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"Bromance Gone Awry" and Other Instagram Tidbits on Bloomberg West (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:55:51 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accel's Breyer Leads Forbes Midas List of Top Tech Investors Again, While Kleiner's Doerr Leads in Media Scrutiny

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:12:13 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SpinMedia Adds Vibe Magazine to Its Digital Portfolio, Minus the Magazine

Peter Kafka — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:00:20 +0000

Last year, Steve Hansen bought Spin magazine, killed the print edition, and kept the website.

Now he’s singing the same song with a new title: Hansen’s SpinMedia is buying Vibe, the 20-year-old hip-hop and R&B magazine, from a consortium led by Intermedia and Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies. It plans on ending Vibe’s print run in the coming months, and will add Vibe.com to its roster of 40+ pop culture and music sites.

This will be bad news for some of Vibe Media’s 52 employees, who are being told today that layoffs will accompany the change of ownership. Hansen said that after the cuts — an “inevitable consequence” of the deal — Vibe will be left as a “substantially standalone property for the next three to six months.”

Eventually, the plan will be to integrate Vibe into SpinMedia’s tech platform and ad sales machine, Hansen said. Vibe is a small site — comScore says 1.4 million people visit its Web and mobile sites each month — but Hansen said it will be valuable because it “reinforces us as a market leader in the 18-to-34 demographic,” and adds Vibe’s “multicultural readership” to SpinMedia’s marketing pitch. (Lots of people have made that assumption: Vibe has had multiple owners, and one shutdown, in the last couple decades.)

Hansen, who came to the company last summer and took over the CEO spot late last year, also said he is raising more money, in the “mid-to-high seven figures,” to help him expand SpinMedia. The company (which changed its name itself from Buzzmedia to SpinMedia in March) just raised $15 million a few months ago. But Hansen said he acquired Vibe with equity, not cash.

As with Spin, Hansen said he’s not ruling out a return to print for Vibe. Someday, somehow. But he doesn’t sound like he’s planning on returning to ink and paper anytime soon.

“We’re still trying to find a print model that works with digital economics, and that continues to be a challenge,” he said. “It’s not as though I have an aversion to print. It’s just a matter of the economics.”

Time 100 List Is Packed With Techies -- From Musk to Systrom to Sandberg and More

Kara Swisher — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:38:29 +0000

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

An Amazonian Challenge: Jason Del Rey Joins All Things Digital, Covering Online Commerce

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:06:36 +0000

We are thrilled to welcome Jason Del Rey to the staff of AllThingsD, where the accomplished reporter will be covering e-commerce.

That includes such critical companies as Amazon, Groupon, eBay and the fast-growing online payments business, as well the escalation of the Internet of Things and the continued mashup of the offline and online worlds.

Del Rey is perfectly suited to the task, having been a business journalist since 2007, when he joined Inc. magazine in order to write about startups and fast-growing small businesses across all industries.

He was most recently a reporter at Advertising Age, where he covered older digital media companies such as Yahoo and AOL, and upstarts such as BuzzFeed and Gawker Media.

Del Rey has also worked as the executive editor of Open Forum, a Web publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The entire AllThingsD staff is thrilled to welcome Jason, who will be starting in two weeks.

New Flipboard: News and Posts Handpicked and Shared

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:02:58 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

One of the best ways of following topics that are interesting to you is Flipboard, a popular app for Apple and Android mobile devices that automatically turns social-network posts and news from online publications into beautiful, magazine-like pages you “flip” through by swiping.

Now, a new second generation of Flipboard, out Tuesday, is extending the app so it allows users to create and share their own handsome digital magazines with a few clicks and without any design talent required. If you make your magazine public, anyone with Flipboard, which is a free app, can read it and comment on it.

I’ve been testing this new version of Flipboard, which has some other improved features, over the past week or so, on several iPads and an iPhone. My verdict is the new features make a great mobile app even better. There are some limitations to the new capabilities, but they make your mobile device more personal and more of a creative tool, rather than just a means of consumption. For now, the new version is only available for Apple’s devices, but an Android edition is in the works.

Walt Mossberg’s Flipboard magazine on the American Revolution

The original Flipboard, which is produced by a small, private Silicon Valley company of the same name, was aimed at helping people wade through the welter of information on social networks and the Web, by allowing them to corral posts on popular topics like, say, baking or basketball, into attractive collections. The company says that capability has earned it 50 million registered users and a smaller, but active, core group of millions who use it daily.

I have long used Flipboard to follow tech and political news, or to leaf through everything posted on Twitter or Facebook by particular people or sites. These collections would update as new posts meeting the criteria appeared. If I had a collection about, say, the economy or smartphones, based on tweets on those subjects, it would stay current, showing me automatically any Web pages referenced within those tweets.

With the new personal magazine feature, however, I can make my own Flipboard-hosted publications on particular topics of interest, handpicking the posts or articles I want to include, rather than relying on feeds or algorithms. And it’s easy to do. When you find a post, video or article you want to include in your magazine, you just click a plus button next to it, choose which of your magazines to “flip it” into and it appears in that magazine. The magazine only updates when you decide to update it with a new article, photo or video. The original creators are credited.

Above, one person’s Flipboard page with personal magazines and subscriptions

During my testing, I made five magazines, some public and some private. Since these were just for testing, they weren’t carefully created. But I was impressed by how quickly I could produce them and how nicely Flipboard laid them out, with handsome cover photos, bold headlines and a logical arrangement of photos and articles.

I made public magazines on the American Revolution, Ancient Wonders, the Boston Red Sox and my favorite current TV dramas. I also made a private magazine to store content I wanted to read later.

This process is greatly helped by a much-enhanced search feature in Flipboard, which finds items both in Flipboard itself and in a long list of social networks and sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and streams of content, called RSS feeds, produced by various sites.

You can add content to your magazines using a special bookmark for most browsers on PCs or Macs. When you see something on the Web you’d like in one of your magazines, click this bookmark and a small Flipboard window opens with thumbnails of your magazines, allowing you to add the item. Alas, this bookmark is very difficult to install on the browsers on the iPad and iPhone.

There’s a new Notifications feature that tells you when people have liked or commented on your magazines. A “By Our Readers” feature suggests public magazines the Flipboard staff considers outstanding.

Publishers are making use of the new magazine feature in Flipboard. Esquire has created a magazine that’s a collection of its interviews and Rolling Stone has published a Flipboard magazine collecting some of its articles on the Beatles.

If you find a magazine you like, you can subscribe to it, for easy and continued access, or share a link to it via Twitter, Facebook or email. If somebody who has Flipboard wants to view the magazine, it’ll automatically open. Otherwise, the link will take a person to a Web page with instructions on how to get Flipboard.

Unfortunately, what you can’t do is to edit your magazine much, or add original or local content to it. You can’t rearrange articles, or create your own text articles, or add photos or videos that live only on your iPad or iPhone. You also can’t rearrange articles. Because Flipboard is so oriented to pulling in content from online sources, to use one of your own photos or videos in your own magazine, you’d have to first post it to a site like Flickr. To use an article you write for your own magazine, you’d have to first post it online.

The only tweaking you can do directly is to change the cover picture, which is typically drawn from the most recent article you include that has a photo; remove an item; create and change the title and a short description of the magazine; and change its status between publicly visible or private.

You also can’t charge for your magazines or sell ads in them, though any ads embedded in the content you include would travel with that content into your magazine.

Flipboard says it expects to add some of these features, like the ability to use photos and videos stored on your device, in updates.

Overall, Flipboard’s new personal magazines are a very good addition to a very good app.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Everybody's a Curator: Flipboard's Mike McCue Talks About New Version of Social Magazine (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:01:36 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ See post to watch video ]

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

Leaning In to No. 1: Sheryl Sandberg's Book Tops Both NYT and Amazon Bestseller Lists

Kara Swisher — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:49:54 +0000

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg might still be trying to figure out the social networking giant’s mobile monetization strategy, but there’s one thing she has locked: The top spot on two of the most important bestseller lists at the same time.

This week, for the first time, her “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” ranked No. 1 on the influential New York Times list for hardcover nonfiction, as well as for combined print and e-book nonfiction. The list, which appears in this coming Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, actually reflects sales for the week ending March 16, 2013.

“Lean In” has been on Amazon’s top 100 list of all books for much longer — in fact, for 32 days. The tome on the many difficulties faced by women in the workforce reached No. 1 status several weeks ago.

The official release date of the book was March 11, which was followed by a publicity blitz of massive proportions, including the cover of Time magazine, huge takeouts in innumerable newspapers, and laudatory television pieces on “60 Minutes” and with Oprah Winfrey.

“Lean In” has also attracted a huge dollop of controversy, with everyone and their mother (and my mother, Lucky, too) arguing over its merits, as well as its message — including whether Sandberg blamed women too much for the lack of advancement in the executive ranks.

She doesn’t, actually — if you read it, which many pundits appear to not have done. But that has not stopped the rigorous and welcome debate over the important issue, which seems to be exactly what Sandberg was aiming for.

Sales appear to have been widespread, but seem to also be helped by big purchases by companies such as Cisco, which are encouraging employees to read it.

With Pulse Following Zite's Lead, Mark Johnson Talks About News Reading App Landscape

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:16:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I reported that LinkedIn was readying a purchase of Pulse, one of the more popular of the many news reader apps, for upward of $50 million.

By coincidence, only days before, I had done a video interview with Mark Johnson, CEO of
Zite, which was bought by CNN for $20 million in mid-2011.

Since then, the San Francisco-based startup has remained relatively independent, said Johnson, although it’s a delicate balance.

In December, Zite released new versions of its Apple iPhone and iPad apps that aggregate a variety of content, expanding its offerings to more than 40,000 interest topics for its magazine-style offering.

The redesign got a lot of criticism, including from Katherine Boehret, and some of the changes were rolled back.

In any case, here’s my interview with Johnson, which touches on a number of topics, including what it’s like to get bought (pay attention, Pulse guys!):

[ See post to watch video ]

Old Media Doesn't Get New Media, Chapter 203: The Sheryl Sandberg Attack

Kara Swisher — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:26:52 +0000

Take one Silicon Valley exec. Who is rich. Who is a woman. Who seems, on the superficial surface at least, to have it all. Mix with high-profile book she has penned about gender issues in the workplace and a social networking effort to organize around. Sprinkle in some fear, some loathing and a generous dollop of startlingly ignorant assertions about how new media works. Bake in the spotlight for a millisecond.

Voila: Sheryl Sandberg Flambé.

Indeed, at this early point in the marketing game of the well-known Facebook COO’s new book, “Lean In,” the unusual level of vitriol aimed at her is, frankly, is eye-opening. While there is plenty that smart people can disagree with in her tome — after all, this is a very hot-button issue — the fact that it has ratcheted up this far before the March 11 publication date says a lot about a lot of things.

Not the least of which is that the relationship between old media and new media is, in the parlance of the huge Silicon Valley social networking company, complicated.

Consider Jodi Kantor’s New York Times article, titled “A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling,” which appeared at the end of last week.

As it was crafted, it immediately went right after Sandberg’s “carefully orchestrated media campaign” — leaving aside the pertinent fact that in this noisy day and age, every big media launch is carefully orchestrated — and then immediately took issue with her effort to start “Lean In Circles”

Oddly described by Kantor, the site is one on “which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success.” Actually, it was a little more complex than that, with major contributions from the highly regarded Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University to this effort.

Then, Kantor uses a sensationally arrogant-sounding Sandberg quote — “I always thought I would run a social movement” — from a recent video interview. As it turns out, though, it’s only a partial lift and almost totally out of context.

In full, it is about how Sandberg thought she would be a do-gooder who would doubtlessly not make much money: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work in a nonprofit. I never thought I would work in the corporate sector.”

Then comes my favorite part from the Times piece: “With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.”

Hmm. Hmm. They can’t say. Wow. Perhaps that’s because Lean In Circles have not started yet? You know, the service has not opened and therefore no one is using it.

Could Instagram have said how that piles of would use it before it started, especially since its first iteration was a dud? Nope! Could YouTube have known “Oppa Gangnam Style” was going to be a ginormous hit? Nope! Could the New York Times have known that it might have wanted to get ahead of this Internet thing before it decimated their business? Nope!

Here’s the thing — you can’t really fail before you start, but perhaps that’s just a Silicon Valley thing.

Let’s be clear, the “Lean In Circles” might turn out to be a big zero and perhaps Sandberg cannot compel women to use them. It could be an online ghost town. Or it could be very popular.

Who knows? All I am certain of is that it will — as the success of most online products depend on — be about whether people find whatever Sandberg is offering useful.

Also wrong is an account of Lean In essays that Sandberg has requested from some prominent women, which Kantor underscored asks for happy endings. True, but not quite if you read the whole document, which also says in part:

“Leaning in means pushing through the challenges and going down a path with an uncertain outcome. The path often leads to a positive internal result (newfound confidence, strength or determination) and often an external
reward (promotion, raise or goal achieved.) Leaning back means choosing to stay in a known or comfortable situation. This often leads to an internal
realization (desire to grow, change, consider leaning in the next time) and possibly a negative external result (stagnation, missed opportunities, loss of income.)”

After that, like many pieces so far, the article is all about how rich ladies with big houses and nannies should not lecture to other ladies without them. Perhaps that is so in some contexts and there is no question that her own massive success might be Sandberg’s most potent Achilles heel in trying to get her message out.

But in my reading, book as a whole is less grand and tsk-tsk than I expected and more about the plethora of depressing stats about women in the workplace, as well as some advice that has vaunted her to the top.

Lots of high-profile male execs have done this without the same level of anger directed at them. Thus, even though Sandberg is not the bilious and appalling as Donald Trump, she does not get to pontificate in any way that seems like, you know, she’s had some traction in the workplace — the Treasury Department, Google, Facebook — and might have some good tips to share.

Interesting, though it was not the only media account like this, the Times then followed today with one of the more bizarre and hyperactive columns I have seen of late by Maureen Dowd, who never met a pun she did not abuse mercilessly (and I love a good pun!).

“She has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution — Betty Friedan for the digital age,” Dowd wrote, also using the out-of-context Sandberg quote again to make her obtuse point. “She seems to think she can remedy social paradigms with a new kind of club — a combo gabfest, Oprah session and corporate pep talk. (Where’s the yoga?).”

Unpacking all those disparate images is a task for someone else with more energy than I have, but it becomes less comical when she goes all digital media expert.

“People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down,” wrote Dowd. “Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.”

Um, no, it does not — and I am not sure who said it did. Although I am certain Sandberg knows more than Dowd about reaching people online and the potential for getting them to act.

Still, it is just a start and Sandberg does not seem to be saying otherwise. And perhaps it is a good thing to debate whether book is pushing women meet goals they perhaps cannot.

Or — maybe, just maybe — it is a little more complicated. In fact, it is a lot more complicated — the issue of women at work is a thorny issue –which is why it will be interesting to see if Sandberg’s book and social network will have an impact or not.

