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What Does Dan Loeb Want for His $1B -- Lotsa Yahoo News, That's What!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:59:30 +0000

Last week, Yahoo’s activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, the New York hedge fund that is waging a proxy fight against the Silicon Valley Internet giant, made a regulatory filing noting that it had spent $971.1 million to acquire 70.5 million shares of Yahoo, a 5.8 percent stake. Loeb asked for Yahoo to consider his alternate board slate, and also wanted its shareholder list to communicate with other investors.

But that’s not all: In another action last week, Third Point asked a Delaware court to give it a look at sealed documents from a now-settled 2008 shareholder lawsuit related to Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo.

Said Third Point in its legal request, which Yahoo is seeking to block (of course!): “It is not surprising, then, that Yahoo and its soon-to-be former directors wish to keep details of their embarrassing — and fiduciarily suspect — conduct hidden from view.”

Here’s a video I did talking about the mishegas on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online show:

Apple Brand Ascendent, While Yahoo's Is in Marketing Retrograde

Kara Swisher — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:55:01 +0000

Yahoo — which has been trying to right itself after a series of missteps and an ever-weakening business — took another direct hit yesterday, as it got dinged in a high-profile annual survey of the Top 100 global brands.

According to Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands 2011,” Yahoo dropped 11 percent in brand value — calculated as $4.4 billion — in the year in which it fell from No. 66 to No. 76.

Way to go, Yahoo marketing! I think that pricey “It’s You” advertising campaign might not have worked.

Meanwhile, Apple broke into the Top 10 list for the first time, vaulting from No. 17 to No. 8, rising 58 percent in brand value to $33.5 billion.

Other tech companies did pretty well in the Interbrand poll — which is the gold standard of the state of brand health with consumers — especially compared to Yahoo (whose brand value high was in 2007 and which is now back at 2001 levels).

For example: IBM kept its No. 2 spot, with brand value rising eight percent; Microsoft fell three percent, but maintained its No. 3 place; Google stayed at No. 4, up 27 percent; and Amazon rose 32 percent and reached No. 26 from No. 36.

Even troubled companies prevailed over Yahoo’s twin declines: Hewlett-Packard held on to its No. 10 slot, with brand value up six percent; Research In Motion dropped only five percent and two slots, from No. 54 to No. 56; and Nokia fell from No. 8 to No. 14 and saw its brand value decline 15 percent.

Most interesting, perhaps, about the 12-year-old survey: Six of the Top 10 brands are tech companies.

Attention Shoppers: Coupons.com Grabs $30M in Funding From Greylock

Kara Swisher — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:00:25 +0000

Among the hot and hyped Web 2.0 scene, not many would pick out 13-year-old digital promotions site, Coupons.com.

But, on the heels of a recent $200 million funding — which valued the quiet Mountain View, Calif., company at $1 billion — and a surging online discounting market, it has nabbed another $30 million from Greylock Partners.

Greylock has already invested half that amount, via a secondary market transaction, and is Coupons.com’s first venture investor. Its previous funders have been institutional investors.

“Coupons.com have been quietly building all the key infrastructure in this area,” said Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “We think they are poised for the massive shift that is coming.”

The new funds, said its CEO and co-founder Steven Boal, will be used for a variety of things, including an aggressive mobile and social push for the longtime site.

“We are now focusing on hypergrowth,” said Boal, who noted that coupon clipping is perhaps the original social media. “Saving is kind of hip these days, even if we have been around for a long time with this exact focus.”

Coupons.com had already moved in the mobile/social direction with the 2009 acquisition of Grocery iQ, a mobile app that lets users manage shopping lists and discounts on phones.

There will be more to come, said Boal, who said the growth of the category is inevitable as consumers use these devices to manage their spending habits.

Coupons.com will also use the funds to expand its staff from 288 employees now to more than 450 by the end of the year, operating in about 13 countries. While Coupons.com has been profitable on a cash-flow basis, all the new initiatives will be costly.

And, while that kind of expansion could remind you of the explosive daily deals sector — and it is easy to put Coupons.com in the same highly competitive arena as Groupon — the company operates more as a platform and a white-label provider of discounting services to manufacturers and retailers, especially supermarkets and chain stores.

In fact, Coupons.com provides a lot of such services for them, garnering $100 million in revenue this year, up from $60 million last year and $40 million the year before. Much of that money is made when a customer uses its site or sites it powers and downloads a coupon for redemption.

One area of promising growth, said Boal, is managing discounts on Facebook’s social networking site, which is increasingly being used by consumer goods companies to test promotions and increase loyalty.

“It’s a really interesting area as product companies can be really nimble in managing their promotions,” he said. “And the ability to really drill down on the response of a certain sector of consumer is very powerful.”

It goes without saying that newspapers that previously dominated this industry have been on the wane.

The massive funding also sets up Coupons.com for a possible 2012 IPO, especially given its dominance — it serves nine out of 10 big grocery chains, four out of four pharmacy giants and such — in the digital couponing sector.

Presumably, there would be no discounts for that stock.

Here’s the official press release:

COUPONS.COM ANNOUNCES GREYLOCK PARTNERS INVESTMENT

Company’s Rapid Growth Including Mobile and Social Couponing Solutions to Benefit from Greylock’s Expertise

Mountain View, Calif. — October 3, 2011 — Coupons.com Incorporated, the recognized leader in digital coupons, including online printable, social, mobile and loyalty card promotions, today announced an investment by Greylock Partners. Coupons.com, which recently raised $200 million from institutional investors, is transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry and accelerating the shift from the newspaper to digital. The investment, a secondary market transaction, will enable the company to tap into Greylock’s expertise as it continues to produce market-transforming couponing solutions, including its mobile- and social-based products and services.

“We are very excited to work with Reid Hoffman and James Slavet and the entire Greylock team,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “Greylock’s expertise and relationships will prove invaluable as we continue connecting brands with consumers via money-saving offers at every touch-point across the digital landscape — including web, social and mobile — and along the consumer’s entire path to purchase.”

“We’re very pleased with our investment in Coupons.com and are excited about working with the team as they continue to build a substantial, market-defining company,” said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners. “Coupons.com is almost single handedly transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry by ushering the newspaper-dominated business to digital. The market opportunity the company faces is immense, and we look forward to contributing in any way to their continued success, particularly in the context of social and mobile solutions.”

Coupons.com powers the vast majority of coupons printed online via a network of tens of thousands of sites in addition to their flagship site, Coupons.com, which is the 39th most trafficked site in the country. Coupons.com Incorporated is also the go-to resource for manufacturers wanting to coupon-enable their digital marketing initiatives, and virtually every major consumer packaged goods manufacturer resides on the company’s client roster. The company is aggressively building its team, expanding its full time staff from 288 employees in June to more than 450 expected by the end of the year, a growth of over 50 percent during the six-month period.

In addition to capturing a growing share of the multi-billion dollar newspaper-dominated coupon industry, Coupons.com is also expanding the couponing market by lowering the barriers to entry for companies to offer coupons, enabling smaller manufacturers — which could not place offers in the newspaper insert because of budget requirements or category exclusivity restrictions — to utilize coupons to engage with consumers. In addition, Coupons.com attracts a new demographic of coupon users, who engage with new couponing methods like digital, social and mobile coupons, but typically would not engage with traditional paper coupons.

Yahoo's Bartz Also Gets Fired From Fortune's Powerful Women List, While HP's Whitman Gets Hired

Kara Swisher — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:48:47 +0000

Today, Fortune magazine released its annual “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” and, as usual, it had its share of tech execs on the list.

