Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

This week, CBS news program “60 Minutes” had an interview with Microsoft co-founder and now major philanthropist Bill Gates, called “Bill Gates 2.0.”

It also included some discussion of his longtime relationship with the late Apple legend Steve Jobs.

Here’s the interview in full, in which he talks mostly about eradicating diseases like polio by improving vaccine delivery and his other efforts to alleviate suffering worldwide.

And here’s a special report by “60 Minutes,” in which CBS’s Charlie Rose talks about the Gates-Jobs part, which includes parts of the joint interview the pair did at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007:

Earlier this week, I appeared on Bloomberg West with the ever-delightful Emily Chang to talk about my recent article in Vanity Fair magazine about the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook, titled “The Money Shot.”

You can read the full piece here or here, but this turned out to be a long — 10 minutes — interview that has a lot more detail (if you are interested, of course).

Among other things, Chang asked me more about the fractured relationship between the mobile photo-sharing app’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom and one of his key mentors, Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, in the wake of the billion-dollar sale to Facebook (and not Twitter), which I called a “bromance gone awry.”

Indeed, Dorsey’s quote on the end of their relationship over Instagram’s choice was pretty sad:

“I found out about the deal when I got to work and one of my employees told me about it, after reading it online I got a notice later that day since I was an investor,” said Dorsey. “So I was heartbroken, since I did not hear from Kevin at all. We exchanged e-mails once or twice, and I have seen him at parties. But we have not really talked at all since then, and that’s sad.”

As I also wrote, “Dorsey’s last Instagram shot perhaps said the proverbial thousand words about it all: A picture of an empty Muni bus” (which is seen above).

You can’t always get what you want, but here’s the Bloomberg West interview, anyway:

Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

Joyus, the video shopping platform startup led by former top Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, said it had raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding, led by InterWest Partners and Time Warner Investments. Existing investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal also participated.

In related news, Joyus said that Ido Leffler, co-founder of natural beauty brand Yes To, would join its board.

The San Francisco-based Joyus has now raised total capital of $19 million to push its efforts to combine video with retailing online. Along with the funding news, the company underscored the efficacy of its approach in a study it also released that it says shows “fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands can directly monetize video through direct response product sales.”

Using premium video content to flack its wares, Joyus said that it converts at 5.15 times the rate of visitors who only browse product listings on the site and that its viewers buy 4.9 times more than those who don’t watch the product videos.

“Every time someone watches a video, Joyus can measure the resulting sales revenue, creating the first ever metrics for return on investment (ROI) using online video to drive product sales,” said Joyus, which noted that on a half-dozen product areas that the average revenue per video (RPV) view ranges from 47 cents to 93 cents, meaning every thousand views of video on Joyus produces between $470 and $930 in direct sales revenue. Joyus shares a cut of the sales on its site with its merchants and provides the purchasing tools.

While others might dispute this performance and many online retailers have added video to their sales processes, Joyus CEO and founder Cassidy said in an interview that online retail has to shift from a focus on engagement statistics and monetization via brand advertising to direct product sales results.

“The data on video shopping needs to be aimed at a return on the investment rather than on just brand recognition,” she said. “We think by providing an informative and entertaining experience, where you can make purchases right away, consumers buy and that this is the direction online commerce is moving.”

As I noted in a previous post about Joyus when it launched in mid-2011: “If you think about a link-laden infomercial, you’ll get a general idea of what is being created by Joyus.”

While Cassidy did note that a comparison could be made to television shopping networks like HSN, which shows elaborate demos of its products, Joyus has its own tech stack and video platform that allows shoppers to watch in a non-linear way that is preferable online and also on mobile.

“We are aimed at those customers who are bred and born on digital, so the merchandising formula is different,” said Cassidy. “This is a shopper from 30 to 50 who wants entertainment and commerce together in a format that is convenient.”

Although we are only about a month out from our 11th D: All Things Digital conference, we still have a few big speakers to announce, not the least of which is Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Cook, who made his debut at D10 last year in his first major interview as the new leader of the iconic and powerful tech giant, will be kicking off the proceedings with an interview with us on the opening night of the conference.

There’s lots to talk about, from the explosive growth of the mobile market to intense competition from a range of rivals, most especially Google’s Android, as well as innovative offerings from Korea’s Samsung. It will also be interesting to talk about the changes at Apple under the leadership of Cook, who took over from the late co-founder and industry legend Steve Jobs, as well inquiring about what new products are in the pipeline and how the company is faring in an increasingly high-pressure market.

Cook joins a long list of stellar speakers slated to appear onstage at D11 from May 28 to 30, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Motorola Mobility’s Dennis Woodside, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Jeff Immelt of GE, new Android chief Sundar Pichai, Sony’s Kaz Hirai, ABC’s Anne Sweeney and more.

But we are not quite done yet, so stay tuned for announcements of out final speakers. And, while we never reveal them before the event, our D11 demos are among our best ever. (Special note: D11 has been sold out for months, but we provide coverage and videos from it throughout the conference.)

Until we get them all in person, here’s the full Cook interview from D10 to peruse:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130430/apples-tim-cook-returns-to-d-stage-to-open-11th-annual-conference/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130424/kara-and-walt-talk-mobile-gates-jobs-interview-and-how-they-met-blame-aol-on-charlie-rose-show-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130424/kara-and-walt-talk-mobile-gates-jobs-interview-and-how-they-met-blame-aol-on-charlie-rose-show-video/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:24:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=315168

Last week, while in New York for our D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Walt Mossberg and I went on the “Charlie Rose” show to talk about the fast-growing mobile arena and where it is headed next.

But Rose also asked about our memorable joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs in 2007 at D5 and we told him what happened between the two icons in the greenroom before their onstage appearance. He also asked Walt and me how we met, which I did not realize was being recorded — after all, who would care but us! — although it turned out to be a pretty good story (and a great partnership, too).

Here is a link to the video on the “Charlie Rose” site and it is also embedded below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130424/kara-and-walt-talk-mobile-gates-jobs-interview-and-how-they-met-blame-aol-on-charlie-rose-show-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130419/interview-bill-gates-talks-about-tech-innovations-for-vaccines-ahead-of-global-confab/ http://allthingsd.com/20130419/interview-bill-gates-talks-about-tech-innovations-for-vaccines-ahead-of-global-confab/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:26:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=313914

Earlier today, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discussed technological innovations for vaccines, ahead of a Global Vaccine Summit being held next week in Abu Dhabi.

Set during World Immunization Week, 300 people — including Gates, who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and who will be delivering a keynote address — will gather on April 24 and 25 to talk about what the world community needs to do move forward the effort to vaccinate children, including a plan to eradicate polio by 2018.

It’s an important effort since, according to the Gates Foundation, every 20 seconds one child dies from a disease that could have been prevented by an existing vaccine.

“The key thing to understand is that vaccines are miraculous,” said Gates in a roundtable telephone interview with several reporters, noting that they are low-cost in relation to the huge benefit they provide.

Two key next steps, he said, have to do with a variety of technologies that are being explored to help in the delivery of vaccines, and also finding ways to make them cheaper.

“There is an under-investment in general, particularly in doing things for the poorest,” he said, requiring his private organization and others to pay for the research or to work with big pharmaceutical companies to create technologies that can also be deployed in more lucrative ways in rich countries. “Usually, there is a missing market incentive.”

Still, there is innovation in the sector, even if it is slow.

Gates referenced a “super-thermos” approach that is being field-tested in Senegal that keeps vaccines cold without needing more energy. Another effort is under way to formulate vaccines so that they do not need to be kept cold in the first place. A third is to combine several vaccines together to get the prices down.

Also important are improvements in satellite mapping technology, which allows field workers who deliver the vaccines to better assess where the need is. That’s especially important since a lot of the work is still on the ground, such as the push to eradicate polio in much the same way as smallpox has been. Currently, noted Gates, it is still an issue in just three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

And since reaching near total coverage is critical — “The difference between 85 percent and 90 percent [coverage] can be the difference between success and failure,” said Gates — making sure health workers find the people they are trying to vaccinate is paramount.

“It’s kind of a high-tech thing compared to how it was being done,” said Gates.

But, although there have been great hopes around the use of mobile devices in the field to access and record accurate data on patient visits, immunizations and other health information, it’s still an uphill battle against easier paper solutions.

“The paper-based systems are preferable,” said Gates, because of lack of reliable connectivity and ease of use. “It’s a high threshold to get rid of that and use cellphones.”

Or, as Gates noted in a blog post from a recent visit to Ghana, where cellphone data-keeping is being tested: “Many of us are looking at potential digital strategies for record-keeping, but paper is pretty good.”