To be clear, I have no idea if it will and neither does anyone else. No one thought Facebook would have a billion users (I definitely did not!).

That answer is to come, of course, after what will doubtlessly be a rollout where the turbulence is just beginning.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” wrote Sandberg in her book.

True that. That’s because, as it turns out, leaning in turns out to mean a very bumpy ride for those who do.

Former CBS Exec Lurie Joins Former Yahoo Levinsohn at Guggenheim Digital Media

Kara Swisher — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:35:23 +0000

Well-known digital media exec Zander Lurie has been hired by former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn to become one of his key lieutenants at Guggenheim Digital Media.

Lurie will be an EVP there, where he will help manage and grow the new heavily funded digital unit of Guggenheim Partners, whose current media assets include Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, the Clio Awards, Film Expo Group and the digital extensions for Dick Clark Productions.

Lurie was most recently an exec at CBS, including as SVP of strategic development, where he worked on a number of key digital initiatives. He was CFO and head of business development for CBS Interactive and also worked on M&A at its CNET tech news unit. Lurie left the media giant in May.

“The opportunity to join Guggenheim Digital Media and work alongside Ross was a no-brainer,” wrote Lurie to me in an email. “We have high-quality, trusted brands in the portfolio and an appetite to grow our position in the premium content/video landscape.”

Expect more acquisitions now that the deal-making Lurie is joining the deal-making Levinsohn and there’s a pile of dough to spend.

Lurie is the first significant hire by Levinsohn, who became CEO of GDM last month. He had been interim CEO of Yahoo, but lost that job when the Silicon Valley Internet giant hired former Google exec Marissa Mayer.

Michel Protti, who worked with Levinsohn at Yahoo as his chief of staff, is also joining GDM as SVP. Before Yahoo, Protti worked at McKinsey & Company.

A New King of Magazines Emerges

Keach Hagey — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:47:28 +0000

In 1922, the same year Henry Luce and Briton Hadden founded Time magazine in New York City, Edwin Thomas Meredith launched a title called Fruit, Garden and Home in Des Moines, Iowa.

Two years later, the magazine changed its name to Better Homes and Gardens, today one of the biggest-selling titles in the U.S. and a core product of Meredith Corp., the Iowa-based TV and magazine firm still controlled by the Meredith family. It is now poised to merge with most of the glamorous Time Inc. publishing empire that Mr. Luce built into international fame.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Study: Online Media Pays Off for Consumers More Than Offline

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:21 +0000

Apparently, you can get media satisfaction — as long as you are online as opposed to offline.

According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, consumers accrue more value from their online media usage than from their offline consumption.

The new research report — titled “Follow the Surplus: How U.S. Consumers Value Online Media” — calculated that the average U.S. online user got a “consumer surplus” of $970, compared to $900 from offline media.

BCG defines consumer surplus as “the value consumers themselves place on a media-related activity or product over and above what they pay for it.”

The report looked at seven categories — books, radio and music, U.S. newspapers and magazines, TV and movies, video games, international newspapers and magazines and user-generated content and social networks.

The largest chunk of online consumer satisfaction came from UGC and social, such as use of Facebook and Google’s YouTube, which makes sense since the actual cost is nearly zero — making any benefit essentially digital gravy.

Books were where the least consumer surplus was online. That’s not a surprise, said BCG senior partner John Rose, who coauthored the report, but it is likely to change soon with the increasing popularity and proliferation of a variety of devices.

That’s double from three years ago, with the average consumer now owning 2.9 devices, such as mobile smartphones and tablets. It will increase to 4.1 in three years, said the BCG report. Also up, of course, is the number of hours spent online, which — in turn — dramatically increases the value of online media consumption.

Advertisers still have not caught up with consumers, of course. “The value is from the consumers’ perspective and not the advertisers’ perspective yet,” said Rose, in an interview. “The business models are still not in place to support what consumers already know they want.”

Gender is not an issue, with men and women both consuming about 12 hours a week of online content. But men listen to more music, while women prefer social interaction more.

Another interesting result, read the report: “By a margin of some five to one, U.S. consumers are more excited about the Internet’s potential rewards than they are worried about the potential risks.”

In other words, they like online media, they really like it.

That’s why, said Rose, the medium and the business model will evenutally come together.

“Different people will say different things about when it will come together and not if it will come together,” said Rose. “Advertisers have always found ways to create value, even if they have not done it yet with online media.”

There are lots of other interesting findings and charts from BCG, some of which are embedded below (click to enlarge them and the whole report can be found and downloaded here).

Time Inc. Cuts Come Tomorrow

Peter Kafka — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:23:04 +0000

A brief but unpleasant update to the long-running Time Inc. layoff story: The cuts will finally arrive on Wednesday, people at the company tell me.

If you’re one of the publisher’s 8,000 employees, the good news is that many people I’ve talked to seem to believe that an earlier report (which I’ve repeated) of up to 700 layoffs may be too high, and that the total may end up closer to 500. Then again, no one has offered a definitive headcount.

The other consensus opinion is that the cuts will affect just about every corner of the company, and most of its magazines (it publishes 21 in the U.S.).

