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Almost Famous: Ben Zotto of Cocoa Box Design

Drake Martinet, Intern, All Things Digital in News on May 28, 2010 at 12:05 pm PT

This week, we coffee’d at Coupa Cafe on the Stanford University campus to interview Ben Zotto. He’s the mind behind Cocoa Box Design, the app company responsible for Penultimate, a sleeper hit at the iPad App Store. Ben is developing popular software that is just a little outside of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s vision for his “magical” device. That doesn’t seem to bother Zotto though.

BoomTown Prediction: Chasing Away the Mice (And Keyboards Too)

Kara Swisher in News on May 7, 2010 at 10:30 am PT

The Washington Post, where I once toiled, asked me to do a short piece recently for a spring-cleaning feature in its Outlook section. It was titled “Twelve Things the World Should Toss Out,” and BoomTown’s choice was physical computer keyboards and mice. Before you go all technical on me, be warned: I wrote the piece on an Apple iPad with a virtual keyboard and touchscreen. And frankly, if I could have all my blog posts downloaded directly from my noggin, it would be okay by me.

Yahoo Demos Cool Etch-a-Sketch Mobile Search App and New Search Dude Shashi

Kara Swisher in News on February 10, 2010 at 10:30 am PT

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event at its Sunnyvale campus this morning. Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products. Both talked about what the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-A-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff.