And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

CityVille is the perfect hospital waiting-room activity. You click to create buildings and plant crops, click to harvest them and collect money from your shops, click to visit your friends’ cities and help them do the same things.

Unlike in a real city, everything you can possibly accomplish in the game is good. You receive money, goods, reputation points, energy and random bonus prizes constantly.

Most of these are useful, but some of them are not. For instance, I currently have a stock of 22 virtual danishes received as bonuses from my in-game coffee shop, and no way to spend them.

Among the early adopter types I know in the tech industry, there’s a sense that casual gaming on Facebook serves an entirely different demographic from their own. The thinking is that games from Zynga and the like replace relatively mindless activities like watching soap operas.

But as someone who has just reorganized her virtual retail shops to be surrounded by virtual trees, so as to accumulate more virtual bonus points, I can see how social gaming–especially as it gets more social–might appeal to the desire for mindless diversions in all of us.

And, I began to get an answer to a question I am asked a lot: Why are so many people playing these seemingly meaningless games?

CityVille is Zynga’s latest attempt to extend the dominance of its breakout social game FarmVille, which has long been the most popular such diversion on Facebook.

Of all of Zynga’s games, CityVille has been heralded as the most social to date, with new features such as a franchise system that allows users to actually participate in the building of their friends’ cities. Personally, I’ve never gotten into FarmVille, although it’s obviously quite addictive as well and hugely popular.

Chalk it up to the new social features, the slightly less awkward and cutesy 3-D graphics, or a momentary openness to mindless diversion on my part, but CityVille is the only Facebook game that’s truly sucked me in so far.

Zynga says CityVille is its fastest-growing game ever. According to AppData, CityVille has 54 million monthly active users, for second place overall (and only two million behind FarmVille).

There are no consequences in CityVille and there is no strategy. There’s also no winning (rather, as in FarmVille, an endlessly extending horizon of tasks to complete).

The worst thing that can happen is a crop can wither or you can allocate your “energy” to collecting rent and not have enough to empty the cash registers at your stores.

But, not to worry–come back in five minutes and there’s another unit of energy waiting for you.

CityVille is satisfying on a superficial level that I hadn’t thought possible. It’s not even like Angry Birds, my former casual game of choice, which breaks all sorts of age and language barriers in its simplicity, but still requires you to position the slingshot correctly and think through the physics of the various projectiles.

In CityVille, all you do is click, click, click.

Zynga seems to want three things from users: Their time, their money and their recruitment of their friends. As for time, I’ve given plenty of it, although you usually run out of stuff to do about 15 minutes into any one session (Zynga wouldn’t want game play to be a burden or feel too complicated).

But I’m not sure my obsession is paying off for Zynga. I’ve spent a grand total of 50 cents on the game. That’s because I wanted to spend the 15 Facebook credits I’d gotten as part of a launch promotion, but Zynga had a minimum purchase of 20 credits. Coughing up two quarters got me the difference–and it also hooked up my Facebook account to my PayPal account for the first time.

I currently have 20 CityVille “neighbors.” They are Facebook connections from all different parts of my life, including high school friends, tech industry people and fellow reporters. We get credits for heading over to each other’s cities and helping out, accepting roles at each other’s city halls and other municipal buildings and setting up franchises in each other’s cities and resupplying them.

And Zynga constantly harasses us to post on our own or other people’s Facebook walls to ask them for in-game gifts and brag about in-game achievements.

Conscious of polluting other people’s walls and admitting to people how much CityVille I play, I usually decline all the offers to broadcast my CityVille needs and accomplishments. But it’s clear Zynga could stand to add even more communication channels if it wanted to; a friend recently emailed me off-game to ask if I could hurry up and send him a CityVille zoning permit.

I get the sense most of my particular set of neighbors haven’t given Zynga a lot of cash for virtual goods, considering our cities are growing at about the same rate and I see them on there at least once a day helping tend to my crops and resupplying their franchises. There are no in-game advertisements.

A few of my neighbors, however, have accumulated premium goodies galore. A certain Facebook exec’s city is decorated with paid-for doodads like a basketball court, tennis court and bronze statue–but I imagine it’s not too hard for him, of all people, to stock up on Facebook credits.

A particular start-up CEO who’s my virtual neighbor seems to play on an hourly basis. He has already hit level 35. You know that somewhere a Zynga engineer is scurrying to create more tasks and content to add more levels to keep up with him and other addicts.