But there are plenty of other Time Inc. employees who don’t work at a particular title, and centralized departments like research and HR will be affected, too.

Bottom line: The cuts will be big, and they’ll be the most significant move CEO Laura Lang has made in her first year on the job.

No comment from Time Inc. PR.

Magazines Use Digital Editions to Ramp Up Pricing

Keach Hagey — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:01:36 +0000

Cosmopolitan readers can get their first year’s subscription to the print magazine for $10. But if they want the digital edition on their iPads, they will have to fork over $19.99.

That’s a pricing maneuver so bold it may make even Cosmo readers blush. In the book and newspaper industries, digital versions are typically cheaper than print ones. But some in the magazine world are going the other way, charging more for their digital versions.

Buffeted by declining advertising, which accounted for about 75% of their revenue historically, magazines are turning to tablet computers and digital editions to boost circulation revenue. In doing so, they are hoping to reset decades of subscription discounting so deep that a year’s supply of magazines like Esquire currently costs just $8.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

PureWow Hires New Editor From Real Simple

Kara Swisher — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:00:21 +0000

PureWow, a New York-based lifestyle email and website aimed at GenX women, has hired Real Simple magazine editor Mary Kate McGrath as its first editor in chief. She will be responsible for content strategy for PureWow, which launched in September 2010 with funding from Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and the founders of the website wowOwow. The site has about 1.5 million subscriptions across its eight editions, and plans to expand to several more U.S. cities this year, as well as topical sites.

People Tries to Boost Subscriptions by Selling a New iPhone App

Peter Kafka — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:00:15 +0000

What’s that? You say you’d like to keep track of famous people on Twitter, but don’t want to use a Twitter app to do that?

And you say you’d also like to read lots of articles from People.com on your iPhone, without going to People.com?

Voila! Meet People Magazine’s CelebWatch app, which will fit that very specific bill. And say goodbye to People’s old mobile apps, which got about 500,000 downloads over the last three years.*

Think of the new one as a very curated mashup of Twitter and People’s Web site, and you’ll get the basic idea.

This is the kind of app that will be very useful if you want to keep track of everything Rihanna says on Twitter, and everything People.com says about her (and other famous people).

But it won’t do you any good if you like to use Twitter for other stuff, like telling people what you had for breakfast, or tracking revolutions in Egypt, or anything else.

Even if you’re not a candidate for CelebWatch, the app is still worth noting for the strategy Time Inc. is using here: It’s selling access to the app for $1 a month, or $10 for a year, and giving it away for free to People’s “all-access” subscribers, who are already getting print and digital bundles.

It’s the second part that’s more important. Time Inc. executives will be pleased if they see a few new dollars coming in from app sales. But what they really want to do is make their magazine subscriptions more valuable. Maybe throwing in something that costs other people a buck a month will help.

“We wanted to have a mobile pillar for the business we’ve already built out,” says Jennifer Ogden-Reese, who heads up consumer marketing for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment Group.

To spell that out: People, which has 2.4 million subscribers, is perhaps Time Inc.’s most important title. So if a modest app like this helps keep those numbers up, it’s going to gain a lot of stature.

*And if you’re an Android user, hang tight. People says your version is coming soonish.

Custom Magazine Focuses on the Big Pictures

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:07:08 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

When you’re hungry for online news, where do you go for a personalized fix? There’s the friend who constantly posts the funniest stories on Facebook before everyone else, or the colleague who shares smart articles on Twitter the second they’re published online. You might even use an app that sorts through online news stories to find exactly what you’ll want to read.

One of the coolest apps out there is Zite, which assembles stories into a personalized digital magazine and simplifies the process of consuming a lot of information in a short time. Since its debut nearly two years ago, I’ve opened Zite’s free app on my iPad nearly every morning. (It also runs on Android and Windows Phone 7.) It displays loads of interesting material on all sorts of topics, and it knows what I like to read because it has tracked my reading habits since the first article I read on Zite.

Starting Tuesday, a new edition of Zite is available for download, updating the existing app on Apple’s iOS 6. (An update for other devices is coming next year.) I’ve been using this new version for the past couple of weeks with a focus on the iPad app. While I like some of its new features, such as a box for current headline news, it tries to do too much without enough focus.

The new Zite puts a lot of emphasis on visuals, forcing people to swipe to new screens to see more stories. Instead of seeing five articles (with headlines, photos and a few sentences per story) in neat squares on the first page of Zite, you’ll now see just three articles. One story includes an extra-large image that swallows up a lot of space and isn’t always clearly distinguished from the rest of the page. Other pages are shown in a layout meant to mimic a glossy magazine, but can come off looking haphazard and too busy.

If these images offered some sort of insightful visual, I might be more accepting of them. But in many cases, the photos don’t show their actual subject. An article about TV personality Alton Brown showed just his pant leg and hand, while a story about a new tech company showed a large black square with a small sliver of someone’s face. Some headlines showed up cut off in mid-sentence.

Zite’s CEO, Mark Johnson, says the app’s algorithm sometimes highlights the wrong part of a photo, and font and software glitches caused the headline issues. He says the company plans to fix both of these problems in an update to the new version, which is expected next month.

