Solution: Be your own paparazzi!

Costolo posted this awesome surfing action shot on his Twitter account in the wee hours of this morning.

He attributed the pic to Federated Media founder John Battelle, who’s also vacationing in Hawaii this week.

By the way, Costolo doesn’t limit himself to unplanned dives, as this appears to precede. He’ll be speaking at our D:Dive Into Media conference next month.

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.

Asked for comment, a Google spokeswoman replied, “Part of the Google+ team is attending an offsite this week.”

A source said that the members of the Google+ team also had visited Hawaii for a celebratory offsite right after the launch. Perhaps this is a repeat or a second trip for those who didn’t get to join the first.

Update: Mike Arrington is reporting on Uncrunched that 450 Google employees are at this week’s event.

It might be hard to believe, but in Silicon Valley’s competitive job market, trips to Hawaii aren’t unheard of. As I recall, the Facebook Photos team also had a Hawaii “offsite” after a major launch last year. Update: A representative for the Facebook Photos team said this was technically a group vacation, not a company offsite.

Here’s a fire dancing snapshot from the Google+ photo stream of software engineer Eider Oliveira, who posted it last night with the fitting caption “I’ve circled you.”

And here’s a stunning sunset picture from Chris Chabot, a Google+ developer advocate.

This gorgeous Instagrammed shot at Haleakala National Park from open Web advocate Chris Messina hit the Instagram popular list last night.

The online retailer on Thursday took action in Illinois, as it had threatened to do, to counter a new law aimed at forcing online retailers to collect sales taxes in the state. Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island have enacted similar laws, and California is weighing action. Amazon is also in a court battle with New York over such legislation.

The Illinois law, signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Thursday, requires online retailers that work with affiliates in the state to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Illinois residents and businesses. Amazon responded to the measure by cutting ties to its Illinois-based affiliates, which are blogs and other websites that refer traffic to Amazon’s website and get paid commissions if customers make purchases there.

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has fiercely opposed all efforts to force it to collect sales taxes. “We had opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive,” Amazon said in its letter to Illinois affiliates. “We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action.”

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In a post last week, BoomTown wrote that Cisco would introduce a consumer telepresence product.

It did today in San Francisco at a press event. It is called, inexplicably, “Umi” telepresence.

I’ll be honest, it sounds like the kind of sushi I typically refuse to eat, because I am not as adventurous as I like to pretend I am.

Actually, it seems to be a variation on you-me.

Get it? You and me and telepresence. As in “Star Trek” for non-geeks.

According to Wikipedia, here are some other definitions for the word:

“Umi may refer to: Umi, ‘sea’ in Japanese language; UMI, Universal Mobile Interface; Umi, Fukuoka, a town in Japan; Umi-a-Liloa, the king of the island of Hawaii; Umi Ryuzaki, a character in the fictional manga series ‘Magic Knight Rayearth’ by CLAMP.”

“Connect with a touch of the button,” is the motto for the giant Silicon Valley networking company for Umi.

And, frankly, I wish I could have telepresenced from my bed at home with it.

You can, using Umi with your existing high-definition television and high-speed broadband. It’s in three parts: A camera, a remote control and, ugh, yet another set-top box to pile on the rest on the shelf in your home living room, as you can see below.

Cisco said the device is scheduled to be available to consumers on November 14 in Best Buy (BBY) Magnolia Home Theater stores, as well as at bestbuy.com and umi.cisco.com “for the suggested retail price of $599 with a monthly fee of $24.99 for unlimited ?mi calls, video messaging and video storage.”

At the short and sweet event, Cisco execs touted their entry into the crowded consumer video-conferencing arena.

“It’s all about tasting the chocolate,” said Cisco exec Gina Clark about her box of Umi, which will work with Google Voice Chat–but not Skype and Apple (AAPL) iChat yet.

It also has the seal of approval from Oprah Winfrey, who will doubtlessly use it in some Oprah manner on her talk show.

Clark mentions tasting the chocolate several more times to knock the point home that if you try it, you’ll like it.

I can’t believe I ate the whole Umi!

Now, Cisco–which really is obsessed with the chocolate metaphor today–is making me have a chomp in a demo.

And, while I am no reviewer, it is pretty sweet, and looks great, well beyond what is available via Internet video chat.

Until the inevitable shaky video appears, here is the full press release from Cisco (CSCO):

Cisco umi Press Release

Mr. Smallwood did not specify how this differs from the condition of the average videogame aficionado.

Silly as the suit may be, it isn’t without legal ramifications. Steven Roosa, a lawyer doing research at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, sounded almost giddy this week at the prospect that a court might chip away at the enforceability of End User License Agreements, or EULAs. These software license agreements often radically limit how, and for how much, customers can sue if they feel harmed by an electronic product.

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Steve Case is most famous for building America Online, which became the Internet’s first mega-company, and for merging it with Time Warner (TWX), which became the worst corporate marriage in recent history.

But AOL (AOL) is 25 years old, and the AOL-Time Warner deal is a decade old. What has Steve Case been doing since then?

Investing, in a lot of different stuff. His Revolution holding company has stakes in everything from Revolution Health, a wellness/fitness/medical advice Web site, to Cacique, a Costa Rican resort, to Clearspring, a Web widget company. Late last year, Case sold Revolution Money to American Express (AXP) for $300 million. And Zipcar, another portfolio company, has just filed for a $75 million IPO.

Liveblog

“We meet again,” sighs Kara. “I just can’t quit you.” “We’re off to a good start,” says Steve.

1:58 pm: Kara–Let’s go back 25 years. Talk about the beginning of AOL.

1:59 pm: Case–Well, Zuckerberg was one year old.

I got into this when I was in college, reading Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave.” It was riveting.

We started in 1985, in partnership with Commodore. It was a total bet on community. We believed the killer app was community. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.

On the road show, no one believed us. Which was fair, because we didn’t have many customers seven, eight years into it. Needed lots of technology to catch up a bit. And needed people to catch up, too.

2:01 pm: Kara–What put you over the top? All of those discs?

2:02 pm: Case–It wasn’t the discs. It was the content. By 1992, ’93, many more people had computers in their homes, connectivity was better. The Internet was evolving–it wasn’t legal for us to connect to the Internet until 1991.

It took a while before we were considered an Internet company. Even when we went public, we were an interactive company, or online services. Had to morph as market evolved.

2:04 pm: And at some point News Corp. (NWS) sued you?

2:04 pm: Yeah, in 1998. they were upset about an online game they thought we were excluding. There was a lot of antitrust chatter then. Those were the good old days.

Kara: Well, you proved them wrong, the idea that you were too powerful.

Case: “I’m not going to comment on that.”

2:05 pm: On the Time Warner deal: Made sense for us and our shareholders at the time. It made strategic sense. But as Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is hallucination.

I’m recalling, by the way, that one of our strategies was to buy Apple (AAPL), hire Steve Jobs and put him in charge. It was an idea that was floated.

Big point is that with the right leadership, which my group, including me, couldn’t provide, we were set up to succeed. Look at stuff like iTunes, YouTube, etc.–all of that could have come from that company.

2:07 pm: I stepped down after the merger. After a couple of years, I started making one-off investments. Then created Revolution as a holding company. Runs through portfolio, which you can see on his site.

2:09 pm: Kara–You were early on a lot of important trends. Oh, and tell me about your favorite device that isn’t the iPad (thanks, Kara!).

2:10 pm: I’m interested in the social media side, and there’s some stuff bubbling there that reminds me of the early days. Also, mobile and location-based stuff, really. But really, how the Internet can be a platform to change the world. Even companies like Zipcar and our resorts properties only work because of the Internet.

Kara: What’s the relevance of the Internet to a company that helps rich people travel?

Case: Booking tickets on the Web [hmm]. Health care is the one that can really benefit from the Web. Runs through Revolution Health portfolio.

2:13 pm: Case–Turns out I’m much more interested in businesses that touch consumers. Like Steve Jobs said, I like that better than enterprise.

And health care is really a wellness push. Because health care as we define it is really sick care.

2:14 pm: Kara–Talk about Twitter and Sarah Silverman.

Case starts to answer, but Kara interrupts and steers him somewhere else.

Case: I really didn’t want to do a blog in the last 10 years, because that seemed like work. But Twitter made sense. I signed up early, like three years ago, but like a lot of people, it didn’t make sense to me. About a year and a half ago it made sense. Less about what you’re doing than what you’re interested in.

2:15 pm: I’ve always liked that interaction part. I wish we’d thought of Twitter–we were headed in that direction with buddy lists, etc.

2:16 pm: Kara–Tease out the different big Web businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare.

Case: Facebook’s obviously a real company with real revenue. Twitter and Foursquare are much earlier, but they could be on the cusp of a real business with real revenue.

Kara: If you were a 19-year-old college student, what would you be looking at?

Case: I’m hoping that the Internet just becomes everyday life. You don’t call it email, it’s just mail. Etc.

2:18 pm: Big opportunity for Web integration in health: Wi-Fi pedometers, Internet-connected scales, etc. In most cases, remote diagnostics would be able to help you solve and correct problems.

And I think letting people know about healthier choices can solve a lot of problems, and the Web can help with that.

2:19 pm: Kara–Make some predictions. You’re a visionary!

On Yahoo (YHOO): Case pauses. “I don’t know.” This industry changes a lot. I don’t feel like I’m in a good place to make a judgment. Do remember that iconic brands, with large audiences: You should never give up for dead. Remember what happened to Apple.

On AOL: Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

On Apple: Nobody would have imagined this 13 years ago, when Steve came back. Remember that it was worth $1 billion and left for dead. By the way, I’ve told Steve this–I’d love to see Apple focus on health care.

2:22 pm: On Facebook, social networking: Really big. Not going away. That kind of communicating is fundamental to human behavior.

On Hollywood: I do think it’s puzzling. We had a hard time getting VC money into the Internet, but Time Warner would spend $1 billion a year betting on movies. They were very comfortable with that, and so many fail.

2:24 pm: Kara–How do you want to be remembered?

Case: “That sounds kind of like a gravestone question.”

Kara: “Okay.”

Case: I want to be remembered, and my team to be remembered, as mostly a force for good, able to get tens of millions of people to take the Internet seriously and integrate it into their everyday lives. We helped get America online.

2:26 pm: A question from analyst Mary Meeker: Please remind us of the market value of AOL when you went public. And please talk about challenges you had when you were growing (“America offline,” etc.)

Case: We raised $10 million or $15 million, had about $30 million in revenue and were valued at $70 million.

As to the challenges–all of them were double-edged swords. For instance, regarding downtime, it took a better part of a decade to get people to take us seriously, and we let them down. Then again, the fact that people cared about our service problems made it clear that they took what we offered them seriously. It took us a year or so to work through that.

2:29 pm: We had a lot of ups and down. Mostly downs. It was a decade of building. One of my worries now, is that there are so many companies that are built to flip. I wish people took a longer view, and I wish VCs did as well.

2:30 pm: Case: I went to school in Hawaii with Obama.

Kara: How was he?

Case: I don’t know. I was a senior and he was a freshman.

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 possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Or at least it was in the first week it hit the market in April. That’s according to JiWire, a mobile marketing company with a very particular niche: Selling ads via commercial Wi-Fi networks.

JiWire tracks device information from the 30,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots where it serves ads, and it says Apple’s (AAPL) tablet made an immediate impact on its network, accounting for 1.53 percent of ad requests.

And for some reason, a bunch of them came from Honolulu. Go figure:

Meanwhile, here’s a more consequential data set from JiWire’s Q1 report on the most popular handsets and operating systems on its network (click to enlarge):

Most of those entries aren’t terribly surprising: Apple’s iPhone and iPod dominate the lists, and Google’s (GOOG) Android has a strong presence, too. The one that might raise an eyebrow is Sony’s (SNE) PSP game unit, which I confess, I never think of as an ad platform.

But mobile ad executives tell me they do, in fact, move a lot of inventory on the gadget. Think of the kinds of advertisers who buy time on Smackdown–armed forces, energy drinks, and other videogames–and you’ve got a sense of the PSP’s buyers.

And now you’ve learned two interesting tidbits in one story! Let’s go for three, via this electricity primer:

Apple ended up paying around $80 million for the company, according to multiple sources. That’s less than half what investors valued the company at in 2008, but it’s more than the $35 million the company raised throughout its life. Which means that some investors could get their money back and more.

But not all of Lala’s investors. Warner Music Group (WMG), for one, ended up getting back about half the $20 million it put into Lala, I’ve confirmed with people familiar the company.

That’s consistent with the $11 million write-down Warner took on its stake back in March. But it’s also confusing. Most venture deals include a clause that gives investors the right to get their money back–often with a premium–before anyone else gets paid following a sale. So any price of $35 million or more should have paid back the music label in full.

I’ve asked Warner for comment, but haven’t heard back. I’ve also reached out to co-investors Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Capital. Apple (AAPL) spokesman Steve Dowling offered up his now-standard line on the deal: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.”

Warner executives can at least say that they did better on Lala than they did with Imeem, a rival digital music service. Warner lost all of the $15 million it put into that one, which is being acquired by News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.

And the Warner guys can also tell themselves that employees from a company they once backed are now working at Apple, which can’t hurt.

Meanwhile, the Lala team, which should begin reporting to Apple today, gets credit for selling the company at any kind of premium at all. It’s not a home run, but it’s much better than it could have been.

The start-up has gone through multiple iterations, and its most recent was a streaming music service that sold access to songs for 10 cents apiece. But despite a recent promotional deal with Google (GOOG), the company appeared unlikely to succeed on its own.