And only one of my neighbors appears to have never returned to the game after setting up her initial city.

Meanwhile, my own city keeps on growing. I’m currently at level 26. I’m now the mayor of my city and considering a run for governor.

But, now that I’m back from the hospital, I’d honestly really like to stop playing this game and let the healing begin.

Update: Since I first wrote a draft of this post on Sunday CityVille added 10 million users. I’ve updated the stats as of Wednesday morning.

The question is: Which movie was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinking about when he decided recently to fork over $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey?

Was it a bid to spiff up his image–with a splashy announcement on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television talk show tomorrow?

That would be the very same day of the New York premiere of “The Social Network,” a movie that rakes the now-26-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind over some very hot coals in the sordid tale of how he founded the powerful social networking site while at Harvard University.

Or was it actually the impact of another film, “Waiting for Superman,” a just-released gripping documentary about the crisis in public education?

It’s become a topic that has apparently become of great interest to Zuckerberg, as he has been considering his approach to big-time philanthropy in anticipation of huge wealth after Facebook eventually has its long-anticipated IPO.

In fact, said sources, the timing of the donation was hotly debated within the company, with worries that it would look like Zuckerberg was trying to counter the flood of negative press from “The Social Network.”

And for good reason.

After seeing a screening of the movie recently, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted that “the film portrays him as an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk…He’s the bad guy in his own creation myth.”

In fact, said sources, Zuckerberg actually has been cooking up the deal since he and high-profile Newark Mayor Cory Booker started kibitzing over the idea while both attended the Allen & Co. conference in July.

From there, Zuckerberg decided it was best to flood the zone–in this case, the deeply troubled Newark school system, which had previously been taken over by the state.

Now, it will instead get a big dose of friending–um, funding–from a foundation that Zuckerberg is funding with $100 million worth of Facebook stock, which will be sold off in secondary markets as needed.

Sources said his interest in the area was apparently sparked by watching the up-and-down experience of his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, whose first job out of college was as a teacher. She is now a medical student.

It’s all an unusual bipartisan effort, with Zuckerberg working with the Democratic Booker and also New Jersey’s new Republican Governor Chris Christie.

The pair of politicians, who will formulate a plan, pushed for the announcement this particular week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in order to give the topic national attention.

Winfrey has been focusing on education reform this week on her show, and the Obama administration is reportedly going to do the same in the weeks ahead.

Thus, Zuckerberg himself decided to move forward now, sources said, apparently concluding that even if a prominent movie was portraying him as the villain, he did not have to act like one in real life.

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:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100824/update-zappos-tony-hsieh-on-magical-happiness-bus-tour-and-hugging-it-out-with-boomtown/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:28:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32420

BoomTown motored on down the lovely Highway 280 in Silicon Valley to Facebook to hear execs talk about a new geo-location feature the powerful social networking site is rolling out today.

And, the new name of the service, which will be deeply integrated into its current update system, as I reported earlier, will be “Places.”

The service seems to be basic and useful–it is reviewed here by Walt Mossberg–allowing people to post their location on the Wall of their Facebook profile, much as you might a photo or video.

There will be no games, no mayors and no special discounts either in Facebook Places–just plain and simple checking in and, presumably, taking names.

Privacy is a big focus of the launch of Places, which will allow users to decline to be placed by others.

The $100 million question is how much Facebook will allow the integration of other competing services including Foursquare.

A lot, it seems, as sources said Foursquare Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was invited to appear for the announcements, perhaps to minimize the idea that this is a Foursquare-killer.

It’s not. Today.

4:30 pm PT: Of course, I and a badillion other reporters arrived on time, to 1050 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif. in a mass of media force that would probably better be deployed on more weighty topics than the particulars of checking in from some hip dive bar in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.

After some waiting, we were finally bussed–or perhaps the better word is geo-located–to the actual HQ of Facebook nearby, and shepherded (just like sheep that we are!) into its cafeteria.

Except it had been duded up like a tiki lounge with palm trees and a driftwood stage. I felt as though I was suddenly on an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” Cue Ginger for her big song number with the coconut bra!

Hey, Skipper…

5:18 pm: That skipper would be CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was–as usual–dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and was endearingly awkward as always. It’s kind of touching that Zuckerberg still tries to have the just-us-guys posture, despite all the fame and fortune.

He quickly announced Facebook Places, across the U.S. tomorrow, on an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and a mobile Web site.

