But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick.

The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live.

The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.)

After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos.

The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app.

The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price.

“We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.”

Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, while a poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive shows that nearly 60 percent of mobile users plan to look at or use their mobile device during the game. We’ll likely see some interesting data after Sunday, as well, about mobile usage during the Super Bowl. These metrics are key for advertisers as they try to gauge how many eyeballs are on second — and third, and fourth — screens during big television events.

And what about those Super Bowl ads, you ask? NFL Magazine’s Super Bowl app won’t feature any third-party ads this year, but it will include NFL promotions, as well as ads for The Daily, the tablet newspaper owned by News Corp. (which also owns this site), since the NFL is using The Daily’s technology platform to power the app.

Berman said that since this is the first time NFL Digital has done a commemorative Super Bowl app — it’s the NFL’s first tablet-only app, as well — they’re not focused on signing up a bunch of ad partners to start, though it’s a possibility for future versions of the app.

Revenue generation aside, the app means something else for rabid sports fans: The ability to call up key plays on your tablet whenever you feel like watching them. And rewatching them. And showing them to your friends. And discussing the nuances of the plays.

And unlike a commemorative magazine — which, by the way, the NFL will be producing, as well — the app provides an interactive and updatable experience. Look, Ma, moving pictures!

John Dillon, the CEO of Engine Yard, was one of them. Dillon was CEO of Salesforce from 1999 until 2001, when he was ousted by founder and current CEO Marc Benioff. Heroku specializes in the development of Web applications on Ruby on Rails. So does Engine Yard. Now his old company is a competitor. He shared a few thoughts about that in an interview last week. But here are the highlights: First, he thinks Salesforce overpaid for Heroku. Second, he thinks the deal is an admission that Force.com, Salesforce’s own application development environment, isn’t working.

NewEnterprise: So John, what did you first think about the Heroku deal?

John Dillon: I certainly didn’t expect to compete with Salesforce. First of all, we know the Heroku guys really well. We even talked at one point about combining the companies. They’re into Ruby on Rails, which is the best environment for building applications in the cloud. We’re kind of going after the same market. They were going after smaller players and we were doing more industrial-size customers. Both companies had been approached to be acquired at different times, and in either case the deals didn’t get done. We had pretty good confidence in our future. So then Marc Benioff goes out and spends more than $200 million for a company doing maybe $2 to $3 million in revenue. It’s kind of an unbelievable multiple. Of course its a massive endorsement of Ruby on Rails, but it’s also an admission that Force.com isn’t working. You don’t spend that much to buy some additional technology if your core product is working well. I think they’re struggling, and I think they’ve created a bit of a Frankenstein.

You really seem to think Salesforce overpaid for Heroku.

Absolutely. It was somewhere between 80 and 100 times revenue. When VMware bought SpringSource it paid maybe 20 times revenue and that was considered a phenomenal deal.

If that’s true, why do you think Marc Benioff would pay that much?

Because he was desperate to find a way to shore up Force.com. He’s been touting it for three to four years and it hasn’t lived up to expectations.

So what does Engine Yard bring to the table?

We deliver a lot of the components you need to build and deploy and run applications in the cloud. There some 20 to 30 components, the load-balancers and Web servers and app servers, and databases, and Ruby on Rails. What we’ve done is we’ve integrated all that, and we’ve automated the ability to provision it and we’ve hardened it. That means the development team doesn’t have to worry about any of that. And that’s where you make a lot of mistakes that can cause your Web site to go down. But because we’ve used mostly open source, there’s not some big cost that you have to bear, when you’re using someone like Oracle that sells you all this stuff, and then you have to pay 20 percent a year in maintenance. Our customers pay us for success. Building the application is inexpensive. You can build it and if it doesn’t work you can throw it away. But when you build it and deploy it and lots of people use it that you start paying because it’s based on resource consumption.

Who are your customers?

They’re all over the map. And then we have your traditional enterprise companies. From a Web standpoint, we have Get Satisfaction. We have gaming companies like Playmesh that make social games for the iPhone. Most of our enterprise customers don’t let us name them. But we have a few Fortune 500 accounts. About 20 to 30 percent of the time we have customers who sign up using a credit card and we call them up and find they’re inside some household-name corporation.

What kind of an exit are you contemplating? IPO or get acquired?