And off it, too — first and foremost being ousted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who was jacked completely from her 2010 No. 10 rank. She was No. 8 in 2009.

In her place: Newly designated Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the No. 9 spot.

Also on the list: fast-rising IBM sales, marketing and strategy exec Ginni Rometty at No. 7; Xerox CEO Ursula Burns at No. 8; Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz at No. 11; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 12; Google execs Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer at No. 28 and No. 38, respectively; IBM North America GM Bridget Van Kralingen at No. 39; and Best Buy Americas President Shari Ballard.

Catz was the highest paid of the group, with $42.1 million in total 2010 compensation.

And also taken off this year: 2010 No. 14, HP’s Ann Livermore, who left her top job there, but still is on the tech giant’s board; 2010 No. 28 Cathie Lesjak, CFO of HP; 2010 No. 44 Lorrie Norrington, a former president at eBay; and Apple’s communications head Katie Cotton (she was robbed!), who was No. 50 in 2010.

The new list will be in the magazine on Monday, which is when a related conference will take place in Southern California. (I will also be in attendance there, along with other less powerful ladies.)

Whitman is scheduled to speak at the conference in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 4.

Zuckerberg Tops Vanity Fair's "New Establishment" List Again (And Look Who's No. 40)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:00:13 +0000

Vanity Fair magazine put out its high-profile “New Establishment” list of the top 50 people, who are “an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies, and entrepreneurs, who quite often sport hoodies, floppy hair, and backpacks.”

The hoodie part would be referring to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who topped the list — which is in the just-released October issue — for the second year in a row.

The Vanity Fair list was packed with Silicon Valley luminaries.

The No. 2 spot went to the hopelessly conjoined twins at Google, CEO Larry Page and his co-founder Sergey Brin. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was No. 3, followed by newly born CEO Tim Cook and top product guy Jonathan Ive of Apple at No. 4, with Twitter creator and Square founder Jack Dorsey at No. 5.

Interestingly, super-VCs Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz clocked in this year at No. 6.

The digitally fast-forward Lady Gaga was the top woman on the list at No. 9, in front of “Harry Potter” author J. K. Rowling at No. 16.

And, clocking in at No. 40? Why, me and my partner-in-crime at AllThingsD, Walt Mossberg. He is apparently a “kingmaker” of tech and I do “juicy exclusives.”

That actually is pretty accurate. More importantly, we were ranked higher than Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher. In other words: Mission accomplished!

We also beat the Angry Birds dudes at No. 49, whom my two kids would nonetheless have voted tops over their mom any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In addition, Vanity Fair broke off a list of 25 “Powers That Be,” which is made up of a lot of longtime “New Establishment” folks, as well as another list called the “Hall of Fame.”

“These are the people who have shaped the world we live in today — and continue to wield enormous influence,” said Vanity Fair, which translates into dustier moguls.

Topping the powers-that-be, of course, is Apple’s co-founder and Chairman Steve Jobs. And outgone Google CEO and now Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is now enshrined in the hall of fame.

As Walt and I head to a good table at the Minetta Tavern to meet the cool peeps for a celebratory drink, here is the official press releases from Vanity Fair:

FACEBOOK FOUNDER MARK ZUCKERBERG TOPS VANITY FAIR’S NEW ESTABLISHMENT LIST FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW

Sergey Brin and Larry Page Take No. 2 Spot, Lady Gaga Jumps to the Top 10 of Tech-Dominant List

NEW YORK, N.Y. — “The Age of Information gives way to a burgeoning Age of Technology,” announces Graydon Carter, remarking on the “seismic shift in interest and influence” that has occurred in the 17 years that Vanity Fair has been ranking America’s power players. The magazine’s 2011 New Establishment list identifies the top 50 of an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies, and entrepreneurs, who quite often sport hoodies, floppy hair, and backpacks.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the inescapable social-networking site Facebook, maintains his perch at the top of Vanity Fair’s 17th annual New Establishment List ranking for the second year in a row. With a possible I.P.O. on the horizon by 2012, which could value the company anywhere between $50 and $100 billion, Facebook has enough clout to worry even the unshakable Google. Zuckerberg is still the youngest person ever to top the list.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, are in the No. 2 spot this year, closing in on Zuckerberg as they jump up one spot, from No. 3 in 2010. Eric Schmidt, who appeared on the list last year with the duo, has since been pushed out of the C.E.O’s office, replaced by Page. Despite reports of an anti-trust investigation, Google has been setting its sites on Facebook by concentrating on strategic initiatives, such as engineering social-networking features.

Rounding out the top five are Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, at No. 3, Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, of Apple, at No. 4, and Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, at No. 5.

Lady Gaga makes an appearance for the second year in a row. Coming in at No. 9, she is the highest-ranking woman on the list, in front of J. K. Rowling at No. 16, Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook, at No. 26, Angela Ahrendts with Christopher Bailey, of Burberry, at No. 30, Natalie Massenet at No. 32, and Kara Swisher with Walt Mossberg at No. 40. At 25 years old, Gaga is also the youngest person on the list — not a surprise for someone whose fans managed to crash Amazon’s servers in their desperation to download her third album.

Youthful energy is spread throughout this year’s list with 15 members under the age of 40, including Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, Dorsey, Lady Gaga, Andrew Mason, Sean Parker, Ryan Kavanaugh, Jeremy Stoppelman, Ashton Kutcher, Dennis Crowley, Daniel Ek, Mikael Hed and Niklas Hed, and Justin Timberlake.

There are 14 billionaires on the list: Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, Bezos, Mark Pincus, Michael Moritz, J. K. Rowling, Jim Breyer, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Allen III, Yuri Milner, Robin Li, Parker, and Peter Thiel.

Five member of the New Establishment are actively involved in space exploration, including Brin, Elon Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and Dennis Crowley. Eight of the New Establishment nominees can count themselves members of the ever growing Stanford Mafia; they include Brin, Page, Reed Hastings, Jim Breyer, Hoffman, Musk, Thiel, and John Hennessy.

The New Establishment, Vanity Fair’s annual ranking of the top leaders of our time, is made up of owners, creators, buyers, thinkers, and innovators — the movers and shakers in the worlds of technology, media, business, politics, entertainment, and fashion. These men and women are the taste-makers and trendsetters, opinion formers and agenda creators, not to mention empire builders. Entry into the ranks of Vanity Fair’s list is based on a number of factors: wealth, influence, and philanthropy, as well as such intangibles as vision and the x factor.

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands in New York and L.A. on September 1, and nationally and on the iPad September 6.

