The interactive portion of the SXSW festival — known as “South By” to hip conference goers — kicks off Friday in Austin, Texas.

And speaking of panels, members of AllThingsD will be moderating a few key ones throughout the fest that you won’t want to miss. (We promise not to call you out if we see you hungover and sleeping in the back row. Just come.)

First off, nobody knows more about blogging than the boss, Kara Swisher, who has literally made liveblogging Yahoo’s earnings calls an award-winning venture. So on Saturday, March 9, at 12:30 pm local time, she’ll be interviewing Mr. WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, about the current state of blogging. More details here.

Later that afternoon, AllThingsD’s other boss, Walt Mossberg, will interview former vice president and New York Times bestselling author Al Gore about his new book, “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change” — described as “a frank and clear-eyed assessment of the emerging forces that are reshaping our world.” That panel takes place at 3:30 pm local time.

Early risers, reporters who snoop and sources who snitch should add Peter Kafka’s panel to the calendar: At 9:30 am Saturday, he’ll be joined by panelists Ed Lee of Bloomberg News, Greg Galant of MuckRack and Joe Ciarallo of Salesforce.com (formerly of Buddy Media) to discuss the shifting dynamics between reporter and source in the age of social media. Here are the details on Peter’s panel.

And on Monday, March 11, I’ll be moderating a panel on artificial intelligence — think robots, “smart” calendars and natural-language search apps — with Dror Oren, executive director at SRI International; Raj Singh, founder of Tempo AI; and Nadav Gur, co-founder and CEO of Desti. That panel takes place at 3:30 pm.

And, of course, if you see us elsewhere — at the Mailbox/Dropbox/Highlight cocktail hour Sunday, at the Path/Spotify/A-Grade party that same night, at the Funny or Die + Team Coco’s Comedy Climax Party on Monday, or just hanging around the GroupMe Grill — come say hello.

(Feature art courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.)

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Yahoo surpassed a company goal last week to reach 85 percent participation on its annual employee survey. And, as a reward for that, Yahoos got to vote on what CEO Marissa Mayer would do on Friday.

Their choice? Mayer wore a purple wig, dressed up as the Y! Bang, and posed for employee snapshots with a purple cow.

But, if you’re gonna put something like that on the table, why settle for anything less than this?

And don’t tell Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, but we just reached 100 percent participation on the first-ever All Things Digital employee survey. We’re thinking a holiday mohawk.

Here’s Mayer in costume in a Flickr image:

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Lots of Apple watchers listened to Tim Cook’s NBC interview last night and concluded that the company has big plans for the fabled Apple TV.

After all, Cook said TV was an area of “intense interest.”

But that would be bigger news if Cook hadn’t said the same thing back in May, speaking to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at our D10 conference.

See for yourself, courtesy of Rich Greenfield and Walt Piecyk, the smart guys at BTIG who mashed up the two interviews:

So what does last night’s interview really mean? Well, it means that Tim Cook is very good at staying on message. But we already knew that. What’s more relevant is what Tim Cook is actually doing.

We know Apple has tried out various permutations of an “Apple TV” product with the Television Industrial Complex in the past — sometimes it’s a programming offering, sometimes it’s a cable box alternative.

But so far, there haven’t been any signs that the company has made any real headway on the content/services side. Until we hear otherwise, hard to get too excited about a couple words.

Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

Kara Swisher reported yesterday that several Groupon board members have been considering replacing Mason with a new CEO.

Today, in an appearance at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Mason admitted to the audience that his performance was under review.

“The stock is down 80 percent since the IPO a year ago, so it would be weird if they weren’t discussing if I was the right guy,” he said. “That’s their chief responsibility, and they have discussed it in the past.”

At a regularly scheduled meeting tomorrow, the company’s directors, who do have that fiduciary responsibility to Groupon’s shareholders, will be asking the tough question as to whether Mason should continue running the daily deals company, or if it makes sense to bring on someone more experienced.

If it were up to Mason, he’d stay: “If I ever thought I wasn’t the right guy, I’d be the first one to fire myself.”

While at the helm over the past four years, the co-founder has accomplished some pretty awesome milestones — Groupon became the fastest-growing company ever, and had the largest IPO since Google went public. In that time, the thirtysomething Mason has transformed from the office comedian and prankster with uncombed locks to someone who more gracefully conducts himself on conference calls and wears suits to public appearances. While onstage today, he said that the CEO needs to be someone who can attract a strong team, choose a winning strategy and then execute against that strategy.

“I’m flattered that people think that removing me would flatten these bumps,” he added.

Still, as many companies and boards realize, it takes a different skill set to grow a company than it does to run one at enormous scale, and whether the founder is the right fit to guide an organization through its next phase is not always clear. Does Groupon need an Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, who can be brought in to work closely with the company’s founders, or is Mason a visionary, like Mark Zuckerberg, who can remain successful if surrounded by a few heavy-duty lieutenants?

There is no denying that, over the past year, there have been some major management missteps, which Mason will ultimately have to take responsibility for as the chief executive.