I’m building the company to go the distance. We have the market opportunity and the executive management talent, and we have the business traction. So it seems very doable. The IPO market hasn’t been very friendly. If it opens up I think we’re a strong candidate to IPO in a couple years. It’s not very much fun to be a public company. We have a very real shot at it. But I also think this is going to be a really wild period in M&A activity. I think a lot of companies that don’t understand the cloud are going to buy their way in because they’re otherwise going to get left behind. Our investors are in it for the long haul and I have plenty of money and access to plenty of money. But if Salesforce is going to pay more than $200 million for Heroku then I like what our value looks like.

The App Store is now roughly two-and-a-half years old and offers software for a number of categories in 90 countries, ranging from games, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple took advantage of today’s milestone to highlight several new figures: In addition to revealing that it now has 160 million iOS users in the world, it said there are more than 350,000 applications in the App Store that are accessible to users in 90 countries. Of that application base, there are more than 60,000 apps available for the iPad.

“The App Store has surpassed our wildest dreams,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing in a release. “While others try to copy the App Store, it continues to offer developers and customers the most innovative experience on the planet.”

Apple said the 10 billionth app downloaded was “Paper Glider,” which was purchased by Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, in the U.K. Davis will receive a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

As a point of reference, Apple said in September 2009 that there were 50 million iPod and iPhone users, making the 160 million number announced today fairly significant.

All the security attention paid in recent years to securing the Windows desktop and the applications running on it have paid off a little, Cisco found, making it harder for computer scammers to successfully carry off their intended crimes on that platform. The trouble is they’re now starting to focus more attention on mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and devices running Google’s Android operating system, Cisco said.

Meanwhile, the overall global volume of spam, which often contains troublemaking links that are used to deliver attacks, decreased for the first time ever in 2010. Even so, spam still increased in some developed countries where broadband connections are multiplying. In the United Kingdom, spam volume nearly doubled, while the volume in France went up 115 percent. The U.S. saw a slight decline–11.1 trillion messages down from 11.3 trillion in 2009. Spam in Brazil, China and Turkey also declined. Some of the decline can be attributed to last year’s arrest by FBI agents in Milwaukee of a Russian accused of being the “king of spam,” and to the shutdown of a few botnets used by scammers to send spam.

One thing about Cisco’s report that’s likely to draw some attention is its finding that the raw number of vulnerabilities on Apple products appear to be growing. Apple users are usually pretty sensitive about this topic, and any comparison of the Mac to Windows on the security front tends to make them grind their teeth and pound out annoyed comments on tech blogs. I know because I’ve done the same teeth-grinding and have in the past criticized other reports for similar findings.

Here Cisco is addressing vulnerabilities that Apple has itself documented and patched in software updates. One thing that’s not clear to me–though it sure looks like it–is whether Cisco is combining vulnerabilities found on both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and OS X (the Mac). The data it’s using is from its IntelliShield service, which tracks vulnerabilities and security incidents, and shows that over five years Apple’s vulnerabilities rose, from less than 200 in 2006 to more than 350 in 2010. That rate was higher than Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco itself, the report found, though it goes on to say that Apple has worked harder than most other vendors to protect its users. Security is one of the reasons Apple imposes such strict rules on what’s available in the App store, though people still jailbreak their phones.

Another trend Cisco found is something called “money muling.” Tom Gillis, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security business unit, describes money muling as using unsuspecting people who are attracted by “work at home” spam messages and Web ads to participate in money laundering by moving small amounts of money into bank accounts, just a few thousand dollars at a time. He says the operations around this are becoming increasingly elaborate, and criminals will devote a lot of effort to developing it this year.

I talked with Gillis about the report and other security trends that Cisco found. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

NewEnterprise: So you’re seeing fewer attacks on Windows and more on mobile devices. Is that simply because there are more of them?

Tom Gillis: It’s the simple fact that there’s this new class of mobile device coming into the enterprise that used to be a phone and now it’s a computer, and it can access enterprise information. So what we’re seeing is that the raw number, but not the severity, is down on Windows. Part of this is that Windows 7 was a very good release on Microsoft’s part from a security standpoint. And we’ve got these new devices coming into the enterprise, and so we’re seeing a shift in focus of attacks on these mobile devices. They’re vulnerable to attack and they’re relevant in the enterprise. Two years ago this would have been too small a population to be meaningful.

