AllThingsD » Esther Dyson

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

Liz Gannes — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:32:39 +0000

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?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:32:37 +0000

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

– EDventure’s Esther Dyson on Twitter

Tweets of the Week: From Russia With Tweets

Lauren Goode — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:58:53 +0000

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.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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

Peter Kafka — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:31:16 +0000

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 (TKTM) Entertainment, which dominates the ticketing business, and Live Nation, (LYV), 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.

Session Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Introduction: Legendary Eagles survivor Joe Walsh, looking very much worse for wear, shows up via video to talk about his longtime manager. “Irving is the only manager that I ever knew that said to David Geffen ‘pffft,’ and he’s still here.” Also: “He’s a friend of mine….All the guys in the Eagles love him. He has a beautiful house that we bought him.”
Irving notes that Joe is now sober.
Irving rattles off his management empire: 16 management companies, handling everyone from Miley Cyrus to Willie Nelson. Country, classic rock “where the tour money is.”
Kara: Where’s the music business going? Irving: Obviously, with the “demonetization of recorded music,” everyone got into a woe-is-me attitude, but I’m enthusiastic. “Narrowcasting” of the industry has created new stars, and live business is good.

Irving: Music labels have always been slow to react to technology, and a lot of people in this room profited from that. Basically the record industry sat around and tried to protect an old model.
Kara: Could the business have reacted differently? Irving: Yeah, suing your customer is a bad idea.
Kara: Will there be record companies in the future? Irving: Yes. They have 100 years of content. They’ll be more like publishing companies, where they are a repository of rights.
Kara: How do you feel the technology business has treated the music business? [Apologies for gap, technical issues]. Eagles have generated about $400,000 in Apple (AAPL) iTunes royalties. Which is about what they get for a couple live shows.
Irving: Overall, the state of music industry is promising. Was fallow for a bit, but there’s a whole new generation of singers, songwriters, performers. “You never know where it comes from.” In terms of the business, there will be more companies than the four big labels that dominate today. “It will be a great time for entrepreneurs….It’s not over, but it’s warping into 2.0, 3.0.”
Kara: What does a music executive have to do to survive? Irving: You have to take chances. They can’t complain about the iTunes deal. They have to embrace new technology, and I think they are, and it’s easier to get deals done now.
Kara: What about these little digital companies like Playlist and iLike, which Ticketmaster owns a piece of? They can survive, and they’re excellent marketing opportunities. But they’ll have to find other ways of making money. Can they? “I don’t know.” Advertising? “I don’t know.”

Onto the merger. Irving lays out the case. Everything revolves around live music, and they’re the biggest player in live music. It’s really the promotion piece, and the marketing piece, added to Ticketmaster. Without that, Ticketmaster wouldn’t survive. “Any of you guys can write a program that does what Ticketmaster does….I’ve been there a couple of months and I have gripes myself.”
People’s gripe with Ticketmaster isn’t with what we do, it’s demand issues: People want tickets to attend sold-out shows, so we have unhappy customers. Plus we’ve been the “collection agency” for a whole bunch of fees. “But the decision is ultimately made by the act.”
What about criticism to the merger from the likes of Bruce Springsteen? “Everything we do revolves around what’s good for the artist and what’s good for the fan. That’s our new model.”
Not really an answer, Kara points out. Irving: “I would say that Bruce is uninformed about the potential of what this could be.” [Maybe someone could tell Jon Landau.] For instance, we could be bundling new songs along with tickets. “The business traditionally resists change,” so complaints about the merger are nothing news. And there’s plenty of competition: Phil Anschutz competes with us and he’s worth more than the combined market cap of both of these companies. Warner Music Group’s (WMG) Edgar Bronfman Jr. says he’s in the ticketing business, etc.
Discussion of TicketsNow, a StubHub-like “secondary market”/scalping business owned by Ticketmaster. Irving has said that in the past that he wouldn’t have bought it. Would he sell it now? Maybe.
What are the prospects for the merger? “Very optimistic” that it will get done between now and end of the year.
Back to griping about prices and availability: “People in the music industry, we’ve had a horrible record of shooting ourselves in the head.” We haven’t done enough dynamic pricing for tickets, and we should, and that will help make people happy. But these issues are fundamentally the artists’ responsibility. They decide what tickets we sell, and at what price.

Where is the music business going, overall? Who’s your favorite? “It’s like asking what’s your favorite kid.” Internet makes things very exciting, distribution is opening up. What about the industry suing customers? I think that’s a “very small issue.” We do need to protect intellectual property, and the people who make it.
Q&A: Esther Dyson wants to know what Ticketmaster/Live Nation will do with all the data they collect about customers, etc. “Any artist that calls up and says I’d like the email list of the people who came to my show, we’ll make that available.” But with regard to pricing, etc., artists and their management are not being sophisticated about how they use data. And we have to keep the press from chastising artists that use dynamic pricing.”
Q: Not clear what the question is. But seems to be about using an auction model from the get-go. “Auctions are falling into real disfavor at the moment….We’re finding that people don’t want to spend the time to participate in them.” They just want to know that this VIP package costs this much.
Q: What do you think about subscription services? “I’ve always thought subscription was an incredible model.” But tricky to pull off with labels, publishers, unions, mobile guys all trying to figure out how to split the money.
Q: Do you have specific advice for classical music artists? The great thing about the Internet is that you no longer have to be popular with everybody to have a career. Classical should flourish in this era. Build a base, get in front of people, have people like you live. “That’s been true in 1966, and that will be true as long as there is music.”
Do your artists like Twitter? Some do. “Very useful” but other artists “refuse to get a mobile phone.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:31:58 +0000

It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

First up this week is an event today at which BoomTown will appear called “The Free! Summit: Inside the Digital Economy” in San Mateo.