Here are five of them that the board will likely be looking at tomorrow as part of its evaluation as to whether Mason should stay or go:

1. Accounting: Never Groupon’s strong suit; the daily deals company has struggled with its books since before it went public. Prior to its IPO, it was forced to restate revenue and also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was. After it went public, the problems continued. Following its first quarterly report, Groupon had to restate its earnings to take into account higher-than-expected returns last year during the holidays.
2. Management turmoil: Earlier this month, the company finally appointed a COO after the seat sat vacant for more than a year. The company picked Kal Raman, who was promoted from SVP of global sales and operations, a job he was essentially doing anyway. This is the third attempt at having an operations guru, after burning through two others in 2011. Neither Margo Georgiadis, who came from Google, or Rob Solomon, who came from Yahoo, lasted long.
3. Maintaining margins: This one is a big deal. Groupon was deemed the fast-growing company because of its tremendous top-line growth, but the real reason the company was considered so valuable was because of its high margins. Local restaurants and merchants were willing to pay big dollars to get new customers in the door. But as sales have started to plateau, the company has started to augment its original business with the sale of physical goods, which has inherently thinner margins. The business is also entering extremely competitive waters where well-established players like Walmart and Amazon operate.
4. European troubles: Part of the company’s promise when it went public was world domination. Groupon was on track to become a household name across the globe by replicating its popular U.S. business model everywhere. But Europe has underperformed. Mason has admitted that Groupon was too focused on capturing market share in those markets and subsequently let innovation and customer and merchant satisfaction slide. As a result, Groupon’s gross bookings revenue have been severely affected.
5. Continued growth: All of the previous issues are well known, but the big challenge going forward will be for Groupon to keep evolving and finding ways for both merchants and customers to continue coming back. Groupon has identified a two-part approach. One includes the sale of Groupon Goods. The other bet is to build more tools and services to make local merchants happy. So far, those tools have included online scheduling software, mobile payments and point-of-sale hardware. As designed, these services are not expected to generate huge amounts of revenue, but rather to continue merchant interest in buying daily deals.

It is a clearly troubled record, and a tough road for a novice CEO to handle. But perhaps the most damning sign is the stock price. While it has risen recently, after Tiger Global Management bought a big stake — and went up almost 5 percent since news of Mason’s possible ouster was reported here yesterday — shares are still off more than 84 percent since Groupon’s IPO a year ago.

In other words, for Mason, it’s a long way down.

Greetings from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is sitting down for an interview with AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

The last time these three chatted in public, at the D9 conference in May 2011, they had a wide-ranging conversation, and you should expect the same here.

If I had to guess I’d predict we’ll hear quite a bit about Google’s relationship with Apple, for starters, as well as Schmidt’s take on privacy, politics and the state of the technology business in general.

But we’ll find out right now: I’ll be liveblogging the event below, and you should be able to see a livestream of the event at the top of this post, courtesy of our hosts at the 92nd Street Y.

8:03 pm: Good evening! Looks like the livestream is working, with a delay of a few seconds. Excellent news.

8:05 pm: Some introductory remarks from outgoing Columbia J-School dean Nicholas Lemann.

Walt and Kara are both Columbia grads, hence the connection.

8:09 pm: And we’re off and running.

Disclosure from Kara: She is married to a Google executive. You can read all about that here.

Mossberg: Two years ago we talked to you and you brought up this “Gang of Four” idea. The most influential tech companies. Please expand on that, and update that.

Schmidt: Something unusual has happened. All four companies are networks/platforms generating enormous scale effects. We’ve never had that before: Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. All different, all competitors, all making enormous investments.

Swisher: You left out Microsoft:

Schmidt: Deliberate.

Swisher: Still four? What about with Facebook’s troubles?

Schmidt: A billion users is still a really big deal. You can do a lot with that.

Swisher: We talked to AOL’s Tim Armstrong today and he talked about a war between these big platforms.

Schmidt: These companies are all run by smart people. With respect to identity, one of the mistakes we made on the Internet was we never gave you a reliable way to say who you are. Facebook emerged as the best way to do that. But all of the companies will have some form of identity solution.

Mossberg: What Armstrong was getting at more was about these vertical stacks in the cloud: Messaging, content, all this stuff gets tied into one platform or the other. All that stuff is sticky. And Armstrong isn’t running one of those, so what becomes of him?

8:16 pm: Schmidt: Facebook has Facebook Connect, and Google+ is doing something analogous.

(Now a technical discussion of iMap which seems to confuse most people in the room except Schmidt.)

8:17 pm: Mossberg: So you guys all have these different identity systems. Facebook is based on identity …

8:18 pm: Schmidt: The focus shouldn’t be on lock-in for identity, but the huge race for all these other features on the platform. We argue, for instance, that the Chrome browser gives us a huge advantage when it comes to the cloud.

So basically your phone is a front-end for a supercomputer.

(Schmidt now explaining the origins of the word “cloud,” which has to do with whiteboard scribblings.)

8:20 pm: Time to talk about maps. Schmidt: “Apple should have kept our maps.”

Mossberg: But Apple says you didn’t give them all the features they wanted.

Schmidt: “Apple decided a long time ago to do their own maps … [now they've] discovered that maps are really hard.”

Swisher: What argument could you make to Apple to keep your maps?

Schmidt: They’re better maps.

Mossberg: Are you going to make your own iOS map?

Schmidt: Don’t want to pre-announce products, but if we made one, they would have to approve it. … They haven’t approved all of our apps in the past. (Schmidt allows that the two companies are always in communication.)

Mossberg: Why did you keep Microsoft out of the Gang of Four?

Schmidt: They’re a well-run company, but they haven’t been able to bring state-of-the-art products into the fields we’re talking about yet.

8:23 pm: Schmidt: The Android-Apple platform fight is the defining contest. Here’s why: Apple has thousands of developers building for it. Google’s platform, Android, is even larger. Four times more Android phones than Apple phones. 500 million phones already in use. Doing 1.3 million activations a day. We’ll be at 1 billion mobile devices in a year.

Schmidt: We’ve not seen network platform fights at this scale. The beneficiary is you all, the customer, globally. “This is wonderful.”

8:25 pm: Compare this to the PC industry. Phone user population is six billion, one billion smartphone users. Much bigger than the PC industry — maybe a billion, 1.5 billion installed.

Every month, quarter, year, the growth rate of mobile adoption exceeds everyone’s expectations. The phones become so useful that “it’s good enough for normal people” in lieu of a PC, for day-to-day events. Years ago, “people like myself, we missed that.”

8:27 pm: Schmidt: Facebook is attempting to become the world’s communication hub. Off to a good start. Amazon wants to be the world’s store. All of these guys compete, but they also link up in different ways.