What kind of attacks are you seeing?

It varies. In some cases there’s a little “phone home” code in a free gaming app. Pretty gentle stuff so far. But as people start using smartphones to access sensitive information we need to start thinking about security considerations on these devices. There’s a larger theme here that the whole nature of attacks is changing dramatically. The fact that spam volumes dropped at all is a big tell. For 10 years this has only gone up. We’re not forecasting a steady decline in spam, but the fact that it slowed down at all is an indicator of the shift in the way that attackers are using email. The attacks are more targeted and personal, for one thing.

Can’t some of this decrease be attributed to some of the arrests that happened last year?

It can. There’s been a handful of arrests. And they went after not only the botnet operators but other parts of the spam value chain. There are firms and entities that build botnets of compromised machines that relay the spam, and then there are other firms and entities that rent time on those botnets that do the merchandising. The biggest category is selling fake pharmaceuticals. Some of these fake pharma operations were shut down and the people associated with them arrested. It’s not an easy thing to do, because they’re global, they move around, and so to make an arrest in this space is a huge accomplishment.

So what is the thinking now about securing the mobile device?

We think there are two ways to make mobile devices work in the enterprise. The flood of devices into the enterprise is huge, and everyone wants to use them to check their email and access corporate directories and other fundamental things. There needs to be some kind of software on the end point–the phone or device. It will have to be light. You can’t have some kind of antivirus suite running on the phone. It would be a little piece of software that’s on all the time that knows when you’re behind the corporate firewall and when you’re not, and manages your connection accordingly. We bought a company called ScanSafe that has 40 data centers around the world. When you’re outside the firewall it connects to you the nearest data center and enforces your corporate policies, but all you as the user know is that it just works. This notion of being on or off the corporate network goes away. And we can do all kinds of scanning for security, independent of the device that’s being used.

This year we also saw the Stuxnet attacks, which we now know for certain were carried out against the Iranian nuclear program. Clearly this is a new kind of attack that can be mounted against industrial control systems via computer networks. Is Cisco researching this?

Massively. Often these types of attacks are targeted against Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers. Who buys Cisco’s infrastructure? The biggest banks in the world, the defense contractors. If the goal of an attacker is to disrupt an economy, their targets will be our customers, and they’re demanding a response from us. I like to call it global threat correlation, but it comes down to taking huge samples of network traffic and picking out good traffic from the bad. Cisco has a good advantage here because our equipment is so widely deployed around the world. As we start measuring traffic we can develop reputation data on every publicly routable IP address on the Internet. As we start putting telemetry info into that equipment–and the customer can choose to enable it or not, and it’s turned off by default. But people turn it on because it helps them against the unknown kind of attacks that are popping up. If a Web server says its a Web server, but you just saw it sending spam three minutes ago, there’s a pretty good chance it’s part of a botnet. Once you know that you know that, you can start to mount a pretty good defense. We’re putting a lot of energy into developing that, and it’s proven to be pretty robust.

It’s the show I told you about last month, and I believe it’s the first one the Web video site–owned by GE’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox–has commissioned for itself. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Just like Hulu said it would be, it’s a Web show about stuff that aired on TV. Nothing wrong with that–showing people clips of last night’s TV on the Web is a useful thing. I like to do it, a lot.

But this one–or, at least, this episode–is a snoozer. I wouldn’t have made it through all five minutes if my job didn’t require it.

Hulu says this is a preview of the show, and that the joint video venture would like to “develop and evolve the show with your input.”

So okay, Hulu. Here’s my input: You say your inspiration for this show was the Keith Olbermann/Dan Patrick-era “SportsCenter” on ESPN, from way back in the early ’90s.

But go back and watch those shows. See how the anchors are both praising sports and, with a wink, making fun of it? The way they’re telling you that yes, we know you’d watch this stuff all day if you could–so would we!–and yes, we think it’s silly too?

Your show scans a whole lot more like the modern-day “SportsCenter,” which also has clips, and jokes, but without any real self-awareness or bite. So I’d like some more of that, please.

Or put it another way: You know how your first set of TV ads were sharp and funny? Make your show like that!

