AllThingsD » ladies

Viral Video: "The View" Vs. "The Talk"

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:34:06 +0000

It’s a smackdown of chit-chatting ladies, as CBS’s “The Talk” debuted this week, in an attempt to grab audience from the powerhouse daytime ABC talk show “The View.”

It’ll be hard, since those are some tough women on “The View,” which recently was in the spotlight after Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked off the set in the middle of a segment with Fox News cable pundit Bill O’Reilly, after he impugned Muslims.

Here is a clip from “The View,” in which O’Reilly comic clone Stephen Colbert pretends to walk off the stage.

It’s followed by an opener for “The Talk”–the best part comes at the end, when Julie Chen’s husband, CBS CEO Les Moonves, offers his support in a welcome video, but also threatens to cancel the show if ratings are not good.

Enjoy:

Palm: Those Were the Videos, My Friend, I Thought Roger McNamee Would Never End (Up Selling)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:27:09 +0000

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

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

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

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

[ See post to watch video ]

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

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

[ See post to watch video ]

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

No, unfortunately, he never did.

[ See post to watch video ]

Palm Pre Commercial Keeps Mirroring the Ladies

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:05:19 +0000

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in May, in an onstage interview, Palm’s major investor, Roger McNamee, and I got into a minor tussle over the mirror on the back of the just-launched Pre smartphone and his assertion that the ladies in particular would love it.

Take that, reflectively-challenged Apple (AAPL) iPhone!

Here is a picture of McNamee at D7, talking about the mirror, and here’s the partial transcript of the exchange:

MR. MCNAMEE: It has a mirror on the back. Remember, there has never been a smart phone designed for the needs of women before.

MS. SWISHER: Wait, wait. Women need mirrors more than, say, you?

MR. MCNAMEE: No, I am saying if you have the opportunity to stick a mirror on here, why wouldn’t you do it? If you are making it for 25- to 40-year-old nerds, you would have put a black thing back here. But we are sitting here going, “Look, it costs nothing. Why don’t we do it because you know what, people actually do need mirrors from time to time.”

Later, I joked, “Nice, Roger. Perhaps someday it will include a blow dryer as well,” and McNamee tried mightily to poll the crowd to see if I was being too politically correct for questioning his–oh, that crazy Roger!–borderline kooky mirror-as-innovation theory.

All in good fun!

In any case, Palm (PALM) is certainly not backing away from the female demographic with its latest television commercial, which features an unusually pale woman with a sing-song and vaguely creepy voice.

Rather than hawking a Silicon Valley nifty gadget, it feels more like a perfume advertisement or one for a new shampoo that promises lustrous locks.

All the better to look good in a mirror, presumably.

Here’s the new commercial, as well as a similar one from June, which feels like an ad for yoga clothes (and below it is a video of the full interview–including the mirror debate–with McNamee and also Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein):

[ See post to watch video ]

iPhone App Goes Topless

John Paczkowski — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:30:48 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Sexually Frustrated? There’s an App for That [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:04:52 +0000

The parental controls included in iPhone 3.0 have opened up a rich and fertile frontier in Apple’s App Store: Porn. An app called “Hottest Girls,” which previously featured pictures of women in their skivvies, this week began featuring ones of ladies wearing quite a bit less. “We uploaded nude topless pics today,” says app developer Allen Leung. “This is the first app to have nudity.”

But far from the last, I’m sure.

A few weeks back, this sort of update never would have made it into the App Store, but now that the device supports age restrictions for applications, Apple (AAPL) has adopted a more permissive stance toward
“objectionable content.” Browse the Hottest Girls page on the App Store and you’ll find the following warning:

“You must be at least 17 years old to download this game.
Rated 17+ for the following:
Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity
Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes”

“Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity?” Interesting. It would seem then that Hottest Girls isn’t just the first app to boast nudity, it’s also the first to set up shop in what may become the iPhone’s red light district. It will be interesting to see to what uses the adult entertainment industry can find for the iPhone’s accelerometer….

UPDATE: Apple seems to have pulled the app. It still appears in the iTunes store, but it’s apparently no longer available for download.

UPDATE: The developers of Hottest Girls claim the app wasn’t pulled; it sold out. “The Hottest Girls app is temporarily sold out,” they explain. “The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app. Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing. Those who already have the app will still be able to use our app. To answer the question on everyone’s mind: Yes, the topless images will still be there when it is sold again.”

UPDATE: Apple now says it was indeed responsible for pulling the app.