8:28 pm: Swisher: But Google is in everyone’s business. There’s Google Play, that’s Amazon. There’s Google+, that’s Facebook.

8:29 pm: Mossberg: All of them overlap but Google overlaps the most.

8:29 pm: Schmidt: We’re trying to solve material problems in the world. Judge us by our solutions. )Schmidt jokes about making a tech news site, but insists Google will “not cross the barrier” of getting into the content business — which would be news to the people in the YouTube world.)

8:30 pm: Now we’re talking about Gangnam style.

8:30 pm: Swisher: One of your former executives, Marissa Mayer, is at Yahoo, which is in the content business. What do you think of that business for her? And do you think you can do a search deal with her?

Schmidt: We’d certainly talk about it if Yahoo wanted to do a search deal. But our last attempt to do that got kiboshed. And I assume they have a “pretty binding” deal with Microsoft.

8:32 pm: Mossberg: The FTC and others are looking at you. Today there’s a story that says they’re now looking at “standards-essential patents,” which if I understand correctly are patents that are so basic that they’re supposed to be licensed to everyone, and the allegation is that Motorola has not been doing that.

8:33 pm: Schmidt. I can’t talk about it because I don’t know the details and “because it actually just gets me too upset.” Patent wars are a disaster for all of us. Everyone can find prior art for everything. So the new trick is to get judges to block devices country by country. It’s bad for innovation, it’s bad for choices.

Schmidt: We are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fight these fights against patent trolls, and we’re winning.

Swisher: You’re buying patents, too.

Schmidt: Yes.

8:35 pm: Mossberg: Why did the jury find for Apple?

Schmidt: I don’t know enough about it. I know that Samsung is very upset. … It’s better if I don’t comment on the jury’s decision.

Schmidt: The victims here are not Google and Apple. It’s the little companies that can’t acquire patents to protect themselves.

Swisher: You said it annoys you?

Schmidt: I was trying to use a non-binding phrase.

8:37 pm: Mossberg: In a few weeks we’ll see something historic. Microsoft will have built its first computer, with Surface. Running a Microsoft OS. That’s a huge change for them, because they were always licensing operating systems to other people. What does this mean?

Schmidt: “It means a lot if the product works.”

Mossberg: Let’s say it does.

Schmidt: “My answer stands.” Microsoft built a structural monopoly around Windows. “Produced enormous value, and a series of antitrust cases, which they lost.” So is that the right model to solve problems? I would argue that we’ve evolved to a new model, like with Android. “We’re going to see an explosion of integrated hardware/software solutions.”

Mossberg: Can some other company make a truly integrated device that’s comparable to what Apple does and Microsoft is trying to do?

Schmidt: Google is doing that with Chromebooks.

Mossberg: Yeah, but they’re made by someone else. Now you own a hardware company, Motorola. So when will we see a “pure” Google phone that they made?

(Schmidt argues that it’s already happening because Motorola is a subsidiary and is working on phones, etc. A non-answer.)

Swisher: We talked to Samsung when you were buying Motorola, and they were not happy.

Schmidt: We’re not going to give Motorola an advantage of over Samsung.

Mossberg: Why would you do that?

Schmidt: Because we want lots of partners.

Mossberg: So are you saying you can’t both license software and make your own products?

Schmidt: No, that’s what we’re doing.

Swisher: You guys have vast ambitions. I think about you like the Borg. What is the end game? In the beginning you wanted to collect all the world’s information.

Schmidt: We want to be in the center of the information revolution. “The world doesn’t need more copycat products; it needs innovative products.”

Apple has the cash, people and scale to do what Google is trying to do. Not sure about Facebook and Amazon.

(Some jokes about Google Glass.)

Swisher: What are you doing with self-driving cars?

Schmidt: Why don’t we celebrate innovation? “Don’t you want a car that drives you?”

Swisher: I’m not sure I want a Google car. … Still, what’s the goal here?

Schmidt: Let’s talk about cars. “It’s really an error that we’re allowed to drive the car.” A computer can obviously do this better “once we get a few bugs ironed out.” There are 30,000 people killed on American highways. It’s a terrible tragedy. If there’s some way we can help, that’s a good thing. Most likely scenario is that the car manufacturers end up using some of the technology, and we’re in talks with them.

Same thing with Google Glass — we don’t know what it will be like for other people to be able to use this technology, but we’ll find out.

8:48 pm: Mossberg: One day Sergey Brin dragged me into the “holodeck” at Google. It was pretty cool.

Swisher: What’s your life like right now?

Schmidt: I spend a lot of time on airplanes. Very interested in the effect of all this technology on society. Publishing a book on this next year. It’s overwhelmingly positive, but we have to look out for stuff, like when autocrats misuse this stuff.

Morale in the U.S. is the lowest it has been in decades. That’s a demographic problem, a global problem, and an automation problem. That’s the underpinning of all of these debates. The only solution I can come up with is innovation.

8:51 pm: Schmidt: Like everyone else, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to fix this is by education. The gap between the elite and everyone else when it comes to technology is getting greater and greater. We need to make that gap shorter.

Mossberg: Are you a proponent of using technology for online education “even at an elite institution like Columbia”?

8:53 pm: Schmidt: I describe all of the online education efforts today as version one. Think about the early iPhone. So much has changed. These are all glimmers of what will be possible.

Q&A from the audience:

Q: Please comment on HP’s struggles and prospects.

Schmidt: Meg Whitman is very capable, and she’s identified that this is a multiyear turnaround. Hard for me to opine on it. “It’s very easy to criticize a company that you’re not in.” When I used to be at Sun, “we had lots of time.” The industry is so competitive now, there’s no time. If you’re off by a week, you miss millions of dollars. It’s very hard to stay on that curve.

Q: If you had to be a CEO again, would you choose Apple, Amazon or Facebook?