For whatever reason, I can’t find classic “SportsCenter” clips on Google’s YouTube or anywhere else on the Web. But here’s something very similar: Olbermann doing sports for L.A.’s KCBS in 1989, courtesy Twitter’s Matt Graves:

Our next highlights video from our D@CES event last week is of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

The event, which we did in cooperation with the Consumer Electronics Show, was only three sessions in one afternoon. It was followed by a lovely party, all at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

Huang talked about how mobile is about to see super-duper-duper smartphones and also touched on the chipmaker’s legal battle with Intel, which was settled earlier this week.

Here’s a longish highlights video of Huang’s interview with Mobilized’s Ina Fried:

I’ll be posting the full videos of this interview, as well as with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Dean Hachamovitch, who is in charge of Microsoft’s Interet Explorer browser from D@CES next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/dces-highlights-video-nvidias-jen-hsun-huang/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110112/dces-highlights-video-microsoft-ies-dean-hachamovitch/ http://allthingsd.com/20110112/dces-highlights-video-microsoft-ies-dean-hachamovitch/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:01:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39437

Our next highlights video from our D@CES event last week is of Microsoft Internet Explorer chief Dean Hachamovitch.

The event, which we did in cooperation with the Consumer Electronics Show, was only three sessions in one afternoon. It was followed by a lovely party, all at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

Here’s a longish highlights video of Walt Mossberg’s interview with Hachamovitch, during which they focused a lot on privacy issues on the browser and the Web (check out his shirt):

I’ll be posting the third highlights video D@CES of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Friday and all full videos from the event next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110112/dces-highlights-video-microsoft-ies-dean-hachamovitch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:01:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39346

Yes, like a digital Heidi Klum, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo did declare that BoomTown’s outfit was “matador casual” at the start of an interview I did with him at D@CES last Friday.

The event, which we did in cooperation with the Consumer Electronics Show, was only three sessions in one afternoon. It was followed by a lovely party, all at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

Here’s a longish highlights video of my interview with Costolo, during which we talked about a wide range of issues facing the San Francisco microblogging service, as well as his take on my fashion choice.

But let it be said, while I did not comment on his sartorial selection at the time, as you will see below, Costolo really did pull off a very smart approximation of an Ellen DeGeneres look himself.

Here’s the highlights video of Costolo–the full video will be up in a week.

The other highlights videos at D@CES will also be posted this week, with the full videos next week: Microsoft Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch on Wednesday, and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Friday.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110105/amazon-brings-the-kindle-app-to-windows-phone-7/ http://allthingsd.com/20110105/amazon-brings-the-kindle-app-to-windows-phone-7/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:06:50 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1218 Amazon’s Kindle app now works on at least 11 different platforms with the addition of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 today. The apps allow you to start an e-book on one platform and then continue reading it where you left off on another. Features include the ability to synch bookmarks, notes and highlights. Yesterday, Amazon also confirmed that in addition to supporting the iPad, it will tailor the apps for upcoming Android and Windows-based tablet computers. At this point, it’s clear Amazon sees value in supporting all platforms. Rather than be discriminating, it’s trying to sell as many books as it can on as many platforms as a customer may want to read them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110105/amazon-brings-the-kindle-app-to-windows-phone-7/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100412/palm-those-were-the-videos-my-friend-i-thought-roger-mcnamee-would-never-end-up-selling/ http://allthingsd.com/20100412/palm-those-were-the-videos-my-friend-i-thought-roger-mcnamee-would-never-end-up-selling/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:27:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26577

With rumors flying hither and yon about the sale of Palm–likely to an Asian company, such as HTC or Lenovo–BoomTown is getting all misty for those days of hope that the little innovative smartphone pioneer might actually prevail against the giants.

Not for the creepy lady in the advertising for the Pre, mind you, but everything else.

Thus, here are three videos in which the dream was still alive at Palm (PALM).

The first, below, is an interview BoomTown did with Elevation Partners’ Roger McNamee, who sank $425 million into Palm and talks about the sky-high prospects for the company at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, where Palm was the belle of the geeks.

The second is from the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, where McNamee and Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein appeared in June 2009 to talk up the launch of the device.

In it, McNamee pooh-poohed the idea that Apple (AAPL) would care about the Palm Pre mimicking an iPhone in iTunes (which Apple did care about a lot) and had a delightful cat fight with me about the mirror on the phone for the “ladies.” It begins with a mock video Rubinstein and McNamee made for D7 in which they make fun of McNamee’s proclivity for telling tall tales about the Pre.