THE VANITY FAIR NEW ESTABLISHMENT

1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google
3. Jeff Bezos, Amazon
4. Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, Apple
5. Jack Dorsey, Square, Twitter
6. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz
7. Reed Hastings, Netflix
8. John Lasseter, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios
9. Lady Gaga, singer
10. Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg L.P.
11. Dick Costolo, Twitter
12. Mark Pincus, Zynga
13. Jim Breyer, Accel Partners
14. Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Graham King, Movies
15. Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital
16. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter
17. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park
18. Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners, LinkedIn
19. Herb Allen III, Allen & Co.
20. Judd Apatow, Apatow Productions
21. Jay-Z, Roc Nation
22. Todd Phillips, Green Hat Films
23. Yuri Milner, DST Global
24. J. J. Abrams, writer, director, producer
25. Robin Li, Baidu
26. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook
27. Andrew Mason, Groupon
28. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, television
29. Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson, Leverage
30. Angela Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey, Burberry
31. Elon Musk, Tesla Motors, Space X
32. Natalie Massenet, Net-a-Porter Group
33. Paul Graham, Y Combinator
34. Sean Parker, entrepreneur
35. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, Flatiron Partners
36. Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, Clarium Capital Management
37. Peter Jackson, Wingnut Films
38. Ryan Kavanaugh, Relativity Media
39. Mike Allen, Politico
40. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, All Things D
41. John Hennessy, Stanford University
42. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp
43. Ashton Kutcher, actor, investor
44. Tyler Perry, director, producer, writer, actor
45. Dennis Crowley, Foursquare
46. Kevin Ryan, Gilt Groupe
47. Daniel Ek, Spotify
48. Henry Blodget, Business Insider
49. Mikael Hed, Niklas Hed, and Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio
50. Justin Timberlake, singer, actor

STEVE JOBS HOLDS THE TOP SPOT ON VANITY FAIR’S LIST OF THE POWERS THAT BE

Embattled News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch in the Top 5

NEW YORK, N.Y. — This year Vanity Fair inaugurates a list of the Powers That Be. These are the people who have shaped the world we live in today — and continue to wield enormous influence. Many are longtime New Establishment members, and their destinies are intertwined with the members of this year’s New Establishment.

Steve Jobs, of Apple, holds the top spot on the list of the Powers That Be. Since Jobs took control of the company 14 years ago, the stock’s share price has risen more than 6,500 percent. At the height of the debt crisis in late July, Apple had more cash on hand than the U.S. government.

Bernard Arnault, of luxury-goods company LVMH, ranks in the No. 2 spot. As an overseer of countless enduring luxury brands, Arnault has left his mark on the industry. Last year he spent $2 billion to accumulate a 20 percent stake in family-controlled but publicly traded Hermès.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is No.3 on this year’s list while News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch comes in at No. 4. The tumultuous News of the World scandals this year have shaken the media baron, but also shown his staying power in the face of just about anything. Brian Roberts and Steve Burke, of Comcast, NBCUniversal, who recently acquired the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2020, are No. 5.

Jill Abramson is the highest-ranking woman out of six on the list, at No. 9. She is followed by Angelina Jolie with Brad Pitt at No. 11, Sue Naegle with Richard Plepler and Michael Lombardo at No. 15, Anne Sweeney with George Bodenheimer at No. 22, Bonnie Hammer at No. 24, and Arianna Huffington with Tim Armstrong at No. 25.

Because some power is permanent, Vanity Fair nominates a number of regulars to the Hall of Fame this year. Warren Buffett, of Berkshire Hathaway, joins Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Tom Ford, actor Tom Hanks, and designer Karl Lagerfeld. Network impresario Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, of DreamWorks Animation, and talk-show host Charlie Rose all make the ranks as well.

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands in New York and L.A. on September 1, and nationally and on the iPad September 6.

THE POWERS THAT BE

1. Steve Jobs, Apple
2. Bernard Arnault, LVMH
3. Michael Bloomberg, mayor, New York City
4. Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation
5. Brian Roberts and Steve Burke, Comcast, NBCUniversal
6. François-Henri Pinault, PPR
7. Bob Iger, Walt Disney Company
8. Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner
9. Jill Abramson, The New York Times
10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
11. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, movies, philanthropy
12. Diego Della Valle, Tod’s
13. Roman Abramovich, investments
14. Mickey Drexler, J. Crew
15. Richard Plepler, Sue Naegle, and Michael Lombardo, HBO
16. Larry Gagosian, Gagosian Gallery
17. Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the Weinstein Company
18. Marc Jacobs, designer
19. Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live
20. David Zaslav, Discovery Communications
21. Jean Pigozzi, investments, art
22. George Bodenheimer and Anne Sweeney, Disney Media Networks
23. Vivi Nevo, NV Investments
24. Bonnie Hammer, NBCU Cable Entertainment and Cable Studios
25. Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, AOL Huffington Post Media Group

HALL OF FAME

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
Ron Conway, angel investor
Philippe Dauman, Viacom
Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, IAC, DVF
John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation
Tom Ford, designer/filmmaker
Ted Forstmann, IMG Worldwide
Tom Freston, Firefly3
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Imagine Entertainment
Tom Hanks, actor
Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation
Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel
Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren
John Malone, Liberty Media
Ron Meyer, Universal Studios
Leslie Moonves, CBS
Ronald Perelman, MacAndrews and Forbes
Miuccia Prada, Prada
Charlie Rose, talk-show host
Eric Schmidt, Google
Terry Semel, investor
Oprah Winfrey, OWN

(Full disclosure: Readers who look closely at the list will notice that all things ATD senior editor Peter Kafka is listed as a contributor. This is true! Also true: Peter wrote biographical entries for several people on the list, but has zero input on its composition. He tells us he had no idea that we were being considered for inclusion, and we believe him. He also says that had he been asked for his opinion, he would have voted for us, his bosses, to be included. We also believe that.)

Exclusive: MailChimp Buys Phil Kaplan's Tiny Newsletter Start-Up, TinyLetter

Kara Swisher — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:58:01 +0000

MailChimp, the Atlanta-based email marketing service, has bought TinyLetter, which is well-known entrepreneur Phil Kaplan’s most recent start-up.

While MailChimp focuses on more commercial clients — including AllThingsD — who want to send email newsletters and manage subscriber lists, TinyLetter is aimed at individuals who want similar services.

In an interview this morning, Kaplan said he sold the nine-month-old company, which he self-funded, in order to take advantage of MailChimp’s infrastructure and scaling capabilities.

He will remain an adviser to MailChimp, which now has about 950,000 newsletters, with about two billion emails sent monthly. It has 100 employees.

In contrast, TinyLetter has about 30,000 newsletters and sends out about one million emails a month.

Kaplan would not disclose terms of the acquisition deal, even though I asked him nicely several times. But the TinyLetter brand will remain.

More AsiaD Speakers: Sony, Google+, Microsoft, Hollywood, Huawei and Hot SV Start-Ups!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:33 +0000

After our grand tour of Asia last week — with stops in Korea and Japan — it seems like a perfect time to update the speaker list for our upcoming AsiaD conference in Hong Kong in October.

As Walt Mossberg and I said, we are trying to mix both U.S.-based speakers with a pan-Asian selection of speakers from across the region, and the new additions are just that.

For the international confab — this one will be held Oct. 19-21 — we’ve already announced a great lineup, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; and Asus Chairman Jonny Shih.

Now, to add to that terrific lineup:

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. In that role, the dynamic exec is at the nexus of the Japanese company’s efforts around tablets, smartphones, gaming and more. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance over the arena, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use? It’s an important question and Horowitz’s job No. 1.

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android far in the lead, Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. The former top News Corp. exec is now a movie producer — his first effort, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” is a big hit. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. The former CTO of Nortel, he’s heading up global development of Huawei’s cloud services for both businesses and consumers. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there is no denying that it has been a golden time for Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including:

Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site that recently got a huge dose of funding and an equally large amount of controversy. How Airbnb can take the company to the next level, including across the world, while dealing with the kinds of challenges the small management team has to face, will be an interesting topic for discussion.

After stints as president of Asia Pacific and Latin America operations at Google and co-founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is trying her hand at a small start-up again. She’ll talk about how the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online, plans to expand globally.

Finally, longtime tech exec David Goldberg is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company. With stints as founder of music site Launch Media, which was bought by Yahoo, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital, he is the perfect person to explain what it’s like being an entrepreneur today in Silicon Valley.

We have even more speakers for AsiaD we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so get ready for what’s next.