Schmidt: I was on Apple’s board, and I’ll always have a soft spot for them. I was very good friends and very close to Steve Jobs, and we miss him dearly. Jeff Bezos has made remarkable moves. And again, Facebook has a billion users.

Mossberg: So which one?

Schmidt: Which one has the most cash? That would be Apple.

Q: When will we have mainstream self-driven cars?

Schmidt: “I’ve been driven in one, and it’s a life-changing experience.” We call it driverless, but it’s better to think of it as car autopilot. There’s a big red disconnect button, and I think that will always be the case. You’re always going to be sitting behind the wheel.

Q: Apple gets huge margins selling phones. What will reduce that?

Schmidt: Competition.

Q: How will you compete in Asia and China specifically?

Schmidt: We want to continue to serve customers everywhere. Building out in Korea. We’re not No. 1 in four or five countries and we’re working on that.

Swisher: What about China?

Schmidt: China has this “hellacious law … true, hardcore censorship.” When we entered China, we agreed to do this, but we’d publish the fact that this information was omitted. But we would cache the content, and China would get mad and just cut off our access. Untenable.

I think that’s roughly where we are. We have a pretty good export ad business in China, but that’s about it. I can’t imagine their new leaders calling me up and saying, “Oh Eric, we apologize.”

Q: Future products and services?

Schmidt: We don’t talk about those.

Mossberg: Okay, what about this. Let’s talk about technology in general. There’s the smartphone, and now there’s the tablet. So what’s the next big thing?

Schmidt: More mobility. Mobile first. Now companies build mobile applications first, Web apps second.

There are “acres and acres” of start-ups building powerful stuff for mobile. The underlying structure here is big data, and when you have all of this stuff connected, you can do interesting stuff. Amazon is starting to do it. We’re getting closer to “true AI.” Imagine your house and driverless car, and all of these basic tasks are taken care of for you by AI. You can see that now by looking at young people today who live on the Web, and get all this information from Twitter, and we’ll be able to get everyone to get all sorts of information that way.

Mossberg: How long will that take?

Schmidt: Don’t know. There’s an 80/20 problem where the 20 percent we haven’t figured out is the most crucial part.

This will apply to biomedicine. Pills that will Wi-Fi out your basic medical condition, could alert your doctor “that you’re about to die, come to the hospital.”

Swisher: Would you buy Twitter?

Schmidt: Can’t talk about M&A. We had Twitter in search results and that fell apart but I’d love to get that to work again. We now have a competitor of sorts in Google+.

Q: How do you deal with environmental costs of the server farms that power the cloud?

Schmidt: We have the world’s most powerful data centers. “When you’re in them, it feels like you’re in a submarine.” We’ve done many many things to make the impact less, and we think ours have half the impact of other data centers. If we get better at this stuff, people will be more efficient, and the servers will be more efficient, and “hopefully this will be a net positive.”

Mossberg: Let’s talk about journalism. Are you worried about the future of journalism?

Schmidt: I have been for a long time. There are a couple of success models, and they all use new models: Politico and Huffington Post. Incumbents will move to subscription models, because they understand that. So what does this mean for journalism?

1) Extra money that used to be generated by the “unholy alliance” of print, classifieds, etc. That’s at risk, has been for a while. “That’s a real loss” at a city level, and an investigative level, etc.

2) And what happens to the brands? The top brands remain quite strong. The mid-tier regional brands have become not as relevant. So one idea is “the new brands will be much more celebrity driven.” So the ultimate structure may be traditional brands, and celebrity driven brands, and I have no idea what they will look like, but people will follow them.

Swisher: Like the Ashton Kutcher Daily?

Schmidt: Or the Jay-Z Post.

Swisher: What about Google buying some of these companies, like the Times?

Schmidt: We decided not to cross those lines. One day I was talking to Larry and Sergey for quite some time about getting into the refrigerator business. And it took me a while to realize they were joking.

9:15 pm: And we’re done. Thanks for following along.

And they’ve generated a lot of interest.

Though Apple declined to provide an official download number, sources in position to know tell AllThingsD that in just under a month downloads of the “Steve Jobs at D: All Things Digital” podcasts have hit the “low millions.”

Which is nice to hear. Because these interviews offer a fascinating, unscripted and unadorned portrait of someone who was a rare and transformative force in technology. And they really should be seen by more people.

The Jobs at D interviews — all six, including a wonderful joint appearance with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — are well worth watching. So if you follow Apple and you’ve not yet seen them, take some time and watch a few.

VIDEO PODCASTS    AUDIO PODCASTS

Below, a brief sampling of Jobs’s appearances at D to give you a taste of the longer videos available on iTunes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120625/download-demand-for-steve-jobs-at-d-podcasts-strong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/skypes-tony-bates-says-the-goal-is-to-get-billions-of-active-users/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/skypes-tony-bates-says-the-goal-is-to-get-billions-of-active-users/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 18:59:11 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=215299 Skype President Tony Bates, the man behind Microsoft’s largest acquisition, outlined his ambitions for the Internet-calling service at D: All Things Digital.

“If we can get to billions, I’ll be happy with that, and we are on the path to do that,” he said in an onstage interview with Kara Swisher.

Bates announced that Skype is a quarter of the way there, with 250 million monthly connected users, up from 170 million when Microsoft’s $8.5 billion deal closed eight months ago.

To get the rest of the way, Bates said Skype is emphasizing two areas of growth: Mobile phones and the living room.

“I like to think of Skype as the virtual kitchen table,” Bates said. “Ultimately, videoconferencing isn’t defined by one device. We see the world having it where you want and when you want it. The living room is an important area.”

Bates freely talked about the integration of Skype on Windows 8, Microsoft’s touch-based operating system, and on Windows Phone. But when it came to the Xbox and using Kinect, Microsoft’s hands-free motion-controlled technology, he was a little vague.