(Photo courtesy of the Gates Foundation)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130419/interview-bill-gates-talks-about-tech-innovations-for-vaccines-ahead-of-global-confab/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:32:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=310730

Last week, I motored on down to Evernote’s spanking (and quite delightful) new offices in Redwood City, Calif., to talk to Phil Libin, its CEO and co-founder, about what has been happening of late at the popular note-taking software startup.

Things have recently been made more interesting with the entry of search giant Google into the sector, with a renewed competing mobile app effort called Keep (which is really a version of its older Notebook offering) for the Android mobile operating system.

Libin seemed sanguine about the move, noting that Evernote’s Android app has a much better user base than Keep. Instead, he said that the company — which has attracted about $250 million in total funding that has valued it at close to $2 billion — is more focused on bringing out new versions of Evernote, which allow a user to save text, Web links, photos and more, as well as on continuing to widen its productivity-app portfolio.

Also a priority is a recently launched premium, business-oriented version of Evernote, as well as even more international expansion, which makes up an increasingly large part of its user base of 45 million (a small number of whom currently pay to upgrade).

Libin talked about all this and more, including continuing to tout his “100-year” strategy for the company (it’s good to plan ahead!) in this video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:01:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=310343

Earlier this week, I went for a visit to the San Francisco HQ of Circa, the startup that always seems to get lumped into the mobile news reader aggregation category with others such as Pulse, Zite and Flipboard. While it shares some obvious similarities — there is no original news gathering going on here with all of them — the approach that it has taken is different and a bit more nifty.

Built currently for the Apple iPhone, the mobile-designed app is aimed at rejiggering how readers consume breaking news. To do this, a team of writers crunches and munches small bits of information about a range of current news events from a variety of sources and forms them into separable flashcard lists to make up a story.

Circa is using the odd phrase — “atomic units” — to describe the end product, which users can swipe through quickly to get the key elements of a story, along with adds of art, photos, maps or graphs. While some disparagingly call it a Cliff Notes for breaking news, it is much more like a television report or a just-the-facts feed from wires services. If you want to get even more digital, it reminds me of a smart and collated version of Twitter.

While it could use more sourcing — I like to know from whence my atomic units are born — it’s a still a good way to consume news on the fly on a smartphone. Users can also follow favorites stories, which are updated and which increases engagement.

I talked about it all with CEO Matt Galligan, one of Circa’s several founders, as well where the next version of the product is going (expect an Google Android and perhaps an tablet version, for example)

How Circa is going to make money is a good question — it has only a few million in seed funding — since it does require people to create the stories, rather than some algorithm. But the market is hot in the acquisition arena for this category. Both Pulse and Zite have been bought (LinkedIn and CNN), as well as the decidedly less substantive Summly (Yahoo picked it up for the excessive price of $30 million), so one could see Circa also getting snapped up at some point.

Until then or whatever news breaks on it, here’s my video interview with Galligan:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130402/eventbrite-hires-cfo-in-expansion-of-top-exec-ranks/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/eventbrite-hires-cfo-in-expansion-of-top-exec-ranks/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:00:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=308320

In its first C-level hire from outside the company, Eventbrite has brought in experienced finance exec Mark Rubash as CFO. The San Francisco-based self-service ticketing platform has hired the former Shutterfly CFO — who also held top finance jobs at eBay and Yahoo — to focus on scaling and expanding its business model and global growth.

And while CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz declined to say in an interview whether the move was Eventbrite’s first major step toward a possible IPO, he did underscore the need to gird the company’s management for future expansion.

Recently, the company said it had sold $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales since it was founded five years ago, with total tickets sold topping 100 million. Eventbrite said that it had sold $600 million of that in 2012 alone, hawking 36 million tickets in 179 countries for such events as San Francisco’s iconic Bay to Breakers footrace.

That kind of hypergrowth requires some more experienced management, “independent of any public offering process,” said Hartz.

“We had an opportunity to bring in a great operator to help us become a multi-category e-commerce marketplace,” he said. “Mark has deep experience in building marketplaces of buyers and sellers.”

Indeed. At eBay, Rubash had global purview over eBay finance, investor relations, accounting and more, while he ran Yahoo’s global finance for its paid search, display advertising and e-commerce units. He has also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and at companies such as HeartFlow, Rearden Commerce and Critical Path.

“It’s a real alignment of what I am passionate about, with a team I really enjoy,” said Rubash. “With the mass of transactions growing on a global basis at Eventbrite, it’s the kind of challenge that is really hard to resist.”