The third is a highlights reel from an interview I did with Rubinstein at this year’s CES, as well as a short clip from that interview of him telling me he had never touched an iPhone.

No, unfortunately, he never did.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100412/palm-those-were-the-videos-my-friend-i-thought-roger-mcnamee-would-never-end-up-selling/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:00:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22943

In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz gave herself a “B-minus in her first year.”

The anniversary of her arrival at Yahoo is, in fact, today. (Her first words as CEO at a press conference a year ago? “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’.”)

In the Bloomberg interview, Bartz was less effusive, saying should have moved faster to reorganize and to strike the online advertising and search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), even as she noted that the management challenge at Yahoo (YHOO) “was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated.”

Predicted Bartz about the Silicon Valley icon: “You’re just going to see Yahoo bloom more.”

That’s nice, especially since BoomTown loves getting pretty-smelling flowers!

But, ever the stickler, it is incumbent on this Yahoo-obsessed column to weigh in on grading too, starting tomorrow and drilling down a lot more specifically on Bartz’s overall performance in 2009.

Thus, I will be looking at five overall areas by which to render the CEO’s marks: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and, yes, moxie–or, if you want to be dull, inspirational leadership.

Until then, please enjoy the highlights video below from my most excellent interview with Bartz at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference last May, in which she both touched my knee and cursed me out.

Let me say, Bartz gets an automatic A-plus for that!

And here is the video of the full session, if you’re interested, clocking in at about 49 minutes:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091015/goog-earns/ http://allthingsd.com/20091015/goog-earns/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:00:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=26695 The broader advertising recovery may take time, but search advertising is clearly beating a hasty path back toward normalcy. Or it is in Google’s case anyway.

Reporting third-quarter results after market close Thursday, Google (GOOG) topped estimates, posting net income that rose to $1.64 billion, or $5.13 a share, from $1.29 billion, or $4.06 a share in the same period last year. Net revenue for the period ended in September rose nearly one percent to $4.38 billion. Excluding items, earnings for the quarter were $5.89 a share. Consensus estimates had been calling for $5.42 a share and $4.24 billion in net revenue. The chart below shows revenue sources within Google (click to enlarge).

Impressive. Seems paid clicks grew 14 percent compared to the same period last year, and four percent compared to the prior period. Cost per click was down six percent year over year, but up five percent sequentially.

“Google had a strong quarter–we saw seven percent year-over-year revenue growth despite the tough economic conditions,” said CEO Eric Schmidt. “While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.”

Good to hear. Google’s shares, which have already risen more than 50 percent in the past six months, are on another upward tear. They rose 1.82 percent to $539.27 on the news in after-hours trading.

Earnings call highlights via The Wall Street Journal’s Andrew LaVallee:

4:32: Call starts. The cast is the same as last quarter: Mr. Schmidt, CEO; Patrick Pichette, CFO; Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of product management; and for the first time, Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development. But there’s a twist–they’ll be using Google’s moderator to vet questions with voters. They vote on “the most relevant questions,” which go to the Google execs, the operator says.

4:35: “While there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty about the pace of the economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us,” Schmidt says.

He adds that Google now has the confidence to invest “heavily” in its future. “It’s all good news from our perspective, at least in looking at the quarter.”

4:37: Says “we want to really get to the perfect search engine” and that many advertisers would like to spend more with Google if the company’s product allow them to do that.

4:38: Schmidt says “we’re open for business in making strategic acquisitions, both large and small.”

4:39: It’s Pichette’s turn. “At a high level, we’re very pleased with our Q3 results,” he says. The quarter benefited from growth in AdSense for content and display initiatives.

4:41: U.S. revenue up 4% to $2.8 billion. U.K. revenue decline affected by foreign exchange as well as ongoing macroeconomic weakness, Pichette says.

4:42: Operating expenses rose from the prior quarter, mostly due to payroll, equipment and facilities-related expenses.

“We believe the worst of the recession is behind us,” he says.

4:44: Brazil was a standout in Latin America, Arora says. We’re beginning to see signs of recovery in Europe and Africa, particularly Spain. In Asia, China performed strongly as an emerging market.

4:46: Looking at the display-advertising business, those have also shown strong results, he says.

On YouTube, new advertisers and partners are helping with monetization efforts. Ninety percent of the top 50 advertisers have run YouTube campaigns with successful results–recent examples include McDonald’s and Hewlett-Packard.

