News Byte

Lanyrd Raises $1.4M to Help People Get More Value From Conferences

Lanyrd, the surprisingly useful “social conference directory,” has closed seed funding, it announced today. Some $1.4 million in funding came primarily from U.K. investors Index Seed and PROfounders, as well as angels like Joi Ito, Esther Dyson and Joshua Schachter.

QOTD: You Mean Google-Assisted Suicide?

Most companies don’t get murdered, they commit suicide.

EDventure’s Esther Dyson on Twitter

Tweets of the Week: From Russia With Tweets

Some of this week’s biggest tech-industry tweets came not from Silicon Valley but from Russia. “Rustechdel”–for Russian Tech Delegation–was hash-tagged by people like Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, start-up investor Esther Dyson and actor Ashton Kutcher, who joined the U.S. State Department technology delegation in Moscow for a week of extolling the benefits of social media to Russians.

Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff: How to Make Money While Music Becomes “Demonetized”

As a longtime music executive and talent manager, Irving Azoff has had to find a way to work with everyone from inebriated rock stars to David Geffen. But he’s never had to placate Washington, D.C. before. But that’s what Azoff needs to do in order to pull off the deal of a lifetime: A merger between his Ticketmaster Entertainment, which dominates the ticketing business, and Live Nation, which dominates the live concert business. When Azoff isn’t busy trying to convince people that the merger doesn’t violate antitrust regulations, or running his ticketing company, he manages the careers of everyone from the Eagles to Christina Aguilera. Note the one thing in the music business he doesn’t spend time on: Selling recorded music.
Irving Azoff

A Techtastically Busy Week: A Grab Bag of Digital Stuff to Consider

It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored. As if you did not have enough to do, what with all that pointless tweeting, here are some choices for those who want a little analog action, including watching me annoy Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is also trying to become California’s next Attorney General.
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Back to the Future: How the New York Times Saw the Web in 1995

New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may not have figured out how his paper can adapt to the Web age yet. But give him credit: He’s been thinking about the idea for more than a decade.
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Kara Visits DLD in Germany: The Naomi Campbell Edition

Why was supermodel Naomi Campbell suddenly standing right next to German publisher Hubert Burda at the final lunch for his company’s DLD–Digital, Life, Design–conference in Munich yesterday? I have no idea, nor do I know why Burda broke out into song either–how much do you have to love a media mogul willing to do that? [...]

Kara Visits the Monaco Media Forum: More Interviews on the French Riviera!

Here are some more video interviews I did at the Monaco Media Forum last week. Talking about a range of Web issues, the interviewees include pundit and investor Esther Dyson, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser, Simon Assaad of Heavy, BSkyB’s James Murdoch and the ubiquitous Quincy Smith of CBS: