Matt Marshall

PayPal Enables Peer-to-Peer Payments on Android With NFC

Tricia Duryee in Commerce on July 13, 2011 at 10:46 am PT

According to Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile who appeared at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco today, the company has doubled its mobile payments projections to $3 billion this year, and is investing heavily in new ways to make it easy to pay with the phone.

Web 2.0 Expo: An “American Idol” for Start-Ups

Marisa Taylor, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on April 3, 2009 at 5:13 pm PT

During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.” As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?” None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

Kara Visits Demo09!

Kara Swisher in News on March 3, 2009 at 10:00 am PT

There was no doubt, given the continuing economic collapse and all the joy that brings, that Demo09 was going to be a much tamped-down and sober affair this year. But there were still a lot of interesting start-ups being featured in the main ballroom and demo “pit,” such as a cool “touch book” offering, a strange hooking-up-in-a-bar smartphone app and a plethora of ideas that obviously got their inspiration from the iPhone from Apple. As in: touch, swipe, interact! (Which is the official BoomTown motto, in point of fact.) Here’s a video I did of Demo09, which ends today.

Demo Duo Chris Shipley (Outgoing) and Matt Marshall (Incoming) Talk!

Kara Swisher in News on February 25, 2009 at 8:26 am PT

This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peets Coffee in Fremont, Calif., to the exact spot where Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley proposed that VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall take over the longtime bi-annual conference where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd. Shipley will still be running the show at Demo09, starting Sunday in Palm Desert, as well as the next Demo this fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010. Here’s a video of the pair talking about the changeover.

"How To Manage Your Start-Up in the Downturn"? Well, Come to This Event and Find Out!

Kara Swisher in News on October 28, 2008 at 5:05 pm PT

Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions. Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (“Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a star-studded investors panel.

PaidContent's Rafat Ali Speaks! So, Here's Who's Next…

Kara Swisher in News on July 11, 2008 at 7:41 pm PT

Earlier today, BoomTown broke the stunning-for-blogs news that ContentNext, owner of the popular online digital media news site paidContent, was being bought by the Guardian Media Group for about $30 million in an earn-out acquisition. But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired. And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.