“It’s one of the most amazing forms of input we’ve seen to date. It’s been associated with games, and my kids love it, but Kinect is not just for games. … I think voice is another input. For us, it would be adding a communication layer using Kinect as a gesture or input device.”

As for when we might see the integration of the two, Bates said to stay tuned.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/skypes-tony-bates-says-the-goal-is-to-get-billions-of-active-users/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 10:00:14 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=215153
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/steve-jobs-at-d-podcasts/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/steve-jobs-at-d-podcasts/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 00:23:06 +0000 Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=213490 There’s lots of video of the late Steve Jobs, primarily from his famous introductions of Apple products over the years and from his oft-quoted Stanford commencement address.

But by far the largest trove of video of the legendary innovator candidly answering unrehearsed questions and explaining his views on technology and business comes from his six lengthy appearances at our D: All Things Digital conference, from 2003 to 2010.

In these onstage conversations, Jobs explained his — and Apple’s — evolving philosophy of where the digital world was heading, and of business itself. He discussed competitors, controversies and his own sense of what matters most. He stressed the importance of building products for their actual users, not “orifices” like corporate IT departments or cellphone carriers. He explained why it was often more important to decide what products and features not to build than to pick the ones that were built. He even appeared jointly in a historic conversation with his lifelong rival, Bill Gates.

So, as a memorial to a great man and in the spirit of sharing a priceless piece of history, we are making all six of these appearances available on iTunes for free, in high-quality video. We thank Apple for its cooperation in making these videos available for all.

– Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher

VIDEO PODCASTS    AUDIO PODCASTS

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/steve-jobs-at-d-podcasts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/linkedins-co-founder-reid-hoffman-says-social-innovation-isnt-over/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/linkedins-co-founder-reid-hoffman-says-social-innovation-isnt-over/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 21:25:12 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=214318 Despite large-scale successes by Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, innovation in the social networking sector is alive and well.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder and executive chairman — and Silicon Valley’s so-called “start-up whisperer” — appeared onstage today with LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner at D: All Things Digital to speak about social networking and his investments at Greylock Partners.

“I think the Valley declares old trends dead before they should be,” Hoffman said. In particular, he said, with the success of various social networks, investors and entrepreneurs think “it’s dead.”

Hoffman says he’s still seeing a lot more opportunities. In fact, his last two investments qualify as social: Wrapp participates in the social gifting space, while Edmodo allows teachers to create secure classroom communities.

In terms of the overall investment scene, Hoffman voiced the criticism that there’s so much money chasing the same deals in Silicon Valley that, as a result, valuations are artificially high and “unsustainable.”

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher asked what the long-term impact of that will be, but Hoffman said he didn’t know.

“I’m living in this boat along with you,” he said.

No, Swisher corrected, she’s not in the same boat. “I’m on land, waiting to see if you sink.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/linkedins-co-founder-reid-hoffman-says-social-innovation-isnt-over/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/reid-hoffman-and-jeff-weiner-on-linkedin-perhaps-the-only-even-keeled-consumer-internet-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/reid-hoffman-and-jeff-weiner-on-linkedin-perhaps-the-only-even-keeled-consumer-internet-company/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 21:22:43 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=214512

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Controversy and histrionics are not what you’ll get in a conversation with LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner and Chairman Reid Hoffman.

Instead, the two — whose company is the best-performing tech IPO in recent memory — laid out a vision of “making every professional more effective” in an interview with Kara Swisher at D10.

Other LinkedIn mission statements Weiner and Hoffman suggested as they were asked to define where the company came from and where it’s going:

• Connecting talent to opportunity at massive scale
• LinkedIn is not about passing time; it’s about enabling members and their productivity
• A platform for professionals to navigate work life
• The business of helping companies hire, market and sell
• Our first value is “members first”

Weiner said LinkedIn’s current goals include simplification of its products — a la recent development on the company’s mobile apps — growth and localization, and development of monetization products.

He did sound a bit too much like a business-school textbook at times, with statements like, “And lastly, we want to invest in everyday value propositions.”

But Weiner and Hoffman proved they have a sense of humor by bringing a hilarious parody video to show at the conference, that was — surprise! — also about LinkedIn brand statements. (We’ll post it later.)

For instance: “With LinkedIn, growing your network is as easy as sliding down the rainbow to Kittentown!”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/reid-hoffman-and-jeff-weiner-on-linkedin-perhaps-the-only-even-keeled-consumer-internet-company/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/day-one-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/day-one-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 10:00:29 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=213986
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/day-one-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120510/starbucks-schultz-dont-read-anything-into-exit-from-groupon-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20120510/starbucks-schultz-dont-read-anything-into-exit-from-groupon-board/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 17:44:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=206594 Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz said today in an interview on CNBC that he has confidence in both Groupon’s board and CEO Andrew Mason, even after stepping down from the board after 19 months.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News

Last month, Kara Swisher reported that Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy were suddenly stepping down from the Groupon board.

Schultz’s departure was effective immediately, while Efrusy will not be standing for reelection at the company’s annual meeting in June.

In the interview on CNBC, Schultz said, “I only committed to one year. It just so happens that my exit was timed with the problem they had last quarter, and no one should read anything into that.”

When asked whether the company has enough adult supervision, he added: “I have confidence in the board and Andrew, and that’s all I have to say at this time.”

Groupon’s stock has continued a downward spiral after it revised its fourth-quarter results to account for higher than expected returns during the holiday period. Today, the stock is down 1.3 percent, or 13 cents, to trade at $9.94 a share.

At that price, it is worth half as much as at the time of its initial public offering.

On the same day that Schultz and Efrusy announced their departures, Groupon said it planned to appoint both Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately, in Schultz’s place.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120510/starbucks-schultz-dont-read-anything-into-exit-from-groupon-board/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120313/allthingsd-takes-sxsw-by-storm/ http://allthingsd.com/20120313/allthingsd-takes-sxsw-by-storm/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:46:17 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=185471 SXSW Interactive is, thankfully, almost over. We came, we saw, we ate from food trucks. We stood in lines in the rain (grudgingly wearing branded ponchos), we strained our eyes and ears for any slivers of news that might come out of the panels, and we got more texts and buzzes and pings from our phones’ location-based and messaging apps than we thought was technically possible.