Google+'s Horowitz Talks About Joining Board of Wordnik, as Online Dictionary Site Garners $8M More in Funding (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:14:34 +0000

Google+ kingpin Bradley Horowitz has joined the board of Wordnik, which has also just raised another round of funding of $8 million.

It’s the first board seat ever for Horowitz, who has been a bit busy of late launching the search giant’s first successful social networking product.

Wordnik, which claims to have the word’s most complete map of the language you are currently reading, was founded by Erin McKean, the former editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

On its Web site, Wordnik notes it has “billions of words, 965,125,300 example sentences, 6,690,770 unique words, 223,693 comments, 168,573 tags, 121,180 pronunciations, 61,144 favorites and 936,294 words in 30,038 lists created by 70,054 Wordniks.”

Its grand aim is to be the company that powers definitions and context for publishers of all kinds around the Web — from blogs to articles to even tweets — much as a mapping company might render navigational information.

The aim of owning the world’s largest word graph is ambitious and innovative, although the effort to create a viable business out of it all will be its next job. Wordnik now has 18 employees at its San Mateo, Calif., HQ.

McKean gave a demo of its Smartwords feature at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in 2010, after it had earlier raised $4.8 million from a number of venture firms and other angel investors.

Here’s an interview I did with McKean, Horowitz and Wordnik CEO Joe Hyrkin, who came on board in March, this weekend outside Buck’s in Woodside, as well as the video of the D8 demo of Wordnik:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here is the official press release about the new funding and Horowitz appointment:

BRADLEY HOROWITZ NAMED TO WORDNIK BOARD;
WORDNIK RAISES $8 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING

Horowitz Accepts First Board Appointment; New and Existing Investors Support Wordnik as it Takes Innovative Word/Context Discovery Capability to the Marketplace

SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 25, 2011 – Wordnik, maker of the most innovative word navigation system, today announced that Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google and longtime Silicon Valley executive, would join its board of directors. This is Horowitz’s first board appointment.

In addition, Wordnik has raised $8 million in its third round of venture capital funding, led by new investor Lucas Venture Group. Mohr Davidow Ventures, FLOODGATE, Baseline Ventures, Roger McNamee and additional private investors also participated in this round, which is earmarked to fund strategic growth as Wordnik builds out a range of new product and service offerings. This Series C investment brings Wordnik’s total funding to $12.8 million.

One of the most highly respected executives in the high-tech industry, Bradley Horowitz oversees product design for Google’s social and communications efforts including Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, and the recently launched Google+ Project. Before joining Google, Horowitz led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

“I’ve devoted my career to finding and working on innovative technologies,” said Horowitz. “In accepting my first Board appointment, I now have the opportunity to help guide Wordnik, a company that started with an incredibly innovative word navigation system, as it continues to offer deeper access to discovery and meaning across digital text. I know it will be a very rewarding experience.”

“Wordnik has changed the way consumers discover and interact with words by providing the most relevant context and meaning available anywhere,” said Joe Hyrkin, CEO of Wordnik. “With this investment from our longtime VC partners and strengthened by the addition of Bradley Horowitz to our board, we enter an exciting new phase for the company, building out our core technology and creating new leveraged offerings for a wide variety of content and commerce partners. Bradley brings us both great product insight and industry expertise, and will work with our founders, Erin McKean and Tony Tam, on future innovation.”

Wordnik was launched in 2008 with the mission to help people unlock the value of words and phrases and to discover what information is most personally meaningful. Wordnik’s technology provides additional access to content and context from a wide range of sources including the world’s most respected dictionaries, Wordnik users, and from unexpected places like Twitter and Flickr.

“Wordnik.com has offered consumers an easy way to gain more meaning and deeper context around words – kind of like a ‘GPS for words,’” said Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures. “The next frontier for Wordnik is to bring the power of Wordnik to a wide range of publishers and other content providers by providing the most relevant discovery experience for their users. We think Wordnik will quickly establish itself as a valuable asset to its business partners, in addition to its continuing as an exceptional consumer site.”

Facebook Moves Could Disallow Apps From Running Google Ads

Liz Gannes — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:07:46 +0000

Facebook announced this week it will begin enforcing a policy that requires app developers to run advertising from a list of approved providers. The list is not short–it includes 40-some options–but it notably does not include Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick.

Facebook is not necessarily targeting Google specifically, but it’s an obvious omission. The social networking giant said ad providers can join the list if they agree to certain restrictions on advertising, which include a commitment to never utilize Facebook user data.

Facebook and Google have warred over transmitting user data in the past, with a back-and-forth over exporting user email addresses turning nasty in public last fall.

Facebook will start enforcing the whitelist ad provider policy starting Feb. 28. At that point, app developers who run Google ads–which seems a natural thing to do, given so many publishers use Google ads on other platforms–will have to shut them off and find another provider.

A spokesperson for Facebook said, “We are continuing to work with various ad providers and will add them to the list as they sign the terms. Note that the policy doesn’t go into effect for a few more weeks.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Google declined to comment.

The CEO of an approved ad provider commented that Facebook’s efforts to “restore control and authority of how third-party companies work within its platform” make sense and are generally good for users. (And also good for him, with Google out of the hunt!)

Image via Flickr user bulliver.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

At Least Andrew Mason's Goat Rodeo of Groupon Investors Will Be Fun to Watch!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:01:22 +0000

Next week, at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, BoomTown will be interviewing one of my favorite start-up CEOs: Andrew Mason of Groupon.

And what’s my very first question for the adorkable toast of the digital town, who has just collected a billion dollars in funding, giving his hot social buying site a $4.75 billion valuation?

No, it’s not about what Mason is going to do with all that moolah.

Not, it’s not about why Groupon spurned the $6 billion acquisition offer from Google (and the Yahoo one before that).

No, it’s not about what hair care products Mason uses to get his hair looking so much like Justin Bieber’s coif.

Most of all, what I want to know is how he’s going to manage his ridiculously large–and, let’s be honest, very opinionated–investor group, which is made up of a big chunk of the digital arena’s most prominent VC firms, institutional investors and angels.

Consider the list, which is much more diverse than Facebook’s at a similar time in its gestation (and, in fact, it feels a lot like the social networking site’s current investor stampede):

Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group (formerly DST Global), Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis and others.

(How in the world is the ubiquitous Ron Conway not shoved in this pig pile? Or is he?)

And, of course, the inevitable Allen & Company acted as financial advisor for this massive funding, which also feels like a bit of a private pre-IPO.

It will be interesting to see exactly whom among this shareholder group that Mason and the other top Groupon execs will listen to and who will have the most influence over the next year.

None of the new moneybags got a board seat, which is probably a good thing. As most entrepreneurs know all too well, investors can be a tricky thing–at once helpful and then not so much.

Mason, a clearly gifted exec, certainly has his hands full now, managing expectations for the fast-growing company, as well as the business itself.

Let’s hope that now that this surreal investor sideshow circus is over, that Groupon’s precious time can be focused on just that.

Qualcomm Makes It Official, Grabs Atheros for $3.1 Billion

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:42:04 +0000

Qualcomm, the chipmaker devoted to the wireless handset business, announced today the first major tech acquisition of the year, and the biggest deal in its history, saying it will pay $3.1 billion in cash for Atheros, a chipmaker whose business is in wireless networking.

As I noted yesterday, there are lots of reasons for Qualcomm to want Atheros, not the least of which is its extensive customer list.