He talked about deciding to finally launch Places after a dinner out with his girlfriend, when, deploying a test version, they realized another Facebook exec, Chris Cox and his fiance were nearby at another restaurant.

It was an earth-shaking moment, implied Zuckerberg.

Ahem, knock, knock…that’s Foursquare! Have you heard of it?

Yes, Facebook has been ogling the hot New York location start-up for a year, which is precisely why we are all here.

5:28 pm: Michael Sharon, the product manager of Places gave us a little run-through of the service, which was about what you would expect.

Foursquare except cleaner. Booyah except no games. Gowalla except, well, not Gowalla.

What’s important is that it is very integrated into Facebook’s current features, such as the Wall and status updates. Which is the right thing to do since Facebook has no business being all trendy.

The plains are covered with the bodies of pioneers, as they say, so what Facebook Places is, essentially, is a fast follow.

Sharon moved onto privacy, the big gorilla in the room. You have to opt-in and agree and click here and default to off and you can only tag your friends and you can also block them too.

Also, per Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” all Facebook citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.

Next, lots of info about APIs, so partners can also be part of Facebook’s geo-locating universe.

Up trotted Gowalla’s CTO and Co-founder Scott Raymond, who showed off Gowalla and Facebook integration.

Then a Foursquare exec–not Crowley, who has apparently checked in at a Chipolte in New York at the time of the places launch–loped up to say how great it all is. Just great! Really! Frankly, what else would the Foursquares say at this point.

Next: Yelp dude. Great! Just great! Integration! Check-in and pull your Facebook friends into the Yelp app.

Of course, it would not be a set without Booyah’s Keith Lee. Loves it! Fun! Just great!

This felt like a slow-moving version of invasion of the geo-location snatchers, a parade of glassy-eyed hostages, some scurvy mates walking the platform plank. Aaaaarrrr.

5:50 pm: Finally, Facebook’s product head Chris Cox, who is perhaps one of the more fetching geeks out there, bounded onstage to be all fetching and smart.

He talked about places like home, work and, um, bars. Well, actually, community locations, quoting Ray Oldenburg.

I was honestly not really listening to him at all, because I was riveted on his new haircut, which is just like the buzzed one Vince got on “Entourage” this season.

Errant thought: Those guys on “Entourage” would never check in from a bar! They are totally busy getting their groove on with the ladies–even Johnny Drama–and chillaxing with the doobies and tequila!

When I checked in again mentally, Cox was still chattering away about some glowing phone that tells you everything that happened in that bar forever and ever, since everyone was checking in and memorializing the place over time.

Good god, isn’t it enough that Facebook has all those drunkey-drunk photos from college students nationwide.

No! It wants it all! Yay, all our our drunkey-drunk moments will now be preserved in check-ins for all eternity!

Honey, remember when I ended up in the gutter here? Fun times for our grandkids to unearth one day!

5:58 pm: The Skipper Zuckerberg was back to moderate the Q&A.

Privacy questions about making private places public. If a lot of people are there, it becomes public.

Next: What up with monetization with deals? Zuckerberg notes that Places is at its starting point and “certainly you can imagine these things in the future.”

There was a question about how Places started. Well, IMHO, the moment when Facebook saw Foursquare’s innovation and freaked out.

A very goofy question about what happens when drunkey-drunk places shut down and all those memories are gone, which made me wonder if the reporter asking was drunkey-drunk.

“That’s not a problem we can solve,” said Cox.

Good answer.

Now, the Skipper wants to show us a Facebook custom, which made me suddenly nervous. Sacrifice of the media? No, just some switch-pulling thing.

There was apparently also another tradition–for a six-year-old company, that is–of hitting some gong.

Aha, it’s “The Gong Show.”

Geo-locate that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/ http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:53:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30477

It’s worth checking out an article in the New York Times today that points to a very questionable, but–as it turned out–politically savvy angel investment made by former eBay CEO and now Republican candidate for California governor Meg Whitman.

The piece, by Michael Luo, alleges that Whitman’s $1 million investment in late 2008 in a Hollywood entertainment company called Tools Down! Productions was made to ease a prominent Republican strategist away from working for her rival for the GOP nod.

That would be Steve Poizner, who lost to Whitman in the recent primary and who was close to working with Mike Murphy. Instead, with a little help from the piles of cash Whitman made from eBay (EBAY) stock, Murphy never took the job.