We learned that video games are good for you, that TV has ruined politics in the U.S. and that social media should fix it, and that Jimmy Fallon has different activities in mind when he thinks of “activity wristbands.” We learned how to be disruptive. We heard Google’s designers explain how they convinced their company to take on that infamous redesign.

We identified one of the worst marketing gimmicks in all of Austin (aside from this controversial one), and heard about all the crazy tasks SXSW-ers hired people to do for them. We learned that an impromptu Jay-Z concert will light up Twitter like it’s Arab Spring in Austin. We hosted not one but two parties at SXSW, announcing at the first event the new All Things Reviewed section of our Web site.

Since words can only say so much, we’ve put together a slideshow for you, below, and our full list of stories is below that:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120313/allthingsd-takes-sxsw-by-storm/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120311/houston-comes-to-austin-as-kara-swisher-talks-lessons-learned-with-dropbox-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120311/houston-comes-to-austin-as-kara-swisher-talks-lessons-learned-with-dropbox-ceo/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:14:56 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=183535 It seems a little odd for someone who is not yet 30 to be reflecting on a career doing start-ups. But Dropbox CEO Drew Houston is not your ordinary executive.

At 29, Houston is already on his sixth start-up, having worked at his first at 14 and started another during high school. Dropbox itself came about when Houston was doing another start-up in Boston and struggling with having to save everything to USB drives.

“It was just personally frustrating,” Houston said in a discussion with our own Kara Swisher at SXSW in Austin on Sunday. “The first lines of code were written on a bus in South Station.”

Houston (pronounced “HOW-stuhn” — like the street in New York, rather than the city in Texas) had taken a year off from MIT to work on one of his start-ups, a company to do online SAT preparation. But, unlike prior Boston-area students Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Houston got his degree.

“I promised my parents I would go back,” Houston said. Plus, those other people dropped out because their companies were going through the roof, a problem he didn’t have. “There wasn’t a need for me to immediately drop out.”

Houston also recalled the story of how Y Combinator forced him to find a co-founder in order to get funding for Dropbox.

“It is like asking someone to get married in two weeks,” Houston said. Houston ended up convincing Arash Ferdowsi to drop out of school and joined Dropbox.

“It was clear that he was very smart,” Houston said. “He was interested in some of the same things I was.”

Swisher also prompted Houston to recall the story of how he was connected with Sequoia Capital by Palo Alto carpet seller and investor Pejman Nozad.

“It was just unconventional,” Houston said. “It’s not your typical Sand Hill Road experience.”

Nozad has been a landlord or investor for a number of major Silicon Valley start-ups from PayPal to Andy Rubin’s Danger.

Houston also related the story of how he took a Zipcar down to Apple’s headquarters, before ultimately turning down late CEO Steve Jobs’s overtures to buy his company.

“We actually didn’t get to numbers,” Houston said. “I was really flattered, obviously, we’re huge fans of Apple, but we really want to build this company.” The formal part of the meeting ended pretty quickly, Houston said, as Jobs then famously told Houston that Dropbox was a feature, not a product. The company also had talks, though less formal, with Google.

Houston said it was like Christmas morning at age 24 as he watched his bank account go from next to nothing to several million dollars, hitting refresh on his computer as the first venture money arrived via wire transfer.

Among the many lessons Houston has clearly learned is how to win over a crowd. Dropbox handed out free T-shirts before the talk started on Sunday.

“Oh, you are an easy group,” Swisher said.

(Update: Houston wouldn’t say how much revenue the company makes but confirmed that Dropbox is profitable. He also acknowledged that the last funding valued the company at $4 billion.)

On Competition:

Houston notes that the company has always faced competition in its core business. “Maybe the cast of characters changes,” he said. Houston notes that there are other companies offering more free storage and yet Dropbox continues to gain customers.

“Dropbox is useful to anyone with a phone,” he said. “That’s like two billion people.”

Most rivals work well only with a certain subset of devices, like Apple products or Google’s. “All of these guys have their home base and their turf to protect.”

On how it can protect all that data with only 110 people:

“That is our promise to people,” he said, that for tens of millions of people they are going to protect your stuff from all the various bad things that can happen from security threats to data loss and other issues. “We’ve done a lot of stuff” with a very small team, he said.

On what he worries about most:

It’s doing the things his customers want and hiring the right people, Houston said.

“If you do those two things you can screw up just about anything else,” he said.

On the future:

Houston said the company is expanding from file storage and into solving new problems, particularly trying to tie together other kinds of experiences.

“They don’t realize we are just scratching the surface of all of these amazing things we can do,” Houston said. “The world needs this really large-scale and elegant solution to tie this all together.”

On his talks with Facebook and Zuckerberg:

“There’s a lot of interesting stuff we could potentially do together,” he said.

On how they deal with government requests for information, whether U.S. or China or Syria:

“If you look at our privacy policy or terms of service, it’s written in plain English,” Houston said. “We really want to be the best possible advocate.

Dropbox has only had a few dozen requests from governments, Houston said. The company has looked into all of them and only handed over information in a “handful” of cases.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120311/houston-comes-to-austin-as-kara-swisher-talks-lessons-learned-with-dropbox-ceo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/so-new-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompson-how-bad-is-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/so-new-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompson-how-bad-is-it/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:11:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=167058

You want news out of Scott Thompson? Then you’d be very disappointed with the Yahoo CEO today. Not surprisingly, the new boss — who wants us to remember that he’s really only officially been at work for two weeks — says it’s too early to talk about his plans.

But he does have some, he insists. For instance:

• He has a plan to fix Yahoo’s big mess in Asia.
• And he has a plan to help fix ad sales, which have been in turnaround for nine months and are still declining.
• And he has a plan to buy some stuff to “fill in technology gaps” that will help with all of that.

But no details on any of that during the Q4 earnings call. Instead, Thompson repeated what he told Yahoo employees during his first address to them — Yahoo is both a media and technology company, and people should get their heads around that — and he laid out some big, pretty obvious ideas:

• It’s important to pay attention to users and advertisers.
• Yahoo should move fast, etc.
• He’s going to double down on some existing Yahoo projects, and cut others.

Got it? Good. More details to come, Thompson says. And yes, for the record: That is a serious Massachusetts accent on the new guy.

—————–

EARLIER

Earlier this month, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson got on the phone with Wall Street analysts, and refused to discuss the company or his plans for it in much detail.

Fair enough: He had just been hired that morning, and had barely met anyone in the company.

So now it’s been nearly three weeks. Think he’ll offer much more in the way specifics, in the wake of the company’s Q4 earnings report?

Me, neither. But Wall Street will still be hungry for any scraps it can get, whether it’s an update on the company’s Asia mess, a hint about future cost-cutting moves, or a general “here’s what I think we should be doing” state-of-the-state.

We will definitely get a chance to hear the Boston accent that seemed to charm everyone so much in early January. Time to see if it’s still as effective.

4:58 pm: Greetings! Just doing some finger exercises in advance of the call. Also looking for some Kara Swisher aviator glasses, since La Swish is in transit and cannot cover the call herself. I’d say I’ll do my best to channel her as I type, but I don’t think I could handle that.

5:00 pm: There’s time for a quick ticker check: Investors still yawning, and YHOO shares are nearly flat, after-hours. But Apple!

5:01 pm: And we’re off. On the call: Thompson and CFO Tim Morse.

5:03 pm: Thompson: Even though I’ve been here for three weeks, my official start date was only two weeks ago. Still! I had strong opinions before I arrived, and since then, I’ve been looking around: Big opportunity here.

Powerful brand, lots of visitors: 702 million globally! Advertisers like us, etc. “We’re going to work not just at scale, but with speed.” “I feel great about that, but I’m still very clear that we have a lot of work to do.”

You want details? Won’t give ’em. But I’ll talk about guiding principles:

For me, I insist “that we be balanced.” Have to think about customers, who we are, [something I missed] and how we allocate capital. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

And before we get to any of that, let’s talk about Q4 numbers and 2012 projections.

[At this point you can consult the numbers they've already put out]

Let me praise some people. And, “there’s no question” that we can do better. “And we will.” Need to get to market faster, monetize better.

5:07 pm: Here’s Tim Morse, with some numbers. [Again, you can read most of this, so I'll skip most until he gets to the "color" part.]

Challenging quarter, but I’m proud of the team. Etc.

And now, some 2011 numbers. [Again, I'll also skip this stuff.]

[Meanwhile, here's Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney's take, fresh off the grill: "Fundamental trends remain nothing to email home about. The Display Advertising results were a clear negative, and the Search Advertising results continue to remain murky. Stock buybacks are (almost) always good … Scott Thompson has his work cut out for him …"]

Some details on our display missed. We missed by $15m; $10m of that is from Europe and macroeconomic stuff.

We’re nine months into salesforce revamp. We’re doing pretty good with that. “Several major advertisers” that had bailed or cut back on Yahoo spend have made “meaningful commitments for 2012.”

Some search notes. A reminder that we extended Microsoft search deal through 2013.

We’ll get to 2012 guidance in a minute. But first, a reminder that we’re still growing visitors and page views. More of that to come. U.S. elections and Olympics will be big for us.

“In short, we’ve made progress on many fronts, but that’s not the whole story.” Revenue isn’t growing, and “we expected better.”

5:18 pm: Guidance numbers, which you can also get from the release. But they are “not reflective” of our long-term goals. Because we want to grow.

And margins will get better, too.

And yes, we’re talking about fixing our Asia mess. But we won’t be able to go into details about that on this call.

5:21 pm: Back to Thompson. Okay. So here’s more on that “balance” stuff.

First: Customers. Both our users and our advertisers — we want them both to get real value from us, “and we will focus equally on both.”

We have to get people to use us more frequently. And we need advertisers to know we like them, we really like them.

5:22 pm: Two: “Balance in who we are.” We’re a media company and a tech company. We need to be great about both. “So we end the debate about which is more important … we must do both. End of discussion.”

Three: We gotta grow fast. “When it comes to making decisions, I make them quickly, and then push to move fast, fast, fast.”

Four: We gotta balance investment resources for today, tomorrow and long-term. Right allocation of capital is very important. Most resources have to go to “current core business.” But a lot also has to go to the products of tomorrow and the next 12 months. And also a “small but meaningful” amount into products that won’t show up for a year or more. We need a vibrant long-term product pipeline, and we have to consider businesses that don’t look anything like what we’re doing today.

But need to be very clear — not about restarting investment cycle. Refocusing, which means there are some things that we’re going to stop doing [that is, we'll have shutdowns and cuts].

I have some very clear ideas about the specifics of what we’ll do. But I won’t tell you about them.

Still, some big ideas: Customer experiences, and data.

5:26 pm: On customer experience: 702 million users a month. Did I mention that? Yes, I did. I’ll say it again. “But the sheer numbers of users will not get us to where we need to be.” We have to improve their experience while they’re here: Better interfaces, faster speed, deeper and “much more relevant content.”

And we need advertisers to get better results, and spend more money with Yahoo. [Don't do the opposite!]

On to data: We can use data to make the experience better for users — tweak layout, content, flow of the page and advertisers. “Nobody has done that yet on the Web.” “I know lots of companies talk about using data.” But we mean it. Crucial for you to understand that data is core to our plans. It “will be the key component for driving innovation at Yahoo.”