Qualcomm’s specialty has always been in CDMA technology, the flavor of mobile phone technology favored by Verizon Wireless and Sprint, and it collects considerable royalties around its patent portfolio there. It has struggled to penetrate other markets, and last year shuttered its FloTV operation amid minimal demand. The good news was that it sold its FloTV spectrum to AT&T for $1.93 billion, which is no doubt offsetting the cost of this deal. Add that to the $10.3 billion in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet as of Sept. 26 and this is an easy deal to do.

It’s also the biggest deal in Qualcomm’s history and the first significant one under CEO Paul Jacobs, who is the son of founder Irwin Jacobs.

Atheros shareholders have plenty of reasons to smile today as well. The company’s stock price surged by 19 percent yesterday. At $45 a share, Qualcomm is paying more than Atheros has ever been worth in its entire history as a publicly held company. As Shira Ovide over at Deal Journal notes, its highest price before yesterday was $43.90. Happy New Year, indeed.

I caught up with Qualcomm Executive Vice President Steve Mollenkopf and Atheros CEO Craig Barratt to talk about the deal.

NewEnterprise: Steve, let’s start with you. What got Qualcomm interested in Atheros?

Mollenkopf: Historically Qualcomm has been focused on the cellular phone, though recently we’ve done much more than that. We had some integration relationships with some companies that allow us to deliver a platform to our customers. They’re essentially technical relationships, and one of those companies was Atheros. So we were familiar with them. But the real reason, the why Atheros and why now question comes down to this. We think the industry is moving to a place where a lot of the technology and use cases that are being created as part of the shift to smartphones will be used outside of just phones, and will move into many adjacent spaces. The requirement of technology and different customers overlap a lot with Atheros. They’re a leader in their space, we’re a leader in ours and we want to go into markets that will require the expertise from both of us. It seemed natural, actually.

Craig, the idea for the acquisition seems to have grown out of an existing partnership. When did the talk turn from being Qualcomm’s partner to becoming part of Qualcomm?

Barratt: The partnership has gone on for about five years, where we’ve cooperated on joint reference and designs and software and feature integration. Over the years we’ve broadened out from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, powerline and optical networking. We do have a much more horizontal business. Qualcomm has a very strong vertical business. Through our partnership we saw the teams had a good cultural fit, the engineering teams really respect each other. When we looked at our own strategic imperatives over the long term, we saw that cellular technologies are going to be applied in a much broader markets over time, beyond just smartphones and tablets. There’s an intersection between the Qualcomm technology and our technology, and that’s only going to increase. You’ve probably heard that set-top boxes and things like that are going to start to run Android. So a lot of these mobile technologies are going to start showing up in things like the connected home. Strategically it all started to make sense.

And what will your new job be at Qualcomm?

Barratt: After the acquisition closes, which should be in the first half of 2011, my role will be president of Qualcomm Networking and Connectivity, reporting to Steve.

Steve, if I’m not mistaken, this is the biggest deal that Qualcomm has ever done.

Mollenkopf: You’re correct. For us on the Qualcomm side this is a big step toward expanding our business beyond our traditional platform business and we’re doing it in a way that is in line with how the industry is changing. A lot of the things we’ve been doing with Atheros are things we’ve already been doing as part of our relationship, so this is a natural next step.

Web Commerce Isn't Really Social…Yet

Liz Gannes — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 05:24:20 +0000

My colleague Tricia Duryee has an excellent post up on eMoney about the big trends in e-commerce: Mobile, local and social. But when you think about massive new Web commerce businesses like Groupon and Gilt Groupe, they’re barely social at all.

Sites like Gilt are supposedly exclusive discount fashion communities, but the reality is they will take anyone who will pay. Groupon, which just got Google to say it was worth as much as $6 billion and is on the verge of an investor valuation of $4.75 billion, is a glorified email list. Sure, users must swarm a deal to activate it, but that always happens. And users can share deals with their friends on Facebook and Twitter, earning referral rewards if they buy a deal.

Hitwise researcher Bill Tancer told me via email that only 8.3 percent of Groupon traffic comes from social media referrals. That’s compared to 24 percent of Groupon traffic coming from shopping and classifieds Web pages (as in, ads) and 13 percent from email sites.

Upstream traffic from social networks as a portion of total Groupon traffic declined 83 percent from Nov. 9 to Nov. 10. Tancer said the move from social networks to email reflects the shift of Groupon visitors from early adopters to mainstream users.

The thing is, as seen particularly in the gaming business, social may have the capacity to be an incredible multiplier for any industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said more than once that he thinks e-commerce will be one of the next big sectors to be disrupted by companies that are built to be social from the ground up.

Linking social with commerce is tricky. Besides user reviews and accounts, which have been around forever, much of social commerce is very basic.

For example, Amazon recently launched the most minimal of minimal Facebook integrations, recommending products based on opted-in users’ public “Likes” and giving gift suggestions for friends with upcoming birthdays. The Web retailer could have gone much deeper, by, for instance, automatically connecting Amazon users to their Facebook accounts or helping users tell friends about new items they have bought.

But that would have raised privacy hackles, as with previous Facebook initiatives, such as the discontinued Facebook Beacon effort or the current Instant Personalization program.

Some retailers are trying to sell things directly on Facebook, such as Delta Air Lines tickets and JCPenney apparel. I see the point of trying to capture users on the sites where they spend all their time, but it seems a little awkward.

Not to say Facebook isn’t already developing a burgeoning business in virtual e-commerce through its gaming partners that could eventually extend to real-world goods (although the margins would be much worse).

And, yes, there are all sorts of real-world deals you can access by playing the “mayor game” on a local social service like Foursquare.

Also on the start-up front, the collage community Polyvore arranges deals and creates tools to help its two million users influence fashion designers, and indie retailer Moxsie asks its Twitter followers to help it choose what items to sell.

There are also start-ups, like Payvment and Milyoni, that provide tools for Facebook storefronts. And the purchase-sharing platforms Blippy and Swipely are social commerce taken to the extreme.

While none of those are Groupon-scale businesses, there are many playing around with the potentially explosive combination of social and commerce.

One cool example of social commerce I just saw today was in a post by E.B. Boyd at Fast Company.

Tea Collection, a boutique children’s clothing maker, used the Facebook Like button to decide which of its selection of discontinued girls’ dresses to deeply discount. When a $59 dress was chosen by user Likes, it was discounted to $10. It quickly sold out at a loss, but additional purchases by customers brought in by the sale gave the company one of its biggest overall sales days ever.

Mobilized Offers Some New Year's Resolutions for the Mobile Industry

Ina Fried — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:00:48 +0000

While I’m not privy to their actual New Year’s resolutions, here’s my list of what I imagine is making the lists in Cupertino, Espoo, Mountain View, Redmond, Seoul and elsewhere. To be clear, this isn’t my opinion on what anyone’s resolutions should be, it’s just my summary of what they actually seem to be.

Palm: Stay the cool kid at Hewlett-Packard, so it’ll keep giving us lots of toys and not merge the smartphone acquisition into the PC unit. Release that tablet we’ve been working on and get our phones out of the clearance section of the stores. Remember to include “and printers” on all our slides when asking for more money.

Microsoft: We were going to copy and paste from last year’s resolutions, but it turns out we can’t copy and paste yet. So, that’s resolution No. 1. But since we’re going to solve that in January, we’ll move on to some other ambitions. Let’s see, open up to more developers, convince developers we’re worth their time, add features, support more networks.

Hmm. Last year’s “Try not to suck so much” is starting to seem easy by comparison.

Research in Motion: Learn some new ways of saying “Everything is great,” so it doesn’t get too repetitive in public speeches. Meanwhile, keep shaking things up behind the scenes. Buy a few more companies. Get some apps for that PlayBook. Find some more really big countries that the other people are ignoring and sell them a boatload of BlackBerrys.