4:47: YouTube has signed deals with all four major record labels and several independent labels. Earlier today, Google announced a partnership with Channel 4 in the U.K., which will bring full-length programming to the video-sharing site.

4:48: Arora adds a personal shout-out to the sales team.

4:50: Rosenberg calls the new AdWords front-end one of the company’s biggest investments of the year. Advertisers have new reports, can run more efficient campaigns and can get new features faster thanks to the platform, he says.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091015/goog-earns/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090629/welcome-to-the-fcc-julius-now-get-to-work-on-a-national-broadband-plan-please/ http://allthingsd.com/20090629/welcome-to-the-fcc-julius-now-get-to-work-on-a-national-broadband-plan-please/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:04:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15185

Last week, after much delay, longtime Internet exec Julius Genachowski (pictured here) was confirmed by the Senate as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

It is an important role for the future development of the Web, of course, although it took a dog’s age into the new Democratic administration to approve him.

Hopefully, he and the other commissioners can soon get to work on a wide range of major digital issues, such as a national broadband plan that does not cost Americans a fortune.

Genachowski, a close tech adviser to President Barack Obama, was seated along with Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican appointee who was confirmed for a second FCC term.

After the Senate approves two others–Democrat Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker for the GOP–in the next month, it will round out the five-member panel.

(The other FCC commissioner is a Dem, Michael Copps, who has been acting chairman while Genachowski got approval.)

Genachowski, a former FCC staffer, was most recently working as a VC at Rock Creek Ventures and LaunchBox Digital. But he is best known to many in Silicon Valley as a top exec at IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI).

He is likely to make his debut to chair his first meeting this coming Thursday, and it is a humdinger of dull:

According to the FCC’s Web site, the July open meeting, held in Washington, D.C., will consider three items:

1.) Amendment of the Commission’s Rules to Provide Spectrum for the Operation of Medical Body Area Networks: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to allocate spectrum and establish service and technical rules for the operation of Medical Body Area Networks to monitor patients’ physiological data.

2.) Amendment of Service and Eligibility Rules for FM Broadcast Stations: The Commission will consider a Report and Order concerning changes in the FM translator rules to allow AM broadcast stations to rebroadcast their signals on eligible FM translator stations.

3.) Amendment of Part 101 of the Commission’s Rules to Accommodate 30 Megahertz Channels in the 6525-6875 MHz Band: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing whether to provide licensees with authority to operate on channels with bandwidths up to 30 megahertz in the Upper 6 GHz band and whether to extend conditional authority to two additional channel pairs in the 23 GHz band, as well as an Order addressing a related waiver reques.

But the site also mentioned that “the Meeting also will include a presentation on the status of the Commission’s process for developing a National Broadband Plan.”

Now, that is something BoomTown would like to know about since this country is effectively still in the dirt-road period, in terms of high-speed broadband access for Americans.

But, of course, the cost of what we do get–which is very substandard compared to a lot of other countries–is also very pricey.

Let’s hope Genachowski–who has a lot of other issues on his plate, especially as the media industry undergoes drastic reconfiguration too–can do something about it.

In a related note, Lawrence Strickling was also OK’d to run the telecom division of the Commerce Department, which is the agency with the dough ($4.7 billion in government funds) to help the create this supposed Internet infrastructure boom with the FCC.

I remain dubious of any movement in the arena, but still hopeful.

And, until there is some action from Genachowski, here is a highlights video from an onstage interview Walt Mossberg and I did with former FCC chairman Kevin Martin–along with Verizon (VZ) Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam–at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference in 2008.

Here is the D6 video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090629/welcome-to-the-fcc-julius-now-get-to-work-on-a-national-broadband-plan-please/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090526/d7-video-twitters-biz-stone-and-evan-williams/ http://allthingsd.com/20090526/d7-video-twitters-biz-stone-and-evan-williams/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 04:18:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=586 Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams kicked off the seventh edition of D: All Things Digital by sitting down with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. The duo talked about the rocket growth of their buzzy micro-messaging service; their eventual–and still vague–plans to make money; and their lack of interest in selling the start-up. Here’s a video-highlights reel:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090526/d7-video-twitters-biz-stone-and-evan-williams/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090324/facebook-responds-to-redesign-feedback-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20090324/facebook-responds-to-redesign-feedback-sort-of/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:36:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=11261

Facebook cried uncle this afternoon–but just a teeny, tiny, little bit–by announcing in a company blog that it had made tweaks to its recent redesign in response to massive user unhappiness over the changes.