Silicon Valley chatter is that founder Bill Nguyen, who spent six months in Hawaii this year trying to launch another start-up, and CEO Geoff Ralston had become weary of the same problems that have bedeviled other music start-ups. So they were looking to land Lala at a larger entity.

One thing that helped the company extract a decent price is that it had $10 million cash on hand, say sources who’ve seen the company’s books. That  meant it didn’t have to sell immediately.

But Lala’s real asset was its technology team: In the end, Apple bought the company to get its hands on its engineers, who had built a slick streaming service as well as an iPhone app, which Apple has yet to approve.

If you’re feeling glass-half-empty, you can note that Lala’s $80 million price tag is a big comedown from the $200 million investors thought the company was worth a couple of years ago. But if you’re feeling more generous, you can conclude that any kind of return is worth noting.

The last big exit for a digital music company happened way back in the spring of 2007, when CBS (CBS) paid $280 million for Last.fm. But no one has gotten anything close to that for digital music since then. Imeem is being sold for spare parts, and News Corp. also bought iLike at a steep discount. Spiralfrog filed for Chapter 11 after burning through its cash.

But people are still trying. Pandora Media raised another $35 million this summer after a royalty deal helped breathe life into the Internet radio company.

Meanwhile, venture-backed MOG, whose investors also include some music labels, has just launched a streaming music service of its own. And Spotify, the European music service, has raised a pile of money and generated much more hype, though it has yet to land in the U.S.

Maybe one of them will get it right.

Ryan Higa, whose Nigahiga channel had more than 1.4 million subscribers Monday afternoon, thanked his fans in a new video in which he gave his own version of an acceptance speech. “It’s not just my achievement, it’s yours as well, because without you guys, I’d have no subscribers,” he said. “You guys make–you know–I don’t know where I’m going with this.”

He then previewed a short film, “Ninja Melk,” that he’s working on. “It’s full of action, comedy, and some scenes even have action and comedy in one,” he said.

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Last night, BoomTown went to a lovely party thrown by David Hornik, the August Capital VC who also runs The Lobby conference in his spare time.

He threw the event because those who attend the annual invitation-only gathering in Hawaii wanted to get together again during the year in Silicon Valley for even more schmoozing.

I went to the first Lobby in the fall of 2007 (you can see my video of that below too), so Hornik let me in to have some pizza and beer at August’s offices on Sand Hill Road and use my Flip video to ask those in attendance where they thought the digital sector was in terms of the economy and innovation.

So here’s Hornik, angel investor Brett Bullington (who is also in the 2007 video, but in shorts) and BillShrink’s Peter Pham, as well a merger of MINIs.

Here’s the video (with my 2007 one below it):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090612/kara-visits-the-lobby-party-on-sand-hill-road-as-opposed-to-the-sandy-beaches-of-hawaii/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20080812/more-states-mull-taxing-itunes-other-digital-downloads/ http://allthingsd.com/20080812/more-states-mull-taxing-itunes-other-digital-downloads/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:24:07 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=2508 State legislators look at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other digital download services stealing away business from offline retailers and you know what they see? A piggybank.

News.com reports today that at least nine states this year have considered enacting “download taxes” on digital goods–and five of those states have adopted them, including Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080812/more-states-mull-taxing-itunes-other-digital-downloads/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20071025/kara-visits-the-lobby-in-hawaii/ http://allthingsd.com/20071025/kara-visits-the-lobby-in-hawaii/#comments Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:14:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071025/kara-visits-the-lobby-in-hawaii/

I am at a new conference organized by August Capital’s David Hornik called The Lobby on the Big Island of Hawaii.

It is thick with Web 2.0 players, all here to interact and discuss issues, although without a formal program that is so typical of most Internet conferences.

In other words, the schmoozing in the halls is front and center, an interesting cut-to-the-chase twist from the gadfly VC Hornik.

So what was the talk last night at the opening cocktail party? The Facebook deal, of course, with most people being alternately incredulous, dubious and in awe of the $15 billion valuation that Mark Zuckerberg snagged from Microsoft.

In general, people were worried about the impact on their own companies, most agreeing that it would make the bubble even more bubblicious and that it marked the return of that frothy but queasy feeling of the first Internet bubble when AOL somehow managed to grab Time Warner in a deal that, as it turned out, will now live in infamy.

We’ll see about that, but now it is off to some mysterious group activity all day and, at some point, natch, a beach party.

Or as Elvis sang so movingly: Clambake! Geeks going to a Clambake!

Here’s some video, featuring folks like Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg:

[ See post to watch video ]

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