Samsung: Keep going with this whole Galaxy thing–it worked to the tune of about 10 million phones this year. Try to convince Google phone king Andy Rubin to get a tattoo that reads “Galaxy S smartphone.” Remind the carriers that they really did agree to market all our phones that way.

HTC: Good thing we went Android a couple years back, but now we’re kind of glad we didn’t give up on Microsoft. Now, we have to figure out how to convince them to let us customize Windows Phone 7.

Motorola: Keep telling Verizon and Google that they’ve hurt our feelings and see what other perks we can get via guilt. Hey, it worked well with that tablet, didn’t it?

Apple: We are already perfect, so where do you go from there? Follow a magical 2010 with an even more magical 2011. How’s that?

What else? Let’s see. Okay, here’s one: Keep trashing smaller tablets until the day we come out with one.

Google: Release six or seven more versions of Android. Rename “Nexus Tablet You Should Have Made” to something less insulting to the hardware makers. Travel to foreign countries and discover more desserts, because we’re running out of code names for the next version of the tasty mobile operating system.

Nokia: Ship something to the U.S. so they’ll stop making fun of us and realize that we actually do make smartphones. Speaking of shipping, we really should ship some of these products we’ve been talking about for years. Most people are starting to think “Meego” is just a code word we use when we don’t know what to say.

Verizon: Stay on Steve Jobs’s good side. Print iPhone posters on the back of all those Droid billboards from last year. Release a whole bunch of LTE phones, so that the iPhone shelf isn’t lonely in the stores.

AT&T: Work on next-generation networks using that spectrum we picked up from Qualcomm. Talk about how we really love the other non-iPhone smartphones and actually mean it this year, because we have to.

T-Mobile: Keep talking about how we can just keep making the current network faster, while trying to convince the feds to let us have some more spectrum. Make more of those commercials making fun of AT&T. They are funny and it’s so much easier than having to deal with Catherine Zeta-Jones. And lots of Android, along with some tablets too.

Sprint: Find a way to remind people that, while we still don’t have an iPhone, we do have a next-generation network up and running, complete with phones and data devices. Add a 4G tablet or two to the mix. (Hey, Jon Rubinstein, is that PalmPad ready yet?)

Trying Out a Revamped Myspace

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:02:26 +0000

Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, it’s easy to assume that all social networks are designed primarily to connect friends with one another. But many of these networks—think Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn—aren’t focused on that. Instead, they provide information from strangers, business contacts and group postings on a variety of topics. Myspace is now also shifting in this direction after Facebook decisively overtook it as the most popular social network.

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

[ See post to watch video ]

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Top Docs on Scribd in 2010: Prop 8, P ? NP, GOP Pledge

Liz Gannes — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:00:25 +0000

Document-sharing site Scribd has compiled its own year-end list for 2010, ranking its user-uploaded docs by the number of times they were shared, commented on, liked, starred and embedded.

In the No. 1 spot was the California District Court ruling on gay-marriage voter initiative Proposition 8. Uploaded by GoodAsYou.org shortly after the ruling came out in August, the document was Scribd’s most viral ever. The start-up provided a timeline showing how it was spread (image embedded; click to enlarge).

We should note that Scribd did not provide a list of docs ranked by number of views. CEO Trip Adler said such a list would be dominated by random items that have good search engine optimization, like a scan of an Indian phone book that has long been one of Scribd’s most-viewed documents of all time. Scribd, which now has 60 million monthly uniques, attributes much of its growth to its improvement of social sharing features.

The No. 2 most-shared doc on Scribd in 2010 was the surprising claim of proof of the computer science problem P ? NP from earlier this year. Uploaded by Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs in August, the paper seemed to show that a class of computationally intensive problems could not be solved using simple algorithms.

In the third spot was the Republican political platform “GOP Pledge to America,” uploaded in September by CBS News. The draft lays out policy principles on the economy, healthcare and national security.

I find it interesting that Scribd’s most social documents are more often notable for newsworthiness than timelessness. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments earlier this month appealing the Prop 8 decision that was posted on Scribd. And as for P ? NP, while many computer scientists believe the claim in the paper on Scribd is correct, the proof itself is not seen as conclusive.

The rest of Scribd’s 2010 social docs list is a similar mix of newsworthy documents and research, as well as a little levity, including a list of 25 macaroni-and-cheese recipes.

California Prop 8 Ruling (Good As You)
PNP 12 pt (Angelica Lim)
GOP Pledge to America (CBS News)
Scribd in HTML5 (Scribd)
A Statement to the Viewers of Countdown (Brian Stelter)
Marijuana Is Safer (Chelsea Green)
Cognitive Biases–A Visual Study Guide (Efern211)
Using Facebook to Move Your Business Forward (Facebook)
25 Mac & Cheese Recipes (Gooseberry Patch)
Influence and Passivity in Social Media (Hewlett-Packard)

25 Mac & Cheese Recipes by Gooseberry Patch

Facebook Is Best U.S. Place to Work (According to Its Employees)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 05:01:14 +0000

Facebook employees think their company is a great place to work. In fact, among users of the jobs site Glassdoor, the social networking powerhouse was the top-ranked U.S. employer for 2010, scoring a rating of 4.6 out of 5.

Facebook-branded Vitaminwater

Those smug smarties from Palo Alto, Calif. (disclosure: my husband works there part-time, so I can say that with some bit of certainty) say they love the openness and cooperativeness of internal Facebook culture, according to Glassdoor (as well as the free food and commuter shuttles).

This is the first time Facebook has made the Glassdoor list. In second place is Southwest Airlines–which was last year’s winner–followed by Bain & Company, General Mills and Edelman, respectively.

As for other tech companies, SAS Institute placed No. 7, Overstock.com was No. 9 and CareerBuilder No. 11. Apple was No. 20 and Google No. 30.

Meanwhile, in more surprising news, Glassdoor reports that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is actually more popular now than founder Jerry Yang when he was in the top spot. Bartz has an employee approval rating of 56 percent, compared to 34 percent for Yang when he left.

Other comparisons: HP CEO Léo Apotheker has 62 percent approval, compared to Mark Hurd’s 34 percent when he left, and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has 71 percent approval, compared to Randy Falco’s 13 percent approval when he left.

The most popular tech CEO is Apple’s Steve Jobs, with a 97 percent approval rating. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt are both at 96 percent.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

"Hit Me Up" Was Facebook's Breakout Slang in 2010

Liz Gannes — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:00:18 +0000

I suppose I’m a sucker for year-end trend lists, given I’ve written up reports about trends from YouTube, Twitter and Google in just the last few days. In short: Bieber, Bieber, Bieber.

Next up is Facebook, which offers aggregated data about trends in the status updates posted by its members, including their activity around major news events and their usage of slang.

The best anecdote from the bit is about a newly popular acronym on Facebook, “HMU.” This comes after Facebook noted in 2009 the growth of the trendy whine “FML. (Explanation: We’ll leave the “F” open to your imagination, but the “ML” stand for “My Life.”) Here’s the whole explanation of HMU by Facebook data scientist Lars Backstrom:

The shorthand for “hit me up” was this year’s biggest surprise. In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day–too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year’s list.

However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

In early September, an interesting pattern emerged in how people use HMU. Until that point, it was spreading like wildfire, but was being used with roughly equal frequency throughout the week. In September this changed, as usage rates started going through huge swings from day to day. The reason? Before September the demographic most likely to ask their friends to “HMU” was on summer break and looking to hang out most nights. Then many of these folks headed back to school, and HMU became a weekend-oriented request.