Eventbrite’s investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital, with about $80 million in funding raised since 2006.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/eventbrite-hires-cfo-in-expansion-of-top-exec-ranks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:01:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=306686

There’s no doubt that the highly-valued Flipboard has been at the forefront of social publishing.

With its popular app for the Apple iPhone and iPads, the Silicon Valley startup now has 50 million readers, who use it to elegantly consume content from Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of sources from all over the Web.

Now, in its new second version, the company is moving from a show-me paradigm to a make-something one, allowing users to “create magazines,” according to Flipboard.

In fact, that’s a bit of a broad definition of create — Flipboard 2.0 is more about allowing regular people or professional publishers to curate any kind of magazine in any niche.

For example, in testing the app, I made a magazine about Pop-Tarts. (Does anyone have a problem with that?)

Using a new “plus” button and a pretty easy interface, it is meant to take self-expression to new levels using video, images, text and even music. To help grow audiences for these quasi-creators, as well as find stuff to use, Flipboard has also launched a new content search feature.

There should be some fun stuff created to keep users flipping on the service, but it’s clear the offering is also a lot about finding more revenue for the startup. Using specialized magazines, for example, publishers can instantly create one-offs of previously published content — from Vanity Fair’s “Royal Weddings” to Martha Stewart Living’s “Home How-Tos” — and presumably sell advertising against it.

Flipboard has also partnered with crafts retailer Etsy to make what is essentially a prettified catalog, complete with an integrated shopping cart, for which there are all kinds of lead fees.

Since it has remained independent so far despite some big acquisition interest, figuring out a solid business plan is important, especially since Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million two years ago.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, Facebook co-founder and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company run by former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

There are a lot of other new features in the latest Flipboard, but you can read Walt Mossberg’s review of it here, as well as watch my video interview below of Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue about it all, as well as its business outlook:

And here are some pretty screenshots to give you an idea of the magazine-mania possible:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130321/calling-all-ravens-the-house-of-atd-takes-on-the-game-of-thrones-author-and-hbo-show-creators-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130321/calling-all-ravens-the-house-of-atd-takes-on-the-game-of-thrones-author-and-hbo-show-creators-video/#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:01:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=305581

Last week, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, premium cable powerhouse HBO debuted the third season of its hit series “Game of Thrones” for a huge audience of Silicon Valley geeks, VCs, entrepreneurs and people who like to wear furs, leather, metalwork and body paint.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

As part of the night’s festivities, which also included an after-screening party with numerous cast members in attendance, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed George R.R. Martin, the fascinating author of the fantasy novel series, as well as the television show’s creators, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.

When we asked Martin, who has a bone-dry wit, about how digital he was in terms of social media, he noted: “I would still prefer to tie messages to the legs of ravens.”

So would we.

Here’s the video of that interview:

(Photo credit: James Joaquin)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130321/calling-all-ravens-the-house-of-atd-takes-on-the-game-of-thrones-author-and-hbo-show-creators-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130318/winter-and-geeks-are-coming-hbo-premieres-new-season-of-game-of-thrones-in-sf-this-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20130318/winter-and-geeks-are-coming-hbo-premieres-new-season-of-game-of-thrones-in-sf-this-week/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:02:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=304473

It’s no secret in Silicon Valley that the HBO series “Game of Thrones” is a big favorite among the geek set — including Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — what with its dungeons-and-dragons tone and fur-and-leather outfits.

Which is why Time Warner’s premium cable network decided to do one of its three red-carpet premieres for the third season of the hit fantasy show with a splashy event on Wednesday in San Francisco that will be teeming with digerati.

“We all thought it would be fun for the creators and the cast to come here and feel the enormous enthusiasm this community and our partners have for ‘Thrones,’” said HBO CEO Richard Plepler.

Eight cast members of “Thrones” will be attending, as will Plepler, HBO COO Eric Kessler, creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and … drumroll … author George R.R. Martin.

The show is an adaptation of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” Martin’s series of popular fantasy novels, the first of which is titled “A Game of Thrones.”

No surprise — there is much swordplay in the epic. And that’s where AllThingsD comes in, since Walt Mossberg and I will be doing an onstage Q&A with Martin, Benioff and Weiss right after the first show of the new season is aired.

It’s on, or, as Martin wrote: “When you play the game of thrones, it’s either you win or you die.” Or enjoy a lovely party after.

We’ll have video of the interviews later, but here are two trailers for the third season, which begins airing March 31:

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