always coming out with some little nugget that I am sure made her PR handlers cringe.

Well, there she goes again!

In a post titled, “Why Republicans Don’t Get the Internet,” Meghan McCain noted flatly:

The Republican party isn’t exactly Internet savvy. That’s no secret…This has been a source of personal frustration for me for a very long time. Unless the GOP evolves as the party that can successfully utilize the Web, we’ll continue to lose influence.”

Thankfully, it gets worse!

Writes Meghan:

I know this aggravates the old school political operatives to no end, but it’s true. The Obama administration understands that my generation spends most of its day on a laptop or a BlackBerry, and that using the web is easy way to communicate their ideas to their constituents. Making a website, Facebook group, or YouTube video entertaining and enticing is where grassroots campaigning begins. President Obama currently has around five-and-a-half million supporters on Facebook; my father has around five-hundred thousand.”

Sorry, Dad!

But apparently not all that much, because she ended her piece with a zinger about the GOP’s new Web effort, the Rebuild the Party site, essentially declaring the party a wizened Luddite with no hopes of ever beating the BlackBerry-loving Obama.

…The website is about as provocative as a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. At the time that I write this, the video on the homepage features various individuals, most of them I would guess between the ages of fifty and sixty, explaining why they consider themselves Republicans. Had I still been an independent, there is nothing about this website or video that would sway me as a twenty-four year old woman to join the GOP…Until the Republican party joins the twenty-first century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side.”

Meghan McCain is definitely right about the unusually sleepy video–which only pops when they focus on dead Republican former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt:

Finally, someone who might actually understand the Internet will be taking charge of the thus-far lackadaisical government body that plays the largest role in spurring its growth.

The Washington Post is reporting that Julius Genachowski (pictured here) will be tapped to take on the always controversial job of chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Sources with knowledge of the situation also confirmed the appointment, which will be announced in the next few days, to BoomTown.

Genachowski has previously worked for the FCC as its chief counsel under former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. But he is better known to Silicon Valley as a longtime Internet exec at Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI).

He is now a founder of a Washington, D.C.-based venture firm called LaunchBox Digital, which has invested in a plethora of unusually trendy Web 2.0 companies.

One of its investments, the social news aggregation service Socialmedian, was recently acquired by the German-based business networking site Xing for $7.5 million.

And Genachowski is also a co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, another venture firm, and a special adviser at General Atlantic.

Perhaps most notably, he went to law school with President-Elect Barack Obama.

Thus, Genachowski worked the tech sector tirelessly for Obama’s election, along with organizing the campaign’s successful social-networking and online fund-raising campaign.

He was also clearly on the short list to be America’s first chief technology officer, which might be too light on policy-making and too heavy on pontificating for Genachowski’s tastes.

As top telecom and, really, Internet regulator, Genachowski will have a lot more power and even more on his plate, including the rocky shift from analog to digital television, now set to take place next month, as well as dealing with net neutrality and a range of other key Web issues.

But top of the agenda will likely be how to make real Obama’s promise to drastically improve broadband access across this nation and lowering prices.

The slow speeds and high costs are an appalling legacy of Washington regulators and politicians, who have lived too long and too deep in the pockets of big telecom companies.

That has made the U.S. exactly what Softbank founder Masa Son once called in an interview I did with him at a D: All Things Digital conference: the “Third World of broadband.”

Hey, Julius, you’ll fix that, right?