So what does this new Zite app do that the old one didn’t? People can now tell Zite if they like articles without opening them by dragging the article up (for thumbs up) or down (for thumbs down). They can see articles that are most popular with other Zite users and can read a stream of Headline News, two features I wondered about while using the original Zite.

A screenshot from the Zite app

A “Featured on Zite” section promotes sponsored pages, like Avant-Garde Design sponsored by Lexus, and other news sources, like the Los Angeles Times.

Readers can now jump from one general article to a Zite page filled with articles on a specific topic mentioned in the article by selecting a topic tag. And an Explore page makes it easy to find more articles by linking Twitter, Facebook, Pocket or Google Reader, or checking out staff picks and popular categories.

Instead of 2,500 categories, Zite now offers 40,000. And the app’s green-and-white app icon has been replaced with a cartoony owl, which the CEO says represents intelligence, curiosity and approachability.

The original Zite used clever animation each time you opened it, swinging images around like they were on a string and neatly displaying them alongside their related articles. Now, the app just opens and articles are shown bumping into each other, like colliding puzzle pieces.

Zite still buries bylines until you open an article, which is frustrating for people like me who might read a story because of the reporter.

Several of the new Zite features give the company more feedback about what users do or don’t like. But the original app was built around the premise that you could do nothing to it and it would steadily improve as you used it. Its algorithm always monitored your every move, including which articles you opened, how long you spent reading an article, if you scrolled down or not and if you gave it a thumbs up or thumbs down. This new version puts ranking in a more prominent spot and makes Zite’s analyzing job easier.

In addition to moving an article up or down to indicate whether or not it’s well-liked, people can select a heart to see more stories on a certain topic. But this doesn’t add the topic to a user’s Quicklist, which is a selection of categories and news sources that someone chooses when first setting up the app.

By letting people dive deeper into specific topics, Zite encourages more discovery, but this blend of topic tags, Quicklist and liking a topic could be confusing.

Finding new categories and stories is easier with this new version of Zite, but maneuvering around the app’s overall layout is not. Its original design encouraged quick reading of a lot of information curated just for you, while this new layout forces you to do a lot of swiping, like with a glossy magazine, until you find what you want to read.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Marissa Mayer's First Live Interview (Which ATD Had to Virtually Sneak Into): God. Family. Yahoo.

Kara Swisher — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:06:24 +0000

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

Romney Concession and Obama Acceptance Speeches in Three Minutes or Less

Kara Swisher — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:49:12 +0000

Thanks to Time magazine for these videos, which squeeze the post-election speeches of Republican candidate Mitt Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama into three minutes or less:

Marissa Mayer Will "Talk About Where She Is Taking Yahoo" in First Media Interview Since Becoming CEO

Kara Swisher — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:59:21 +0000

Marissa Mayer — the typically press-loving Silicon Valley exec who has avoided much media interaction since she took over as CEO of Yahoo — will be doing her first sit-down interview at the end of the month at a Fortune magazine event.

In the chat, according to an invite for a November 27 Silicon Valley dinner for its Most Powerful Women franchise, “she plans to talk about where she is taking Yahoo and what excites her about the future of technology.”

Pull up your chairs, people!

Actually, Mayer has recently spoken most specifically about her plans for the long-troubled company, but it was more formally during Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings call, in which she outlined a mobile-heavy strategy and also a plan to make smaller acquisitions.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said then to Wall Street analysts, soon after which she bought a tiny mobile start-up called Stamped.

But Mayer has yet to sit down live with a journalist — she had agreed to appear for a sit-down stage interview at a recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, but she opted instead to be a demo judge, where the former Google exec said nothing about her new job at Yahoo.

Mayer will presumably be doing just that with Fortune editor-at-large Pattie Sellers, who helms the high-profile annual Most Powerful Women conference and also the magazine’s list that featured Mayer on the cover this year (see above). Sellers has also just written a profile of Mayer titled “Ready to Rumble at Yahoo,” which did not include her participation but did have quotes from one of her recent hires — Patricia Moll Kriese — at Yahoo.

But Sellers appears to be the only reporter that Mayer has spoken to on the record since she got the job, although her comments in one piece just after she got the job were mostly limited to the topic to her pregnancy. Sellers also announced the name of Mayer’s baby — Macallister — in another recent post.

Presumably, Mayer will talk about her new son with Sellers, but it will be interesting to see what she says about Yahoo, as well as on the future of technology. At an annual Churchill Club gadget event the techie did with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, Mayer showed off a keyboard whose keys had embedded LCD screens, a wireless rabbit, an alarm clock that can jump off your nightstand and a T-shirt with a wireless signal locator in it.

Here is a video of her in full geek mode talking about that way back when:

It's an iStorm: Scott Forstall Out at Apple, Along With Retail Head, as Other Top Execs Get Promotions

Kara Swisher — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:10:44 +0000

Big management shifts at Apple are now taking place.

Scott Forstall, the man in charge of its iOS mobile software efforts and a major and longtime executive at the tech giant, is leaving next year and will remain an adviser to CEO Tim Cook until then.