Some notable stats from the Facebook 2010 roundup:

At key moments in certain games during the World Cup, as many as 50 percent of all new status updates were World Cup-related.
“Toy Story 3″ was the movie most mentioned in status updates, followed by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Inception,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Iron Man 2.”
Mentions of the iPad and iPhone 4 accounted for 25 million total Facebook status updates. (I’m not sure what the total number of status updates for the year was.)
A day after the Haiti earthquake Facebook was receiving 1,800 posts per minute on the topic.
Yes, Bieber. People talked about the teenage pop star throughout the year, but the single greatest statused-about Bieber moment was the MTV Video Music Awards.
Facebook could identify 33 separate activity spikes for when each of the Chilean miners was rescued.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Top iOS Apps of 2010: Flipboard, Hipstamatic, Plants Vs. Zombies and Osmos

John Paczkowski — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:45:50 +0000

Just nine days into December and the “Best of 2010″ lists are already piling up like early snow. The latest, Apple’s iTunes Rewind, highlights the store’s most popular content of the year and, while its lists of music and movies are certainly worth a look, its breakdown of popular iOS apps is most interesting. Apple’s top selections for the year–Flipboard, Hipstamatic, Plants vs. Zombies and Osmos. Below, the top 10 winners divided up by category.

Top 10 Paid iPad Apps

Pages

GoodReader for iPad

Numbers

Angry Birds HD

Keynote

Glee Karaoke

WolframAlpha

Pinball HD

Friendly for Facebook

Star Walk for iPad

Top 10 Free iPad Apps

iBooks

Pandora Radio

Netflix

Google Mobile App

Solitaire

Movies by Flixster–with Rotten Tomatoes

IMDb Movies & TV

Kindle

Google Earth

Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD

Top 10 Grossing iPad Apps

Pages

Numbers

Keynote

LogMeIn Ignition

SCRABBLE for iPad

Documents To Go® Premium–Office Suite

Angry Birds HD

Real Racing HD

Plants vs. Zombies HD

Proloquo2Go

Top 10 Paid iPhone Apps

Angry Birds

Doodle Jump

Skee-Ball

Bejeweled 2 + Blitz

Fruit Ninja

Cut the Rope

ALL-IN-1 GAMEBOX

The Moron Test

Plants vs. Zombies

Pocket God

Top 10 Free iPhone Apps

Facebook

Angry Birds Lite

Words With Friends Free

Skype

Tap Tap Revenge 3

The Weather Channel®

Paper Toss

Bing

ROCK BAND FREE

Talking Tom Cat

Top 10 Grossing iPhone Apps

MLB.com At Bat 2010

Angry Birds

Call of Duty: Zombies

Bejeweled 2 + Blitz

FriendCaller 3 Pro

Zombie Farm

TomTom U.S.A.

TETRIS®

Plants vs. Zombies

Doodle Jump

Viral Video: 2010 As Told Through Google Products

Liz Gannes — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:10:29 +0000

For 2010, Google dressed up its annual Zeitgeist list of fastest-rising search terms with nifty HTML5 data visualizations and a music video that sums up the year while simultaneously demonstrating uses of all sorts of Google products, including new ones like Google Instant search, voice dialing in Gmail and YouTube Leanback:

Google says its single fastest-rising search term of the year was “Chatroulette,” which peaked way back in March. However, it appears from the explainer page that Google may have included searches for the generic term “chat” in the category.

Also on the fastest-rising list (as compared with 2009′s) were the iPad; pop stars Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry; the social sites Twitter and Facebook; the ringtone site Myxer; and the game sites Friv (extremely popular in Albania and Colombia) and GameZer (big in the Middle East). Less popular this year were swine flu, New Moon and Myspace Layouts.

Is My Email Address My Identity?

Liz Gannes — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:46:31 +0000

Google and Facebook may act like toddlers fighting over a toy, but there is a lot more going on in their recent too-public spat about user emails.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

No Facebook User Emails for Google–But Yahoo and Microsoft Already Have Access

Liz Gannes — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:06:47 +0000

Facebook and Google are hardly friends these days, and they’re having more and more trouble containing their dislike. (Maybe they should take a hint from Jimmy Kimmel and his National UnFriend Day campaign.)

Background: Last week, Google stopped allowing Facebook to help its users find their friends by importing their Gmail contacts list. Google said the move was about data portability and liberation, calling Facebook a “data dead end” because it wasn’t giving its users’ email addresses to Google.

Facebook yesterday found a workaround to re-enable Google contacts importing, and Facebook engineering lead Mike Vernal commented on TechCrunch at length under his own name, charging Google with hypocrisy for disallowing contact importing for Orkut last year and “limiting user choice.”

What’s funny, though, as sources have pointed out to us, is that Facebook actually does allow email importing, specifically to Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail (we checked AOL mail too, but couldn’t find it there).

This is no secret; Yahoo launched its Facebook email contact importer in March of this year. In a blog post at the time, senior product manager Rick Pal said,

Importing from Facebook is super simple…After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

Update: Microsoft confirmed through a spokesperson that its Windows Live users can import both Facebook and Gmail contacts, and said some nice stuff about its commitment to customer choice.

Access to user emails isn’t something Facebook gives just anyone. In fact, only a few partners can hook into them while the rest have to rely on users’ Facebook-formatted information available through Facebook Connect. That includes Google. The difference, according to a source, is that Yahoo and Microsoft asked nicely.

Please see my disclosure related to Facebook here.

DOJ, Tech Companies Settle Hiring Probe

John Paczkowski — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:51:05 +0000

The U.S. Department of Justice has reached an agreement with six major Silicon Valley companies over their employee recruiting practices and alleged no-poaching agreements. The companies named in the settlement: Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Intel (INTC), Adobe (ADBE), Intuit (INTU) and Pixar. Said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Molly Boast, “The agreements challenged here restrained competition for affected employees without any procompetitive justification.”

The official release below:

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REQUIRES SIX HIGH TECH COMPANIES TO STOP ENTERING INTO ANTICOMPETITIVE EMPLOYEE SOLICITATION AGREEMENTS

Settlement Preserves Competition for High Tech Employees

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice announced today that it has reached a settlement with six high technology companies–Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc. and Pixar–that prevents them from entering into no solicitation agreements for employees. The department said that the agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division filed a civil antitrust complaint today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, along with a proposed settlement that, if approved by the court, would resolve the lawsuit.

According to the complaint, the six companies entered into agreements that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees. The agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar and Google and Intel prevented the companies from directly soliciting each other’s employees. An agreement between Google and Intuit prevented Google from directly soliciting Intuit employees.

“The agreements challenged here restrained competition for affected employees without any procompetitive justification and distorted the competitive process,” said Molly S. Boast, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. “The proposed settlement resolves the department’s antitrust concerns with regard to these no solicitation agreements.”

In the high technology sector, there is a strong demand for employees with advanced or specialized skills, the department said. One of the principal means by which high tech companies recruit these types of employees is to solicit them directly from other companies in a process referred to as, “cold calling.” This form of competition, when unrestrained, results in better career opportunities, the department said.

According to the complaint, the companies engaged in a practice of agreeing not to cold call any employee at the other company. The complaint indicates that the agreements were formed and actively managed by senior executives of these companies.

The complaint alleges that the companies’ actions reduced their ability to compete for high tech workers and interfered with the proper functioning of the price-setting mechanism that otherwise would have prevailed in competition for employees. None of the agreements was limited by geography, job function, product group or time period. Thus, they were broader than reasonably necessary for any collaboration between the companies, the department said.