We’re talking very tweaky, though, and not back-to-the-future stuff. As in: The new look is here to stay.

That’s true in the Highlights section, for example, which Facebook said will again look more like the old News Feed.

And the social-networking site also said it would give users more control via better filtering tools of the stream of information that Facebook has focused on making more prominent–and which some say makes the service looks too much like a morbidly obese version of the hot microblogging site, Twitter.

It also said it was “working on a few design changes to help” users find what they want, another complaint about the new look.

But, as Product Director Chris Cox noted in a section of a called “Old Vs. New”:

“Since Facebook started in 2004, we’ve been through several redesigns. Each was built with the intention of making it easier to share and understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see.”

Translation: We’re not going back to Kansas, Dorothy, so get used to the new Yellow Brick Road motif.

Here is the whole blog from Cox, after the jump:

Responding to Your Feedback

by Christopher Cox Today at 5:01pm

Since we launched Facebook’s home page design, we’ve received thousands of e-mails, Wall posts and comments from you along with direct feedback from all of our friends and family. If you’ve already given us feedback, thank you. Hearing what you have to say, whether criticism or praise, helps us build a product that serves you better.

Whenever we build something new or tweak something old, our motivation is the same: to help you share with the people you care about and find out what’s happening with them. Before we launch any new product, it first must pass a process of design, development and testing with a more limited user audience. If those results are satisfactory, we then release it for all of you to use. We know that no amount of testing is as valuable as what you have to say. For this reason, we will always look to you, our users, to tell us what is working and what isn’t so we can continually make improvements.

Here are the top four things we’ve been hearing from all of you about the changes, and the areas where we’re focusing on improvements immediately and over the next several weeks.

Add more control and relevance in the stream

One of the great parts of Facebook is the ability to share and consume different types of content, such as photos, videos and notes, all in one place. We’ve heard from you that you want even more variety and control in your stream, and for it to update automatically. Some specific improvements we’re making are:

Live updating: One of the most common requests is the ability to see your stream update automatically. We will be adding the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.

Photo tags: In order to surface more photos you might like to see, we’ll be adding photos tagged of your friends to the stream. This will happen in the coming weeks.

More choices for applications: We’ve heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.

Currently, the content filters on the left screen allow you to select the types of content you would like to see. Over time, we’ll continue to give you more control over what’s in your main stream and how you consume it. We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what’s been going on. We’re also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone.

See more Highlights

Right now, we’re making improvements to the Highlights section on the right-hand side of your home page. Highlights will update more frequently and will show you more content throughout the day to mirror more closely the content that the earlier News Feed provided.

Find things more easily

It’s important that you are able to find everything you’re interested in, or we’re not succeeding in giving you the right level of control. We’re currently working on a few design changes to help you find these things more easily, such as:

Moving requests to the top of the right column: Friend requests and event invites will be more prominent.
Easier way to create a Friends List filter: From the filters on the left, you will be able to create a new list of friends with which to filter the stream.

Application bookmarks continue to live in the toolbar at the bottom left of the page. You can quickly access your groups, events and other favorite applications from the bottom bar on any page.

Old vs. New

Since Facebook started in 2004, we’ve been through several redesigns. Each was built with the intention of making it easier to share and understand what’s going on with the people you care about. Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see. We keep in mind that there are 175 million people on Facebook, and everyone uses the site differently. We listen to feedback from our users, data on how the site is used, and our intuitions as builders and designers to create the product that provides the best experience across the board.

With the recent home page changes, we’re trying to present the right balance between what’s happening right now and what’s interesting over a longer period of time. We realize that both are important and getting them both right is crucial for the product to work. In the last few weeks, you’ve seen us shift the main emphasis towards real-time conversations and updates as the entry point to Facebook. We’re working hard to make this stream more valuable, and also to build out the richness and relevance of the Highlights section.

Your feedback means a lot, and we sort through everything we receive. The best way to give us direct feedback—to ensure that we can consolidate it—is through the feedback link on the home page tour. In the meantime, thanks for your support.

Chris Cox is Facebook’s Director of Product.

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