5:30 pm: So there’s some insight for you. Now on to strategic-review update. Roy said on last call that BOD considered a lot of alternatives. “It’s important for you to know that the company remains open to anything that’s good for our shareholders.” but we’re “focusing on what appears most promising.” “The work is ongoing, and I won’t say more about that today,” but it’s going to be good for shareholders.

Here’s the takeaway: There’s plenty of opportunity here. “Much bigger than the outside world imagines for us today.”

I’m here because we can do more.

5:32 pm: Alrighty. Q&A time.

Q: Please talk about that Interclick deal. What will they contribute in revenue and earnings? Also, update on revenue per search, please.

Morse: $25M of cost in Q1 from ICLK. $10M in revenue. We expect revenue to ramp throughout the year. As far as RPS increase, Microsoft is doing a nice job, and so are our sales guys.

“We’re definitely closing the gap” when it comes to search. But a reminder that we have a guarantee though March 2013.

Q: On that balance thing: How important will Q&A be here? Big deals in the works? Also, what do you see in macro environment?

Thompson: I think there’s going to be some stuff that we need that we don’t have, and so we’ll probably have to be “aggressive” in the market. “I’m relatively certain that there will be things that interest us” to help us “fill in technology gaps.”

Morse: Europe wasn’t great last quarter, and early indications are the same now. Not expecting much change this quarter, anywhere.

Q: How about a dividend? Also, how do your big principles play into display ad turnaround?

Thompson: “Too early” to imagine dividends. On turning around display: I’ve tried to spend a lot of time trying to figure out our problems there. “We are after that with a very high sense of urgency.” Number-one priority for now.

Q: Also on display. Any sacred cows going forward? Also, on premium video — how are your original series performing?

Thompson: Not sure how to interpret that cow question. “We are understanding and evaluating all options … personally, I’m being very aggressive.”

Morse: Last month, we had nine out of the top 10 original shows in U.S. We don’t give out revenue and pageview and streaming numbers, but “assume healthy growth there.” But more work to be done.

Q: Tim: Please give us more detail on premium display pricing. Scott: You guys made a lot of buzz with that Tom Hanks show announcement. Please discuss economics. Also: Experiment, or prelude to more?

Morse: Like I said, premium display below where we wanted, but it was in the range. And Interclick will make that better.

Thompson: Yeah, that was great buzz at CES. “It was more than the event itself,” everyone had nice things to say. “I was pleasantly surprised.” Not going to share details on dollars. So far, “we’ve had reasonably good success” with the originals we’ve done past.

Q: You talked about doing things Yahoo hasn’t done before. Like what? Also, for Morse: Shouldn’t he be worried about Yahoo’s share on mobile devices?

Thompson: Too early for me talk about strategically what we’re doing.

Morse: On search — yeah, we want to grow our O&O. In terms of mobile share, it’s so early right now. “It’s very intriguing in terms of how we’re going to play.”

But new revenue streams from mobile are even more important than existing ones.

Thompson: Important to point out that “no winner” has shown up yet when it comes to mobility. [Really?]

Thompson: Did I mention data? Let me mention it again. We have tons of it. It’s going to be huge for us. Data and technology can help us predict what users want to do next; it’s a huge advantage for us.

Q: Carol called this a communications company. Terry Semel called it a media company. And you?

Thompson: I had this all-hands meeting, and I said it again today. There’s this long-standing debate here. But “we better be darn good at both. In fact, I think we ought to great.”

Morse: Discussion of financials. Gap between reporter and subject.

Q: You said you’d realign around key areas of focus. But what’s new about that? Are there new verticals? Also, since you’re talking about investing, how does that jibe with operating margin goals?

Thompson: We’re working really hard to evaluate options. “Providing more detail for you today … is just a little bit premature.” “I actually feel a little bit bad” that I can’t tell you more.

“Just a little bit longer, if you will, before we get really specific” on that.

Morse: Yes, we’re going to spend money. But we’re also going to stop those projects, so we can move money around.

Q: On display: Seems like big opportunity to monetize your leftover inventory. Talk about that, please.

Morse: Yep. That’s one reason why we bought Interclick. (Also, theoretically, the reason for this.)

Q: Talk more about Interclick. $10m revenue, $25M costs. But that doesn’t look like what they were doing before you bought them — they had $2M EBITDA per quarter. What’s going on?

Morse: A lot of what they were doing before was related to Yahoo, so we have to eliminate some of that for reporting. Also, we’re building out so we can do more with that. Also, we have to start amortizing intangibles. Also! “This is the first quarter, right out the gate.”

Q: For Scott: You talked about growth before. Can you talk about growth via acquisition, and new business versus growth of existing business? Also, please talk about mobile traffic.

Thompson: I’ve talked to customers. “The conversations were fascinating.” People want us to grow. They also told us “exactly what we have to do to get more of their spend, today.” We can do that. We don’t have to grow solely via M&A. “The really good news is, the customers are there, they’re cheering for us.”

As far as mobile, I haven’t really seen the data. But I’m sure it’s growing really fast. It did at the last business I was at.

Morse: Right.

That’s it, everyone. All done for today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/so-new-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompson-how-bad-is-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111005/steve-jobs-appearances-at-d-the-full-sessions/ http://allthingsd.com/20111005/steve-jobs-appearances-at-d-the-full-sessions/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:49:00 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://allthingsd.com/?p=129213 Steve Jobs was onstage for the first-ever D: All Things Digital conference in 2003, and a guest and interviewee four times since — five if you count the legendary two appearances he made onstage at D5 in 2007, one solo and one with longtime rival and friend Bill Gates.

Here are the complete sessions for his D appearances:

D1 in 2003

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D2 in 2004

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D3 in 2005

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D5 in 2007

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D5 in 2007 with Microsoft’s Bill Gates

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D8 in 2010

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