In addition, new retail head John Browett is headed out the door.

As part of the move, Apple noted that four key execs — Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi — would “add responsibilities to their roles.”

Ive gets “Human Interface”; Cue will take over Maps and Siri voice recognition responsibilities; Mansfield will run a new unit called Technologies, “which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization”; and Federighi gets the big job of iOS and OS X.

More to come on what happened, but Forstall’s departure is very big news and a drastic move for such an important player in the tech space.

He had big fans and also many detractors for his sharp-edged personality, as well as what some described as exhibiting “growing open challenges” to Cook himself. Forstall had previously been called “CEO-in-waiting” in one media account in Fortune.

In addition, numerous sources noted persistent tension between Forstall and several other key execs, especially the powerful design chief Ive.

Veiled internal politics at Apple aside, Forstall has been a key part of Apple’s success over the last decade, especially in the development iPad and the iPhone.

Recently, there has been some level of ire at Apple over the troubled rollout of its own mapping software and the replacement of Google’s popular service, which was Forstall’s responsibility. (No, this move does not mean everyone gets Google mapping back, as one person asked me.)

Browett’s leaving is a little less of a surprise. Since he got the job, he has alienated many within the highly successful retail organization at Apple, many sources said.

His departure comes less than one year after the former Dixons CEO was hired by Apple to succeed Ron Johnson, who left for J.C. Penney in November 2011. Recently he’s been criticized by some Apple Store employees for unfriendly policy changes aimed at increasing Apple’s retail profit margins.

More to come, obvi, but here is the official press release from Apple, which it put out with the most understated title of all time:

Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services

Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Add Responsibilities to Their Roles

CUPERTINO, California — October 29, 2012 — Apple® today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

“We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The amazing products that we’ve introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services.”

Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.

Eddy Cue will take on the additional responsibility of Siri® and Maps, placing all of our online services in one group. This organization has overseen major successes such as the iTunes Store®, the App Store℠, the iBookstore℠ and iCloud®. This group has an excellent track record of building and strengthening Apple’s online services to meet and exceed the high expectations of our customers.

Craig Federighi will lead both iOS and OS X®. Apple has the most advanced mobile and desktop operating systems, and this move brings together the OS teams to make it even easier to deliver the best technology and user experience innovations to both platforms.

Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future.

Additionally, John Browett is leaving Apple. A search for a new head of Retail is underway and in the interim, the Retail team will report directly to Tim Cook. Apple’s Retail organization has an incredibly strong network of leaders at the store and regional level who will continue the excellent work that has been done over the past decade to revolutionize retailing with unique, innovative services for customers.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

LinkedIn's Profile Refresh Is All About the Visuals -- Just Like Other Social Giants

Mike Isaac — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:09:26 +0000

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Chairman Reid Hoffman

Pictures still beat words.

LinkedIn unveiled a new profile page on Tuesday morning, tweaking many of the product’s key areas to emphasize data visualization, graphics and photos.

It’s not reinventing the wheel. Most of the changes are small tweaks in existing products — profile pictures are larger, network connections are visualized in slick circular graphs. The page is divvied up neatly, with a drop-down menu bar at the top, your personal information on the right-hand side and the left part of the page devoted to the stream.

The app, too, is more photo-centric, with large pictures anchoring the screen at the top, followed by a list of the most recent entries occurring in your network. Predictably, the iPad app looks more like a magazine to fit the form factor.

Much of this is incremental, and you’ve seen it over the past few months in slight tweaks to each section.

But step back and look at the bigger picture — LinkedIn’s refresh is yet another in a series of visual refreshes across social companies of late. Facebook led the charge about a year ago with its introduction of Timeline, essentially a yearbook-like way of viewing your profile. Last month, Twitter debuted its revamped profile pages, complete with large-format profile photos and easier in-stream picture viewing. Even Foursquare is trying to look better these days, making photos a larger focus inside the mobile app.

So what is it about the visual experience that is making all these social giants re-think their profiles? Are we just more inclined to come back to pretty things than we are words?

Well, yeah. Take a look at a recent ComScore report, which states that Instagram users return to the app more consistently and often on a daily basis than they do Twitter, despite the fact that Twitter has a higher amount of users signed up for the service.

Obviously LinkedIn can’t be all about photos; it’s not like you’re uploading pictures of your family vacation to your online resume. So LinkedIn focuses on making the data you’ve provided — like your job history, college days and the like — a whole lot prettier.

Will users spend more time using the new LinkedIn? Perhaps with the inclusion of promoted followers, more engagement-building tools like “endorsements,” and other small additions to product designed to keep you inside the LinkedIn network.

But like everyone else, LinkedIn knows that if the company wants their users to spend a lot of time using the product, at the bare minimum it has to look pretty.

Here Come the Inevitable Marissa Mayer Magazine Profiles -- As She Preps Her Quick Return to Yahoo

Kara Swisher — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:17:07 +0000

New York magazine just published what will doubtlessly be the first of many larger-scale profile pieces on new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (Fortune’s at work on one, too).