The department said in its complaint:

Beginning no later than 2006, Apple and Google executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Google on its internal “Do Not Call List,” which instructed employees not to directly solicit employees from the listed companies. Similarly, Google listed Apple among the companies that had special agreements with Google and were part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list;

Beginning no later than May 2005, senior Apple and Adobe executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Adobe on its internal “Do Not Call List” and similarly, Adobe included Apple in its internal list of “Companies that are off limits”;

Beginning no later than April 2007, Apple and Pixar executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Pixar on its internal “Do Not Call List” and senior executives at Pixar instructed human resources personnel to adhere to the agreement and maintain a paper trail;

Beginning no later than September 2007, Google and Intel executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google listed Intel among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list. Similarly, Intel instructed its human resources staff about the existence of the agreement; and

In June 2007, Google and Intuit executives agreed that Google would not cold call any Intuit employee. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google also listed Intuit among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list.

The proposed settlement, which if accepted by the court will be in effect for five years, prohibits the companies from engaging in anticompetitive no solicitation agreements. Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees. The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

Today’s complaint arose out of a larger investigation by the Antitrust Division into employment practices by high tech firms. The division continues to investigate other similar no solicitation agreements.

Adobe Systems Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Jose, Calif., and 2009 revenues of nearly $3 billion. Apple Inc. is a California corporation with its principal place of business in Cupertino, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $42 billion. Google Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Mountain View, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $23 billion. Intel Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Santa Clara, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $35 billion. Intuit Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Mountain View, Calif., and 2009 revenues more than $3 billion. Pixar is a California corporation with its principal place of business in Emeryville, Calif.

The proposed settlement, along with the department’s competitive impact statement, will be published in The Federal Register, as required by the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act. Any person may submit written comments concerning the proposed settlement within 60 days of its publication to James J. Tierney, Chief, Networks & Technology Enforcement Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 Fifth Street N.W., Suite 7100, Washington D.C. 20530. At the conclusion of the 60-day comment period, the court may enter the final judgment upon a finding that it serves the public interest.

Update: Zappos's Tony Hsieh on His Magical Happiness Bus Tour and Hugging It Out With BoomTown

Kara Swisher — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:30:28 +0000

Also, while in Vancouver, BoomTown tried to avoid the happiness-fueled stalking by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online retailer Zappos.

To no avail.

I interviewed Hsieh (as well as Groupon’s Andrew Mason) onstage at the Grow2010 conference. Hsieh’s topic was his new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.”

It came out in June and is all over the bestseller lists, and Hsieh is now headed on a nationwide bus tour to promote it.

You can see my video interview with him below, in which he discusses his fervent intent to hug me. Also other stuff.

Amazon (AMZN) certainly gave a bear hug to the company, buying Zappos last summer in a deal valued at about $850 million.

It was a good idea, since Zappos is well known for its culture of intense happiness, both in its high level of customer service and the enthusiasm of employees of the company, which started as a Web shoe retailer but has been expanding its offerings.

I actually went to Zappos’s Las Vegas HQ and terrorized its very friendly “Mayor” Jerry Tidmore, and also talked to Hsieh then. Both videos are also below.

Here is the update with Hsieh:

[ See post to watch video ]

Online Privacy Follies Hit Home: BoomTown Was One of Those Exposed in the AT&T iPad Snafu

Kara Swisher — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:15:42 +0000

Yesterday, it was revealed that AT&T–which usually and deservedly catches flak for its appalling dropping of voice calls–got caught up in a thorny security debacle related to the Apple iPad.

According to a report initially posted on Gawker Media’s Valleywag site, the telecom giant had a flaw that allowed a group of computer experts to expose the email addresses and identity numbers of 114,000 owners of the popular tablet device.

Including mine.

That would be my personal one from Comcast (CMCSA), which you can see here in an obscured list of others–including some prominent officials in government.

AT&T (T) had my email because it was used to sign up for mobile service for the Apple (AAPL) iPad’s 3G version, automatically appearing during registration.

Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the AT&T breach, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, in what seems to be an early probe.

Oooh, the Feds are involved now.

I wish I could say it will make a difference. Because it won’t.

In fact, coming on the heels of privacy controversies at Facebook and Google (GOOG), it’s just another log on the digital fire that has been burning up privacy for a very long time now.

And now more than ever, it is part of a massive confluence of trends, including:

Consumers more interested than ever in sharing information about themselves in order to make ever better social networking connections online; a plethora of innovative devices–mostly mobile–and Internet tools available to seamlessly and easily allow those consumers to do so; and, perhaps most of all, Internet companies intent on hoovering up as much information as possible, in order to garner more consumers and sell it to advertisers.

In large part, this is all well and good, creating a range of valuable and entertaining services at little or no cost and making the computing experience more personal and relevant.

Because of that, I have to admit I was less tweaked than I thought I would be, although I wish I were not.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose email was also compromised, expressed the feeling best.

“It shouldn’t be pretty hard to figure out my email address,” he was quoted saying in the Journal article. “To me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

That’s because all of us are thinking less that such information is private or will remain that way for long.

See this handy illustration, below, from the Journal, about how the iPads were hacked so easily and you get the picture quickly.

And, indeed, I am one of those who puts a great deal of information about myself out there for many to see, from my email on Facebook to my locations on Foursquare to my thoughts on Twitter to photos and videos everywhere.

That said, like others, I have also begun to rethink some of this, recently removing my phone number and other personal information from Facebook and other places where I had stashed them in plain sight, making them harder to find.

Of course, I also know that retrieving much of my personal information is now a lost cause, like trying to unmix cream poured into coffee.

Still, companies, especially those entrusted with this information, should not be quite so sanguine as consumers have become.

I still haven’t heard from AT&T, for example, which is somewhat irksome since the company has known about the issue for days now.

And as each of these incidents occurs, you get the feeling of execs either too obtuse or thoughtless or, yes, cynical to make this a priority.

They should, since the avalanche of information being made available will only increase, with possibly dire circumstances if not handled well.

Hollywood actress Joan Crawford had it right in a famous quote: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Substitute “Digital living” for love and it’s the very same message.

Scott McNealy's Top 15 Reasons He's Surprised We're Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Web

Kara Swisher — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:30:16 +0000

Last night, BoomTown headed to San Francisco’s wedding-cake City Hall to attend “The 25 Years of .Com Gala,” which is honoring a quarter-century that I have been jacked into the matrix.

Actually, it’s the 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name.

VeriSign (VRSN), which administers the .com registry, sponsored the party, as well as a recent confab in Washington, D.C.

While the growth of .com was slow until the browser became popularized–numbering under 15,000 addresses in 1992–there are now close to 85 million .com domains. This innovative commercial designation is clearly the most important one, both financially and perceptually.

Thus, time to party at an event emceed by Web 1.0 comic favorite Dana Carvey.

He was funny, but perhaps the most enjoyable blast from the past was the appearance of jeans-clad former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who most definitely retains the title of Clown Prince of Silicon Valley as the needler-in-chief of then-dominant Microsoft (MSFT).

After being one of the superstars of Web 1.0, the wise-cracking McNealy has been missing in action in tech of late, as Sun’s influence waned. The company was sold to Oracle (ORCL) recently.

Ironically, given all the hubbub over Facebook’s privacy screw-ups this week, it was McNealy who famously said in a 1999 interview: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

For last night’s crowd, he rendered a very adorkable list of the many reasons he was surprised that the .com was getting feted.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]