Given all the recent debate about free versus paid, as traditional media companies take aim at the issue, it should be interesting.

I will be on an afternoon panel called “Business Models That Work,” which is about the the future of news and what’s next for journalism in the digital economy.

The other panelists are: Dan Gillmor, Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University; Alan Mutter, Adjunct Faculty Member, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and founder, “Reflections of a Newsosaur”; and Marshall Van Alstyne, Associate Professor of Information Economics, Boston University and Visiting Professor, MIT.

Later in the day, the event will morph into the third “Tech Policy Summit,” where I get to do a one-on-one interview with Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, who is still at the social-networking site but is also now running for the job of California’s Attorney General.

(My All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg will appear on Tuesday, along with a solid slate of speakers.)

On Thursday, ContentNext Media is holding its third EconSm conference, this time focusing on mobile, in an all-day event in San Francisco.

Speakers include: Zander Lurie, CFO, CBS (CBS) Interactive; angel investor Ron Conway (see my recent video interview with him here); Eric Johnson, president and COO, Wolfgang’s Vault; Joe Kennedy, CEO and president, Pandora; and Kevin Thau, director of mobile business development at Twitter.

Wrote paidContent’s Staci Kramer: “Much has changed as we get ready for our third EconSM–including the name. The acronym is still the same but this year it’s about the intersection of social and mobile. Social media has passed the gimmick stage–although not everyone has figured that out–and is part of the daily fabric for an increasing number of people.”

And, if you have even more time, the Aspen Institute has just published J.D. Lasica’s 110-page e-book, “Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet’s Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction.”

Lasica told me that he wrote the report after a roundtable of 30 experts in identity and technology (people like John Seely Brown and Esther Dyson) was convened in Aspen to discuss the ramifications of the cloud on a societal level.

He talked the Aspen Institute into releasing the e-book under a Creative Commons license, the first time it has ever done that.

And lest you think this is too focused on just Silicon Valley, I missed attending the Seattle 2.0 Awards last week, but here are the winners:

Best Start-up: Picnik
Best Boot-strapped Start-up: Picnik
Best Start-up CEO: Jonathan Sposato (Picnik)
Best Start-up Technologist: Nat Brown (iLike)
Best Venture Capitalist: Matt McIlwain (Madrona Venture Group)
Best Angel Investor: Geoff Entress
Best Start-up Product Designer: Peter Roman (Picnik)
Best Service Provider to Start-ups: Shannon Swift (Swift HR Solutions)
Best Blog from/about Start-ups: TechFlash/John Cook
Best Social Event for Start-ups: Lunch 2.0 by Josh Maher

Back to the Future: How the New York Times Saw the Web in 1995

Peter Kafka — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:43:41 +0000

New York Times (NYT) 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.

Here he is in 1995, at a Harvard University forum on journalism in the “on-line era,” thinking outloud about the ways his company might make money in the Internet era.

This is all an experiment. We don’t know where this is going. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.

As far as I know, there are only four–three, if you exclude blackmail–“Mr. Roberts, I won’t put that information up in exchange for $100,” which may be the only way to make money at this business today. Either the reader is going to pay or the advertiser is going to pay, or we’re going to get a piece of the transactional action. If the reader decides that she wants to get theater tickets from the Shubert organization for “Cats,” one, we’ll try to talk her out of it, but if she still goes out to see “Cats,” then maybe we’ll get, you know, one one-hundredth or one-tenth, or whatever the heck it is, of that transaction.

I had no idea Sulzberger harbored such an anti-”Cats” bias. Who knew?

I’m also not sure what to make of the fact that the Times–and everyone else in the news business–is still struggling with online economics 13 years later. Should the industry get credit for grappling with a problem that’s much harder than it looks? Or should our collective big brains have resolved this one by now?

Thanks to Harvard’s excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for digging up the transcript of the forum, which also featured tech pundit Esther Dyson; Walter Issacson, who was at the time a top executive at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.; and Frank Daniels III, publisher of the now-defunct Nando.net. You can read the entire thing (warning: very, very long) below.

neweconomicsofjournalism1995 – Free Legal Forms

Kara Visits DLD in Germany: The Naomi Campbell Edition

Kara Swisher — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:03:27 +0000

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?

But I got it all on video and a whole lot more on the last day of the pre-Davos European gathering focused on digital issues and innovation.

(And here is a post by European serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, who apparently thinks his video shows that Accel Partners’ Simon Levene and I were not impressed enough by Campbell.)

In any case, DLD’s motto was: “Uploading the 21st Century.” And while it did not quite do that, there were definitely a lot of interesting moments I captured for your viewing pleasure.

Along with Campbell (who was supposed to appear on a panel on Africa, but did not) and a singing Burda, the video features clips from two sessions today.

The first was titled “Exploding Media” and included: pundit Clay Shirky riffing on flash mobs; a very funny clip of kids talking about television (made by Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg); Google’s Marissa Mayer noting that Google will still not be in the content business; Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz discussing Yahoo’s plans to de-focus on making original content; and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis advising old media to just ask WWGD? (What would Google do?).

Another session on the video features the founders of the genetics-focused social-networking company 23andMe–Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Esther Dyson–answering questions about fears people have about learning too much about DNA.

Here is the video (and now I am off to Hamburg to visit Xing, a business social-networking company):

[ See post to watch video ]

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

Kara Swisher — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:13:05 +0000

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:

[ See post to watch video ]