Titled “Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?” New York’s version is a very solid and fair effort that raises a lot of pertinent questions about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s latest leader.

That, of course, includes pondering the high-profile issues around her coping with a newborn (really new) and work; her carefully crafted public glamour-geek-girl persona that is at odds with her sometimes more tetchy private one; Mayer’s mostly-up-and-then-down-at-the-end career at Google as a key exec; and the myriad challenges she faces in turning around the long-troubled Yahoo.

Writes Lisa Miller quite astutely: “This newest version of Marissa, the mom-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer’s iterative powers, for she’s playing to a tougher crowd, one that won’t be placated by tweets, Manolos, and rapturous praise for pineapple malts.”

Indeed not, which is why sources said Mayer is likely to begin to make postpartum appearances back at Yahoo as early as this week. She delivered her first child with husband Zach Bogue, whom she dubbed “Big Baby Boy Bogue,” on Sept. 30.

Among the initiatives she has been working on up to and after her son’s birth, said numerous sources, is the redo of Yahoo’s powerful home page, a reorganization of top management duties, and an announcement about whether it will buy back shares or give a dividend from its recent multibillion-dollar sale of part of its lucrative stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

In addition, said sources, Mayer is also putting into place her new methodology of keeping track of employee performance and rewards. There is an all-hands meeting scheduled today, in fact, apparently to go over the system, which Mayer spoke about in her last all-hands meeting.

The home page redo is also in the late-stage works for unveiling soon, said sources. Those who have seen it said it has a starker and simpler design ethos, and will stress user personalization, customization and more social elements. It will also have ample opportunity for third-party developers to offer a variety of services on it (maybe Mayer can save Zynga by copying a little bit from Facebook!).

The reorg will also be interesting. Mayer has made a number of top exec appointments, including adding a new CFO and head of HR. She will also be rejiggering other roles of existing management.

For example, expect tech and operations EVP David Dibble — who got a mess of new responsibilities right before Mayer was appointed — to have some of that dialed back.

The disposition of all $3.6 billion of Alibaba cash is perhaps the most immediate issue, especially for investors, who are largely hoping for a buyback of stock. Such a move will likely cause Yahoo shares to rise, as happened at AOL.

That would be nice, since Yahoo stock has stayed pretty flat since Mayer got to the company in July. (That compares, ironically, to a 31 percent rise at Google since she left.)

But Wall Street analysts and others have been making bullish calls on Yahoo recently, including CNBC’s screamy stock guru Jim Cramer of “Mad Money.”

Boosted by the growing value of its Asian assets — in China, as well as in Japan, which Yahoo is trying to sell — and also anticipating some kind of magic mojo from Mayer, price targets for Yahoo shares have been as high as $22.

That was from Goldman Sachs, which reinstated coverage of Yahoo with a “buy” rating recently. Analyst Heath Terry noted that “while user engagement continues to decline, the company lacks a mobile strategy and significant talent has left the company, Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of users, valuable Web properties, and the financial resources to fuel a potential turn around over time.”

Translated: Yahoo kinda stinks, but it still might be able to buy itself out of this mess with a $10.6 billion pile of dough from Asia.

All eyes will be on the actual business Yahoo operates itself in two weeks on Oct. 22, when the company announces third-quarter results. Sources said the quarter will come in as expected, but will still tell a story of lackluster growth in advertising, engagement and, well, every key part of its native offerings.

That said, Mayer is expected to be on the call — her first at Yahoo — to outline her grand vision in more detail, as a spokeswoman has noted.

That’s good, since shiny profiles of her can only do so much. It’ll be nice to finally hear her say something definitive in public about how she’s going to fix the company that has given the mediagenic exec even more press.

(And, let’s hope, without the tweets, Manolos and pineapple malts.)

Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" Features Techies: IBM's Rometty Tops List, but Yahoo's Mayer Grabs Cover

Kara Swisher — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:10:20 +0000

Fortune magazine put out its “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” list today, which was topped by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

The nod to the leader of the longtime tech giant was followed by Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman at the No. 3 slot, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 8 and Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz at No. 10.

But it was — shockeroo — media magnet Marissa Mayer who claimed the very elegant solo photo on the cover (though it is from last year), as well as the No. 14 slot. She is also the youngest woman on the list, at 37 years old.

Mayer — the former Google exec whom Fortune correctly characterized as having been “somewhat marginalized” after 13 years at the search giant in its write-up — took over the troubled Yahoo in July. Since then, she has been making a series of dramatic cultural changes at the Silicon Valley Web icon as she preps for the more structural ones to come soon (and perhaps even before her first child is due in early October).

Other tech stars on the list include Google SVP Susan Wojcicki and IBM SVP Bridget Van Kralingen.

The most interesting part of the list, perhaps, is the fall of media giant Oprah Winfrey, who Fortune said “is the only woman with a spot on this list since its inception.” She is now in dead last at No. 50.

Speaking of marginalizing –ouch!

Fortune also has its annual big conference coming up that is linked to the well-known list. It takes place in early October and is run by longtime editor-at-large Pattie Sellers, who is co-chair of the Fortune event, called the Most Powerful Women Summit.