Well, not the Poizner job, at least. After telling people he was sick of politics and then getting the Whitman money days later for his still credit-free movie production company, Murphy became an adviser to Whitman a year later.

The bigger story the Times is touting, but does not quite deliver, is the advent of super-rich candidates in races this round, including another tech exec, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. She won the California GOP Senate primary.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course.

But what’s interesting is to see Silicon Valley’s digitally enabled moneybags step up to the very stained political table and jump right into the game.

What’s next? Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin buying everyone in San Francisco lattes for life to become mayor? Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bid for president of the United States, via the leveraging of embarrassing photos from the social networking site?

And thank goodness Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) never wanted to run for office.

The Whitman campaign told the Times that the investment was disclosed and justified in that she had ample entertainment interest from her days as a strategic planning exec at Disney (DIS) and also as a board member of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA).

Which is exactly what they would say, of course.

Thus, perhaps it is time to take a moment with Jimmy Stewart in a video clip from the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” of his most potent “Lost Causes” scene:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:33:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26971

While in Las Vegas recently, BoomTown dropped in at the HQ of Zappos, the online retailer Amazon (AMZN) bought last summer in a deal valued at about $850 million.

The company 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 can tell you first hand that I nearly went into a diabetic coma on my recent tour of the e-commerce company, led by Zappos “Mayor” Jerry Tidmore. That included a lot of sweetness from the staff, as well as way too many baked goods strewn about.

Here’s the video, in which Tidmore related to me at the end of our time together the innovative secret ingredient of Zappos’s success:

(I also did a video interview here with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh about his new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” which comes out in June.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/ http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:17:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25340

On Monday night, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley posted a Flickr photo of a BlackBerry screen featured on the latest episode of the red-hot television potboiler, “Gossip Girl.”

The text message on the screen (which I took a picture of here) reads, “Elizabeth Fisher just checked in at the Algonquin Hotel.”

Wrote Crowley in the image title, which he also posted on Twitter: “Checkins on Gossip Girl? No mention of foursquare, but hey, still pretty hot.”

Not hot at all, actually, because there have been zero checkins on Foursquare in the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite as yet!

If you watched the show, you also would know they are too busy hooking up in an endless round-robin, with an occasional Belgian prince drug dealer thrown into the mix, to claim domain mastery of Geisha or Henri Bendel.

(If you don’t believe me, see a clip from this episode, titled “The Hurt Locket,” below, in which Blair Waldorf is dressed up like a porn version of “Anna Karenina.”)

But way to try to ride Serena van der Woodsen’s hip Prada coattails, Dennis.

In fact, the note–which was sent to billionaire playboy Chuck Bass, who is searching for his possibly-not-dead-in-childbirth-for-which-he-has-blamed-himself-mercilessly mother, after running into a suspicious lady at his father’s gravesite on the first anniversary of his tragic car-accident death, who was carrying flowers and then dropped a locket with an engraved “E,” for Elizabeth, which was also his mother’s name…you get the idea–was from Bass’s private investigator, simply telling him she had checked into the hotel.

As in, “Gimme a key and extra towels.” And not as in: Trying to be Mayor of the Algonquin Hotel.

None of the characters on “Gossip Girl” would try to be mayor of anything, since they own the town.

Which is also pretty clear if you watched the show–which just returned from a painfully long hiatus–as closely as BoomTown does.

And? who am I, besides a keeper of the “Gossip Girl” integrity?

That’s a secret I’ll never tell.

You know you love me.

XOXO

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/what-is-cisco-announcing-this-morning-to-forever-change-the-internet-a-foursquare-enabled-jet-pack/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/what-is-cisco-announcing-this-morning-to-forever-change-the-internet-a-foursquare-enabled-jet-pack/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:15:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25193

Bright and early this morning at 8 am PT, BoomTown will be jacked into the matrix for an invitation-only media and analyst briefing to hear exactly what the heck Cisco (CSCO) has been yammering on about of late.

Last month, the networking giant said in a mysterioso email that it would be making “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.”

Significant? Forever? It had better be good.

Like a jet pack from which you can communicate your Foursquare location (“I’m Mayor of the Clouds!”).

Or perhaps a chip you can implant in your head that will give you live updates of every single Apple (AAPL) iPad rumor.

Or a cogent explanation of how to extricate yourself from Google Buzz.

Or, at long last, maybe Cisco has figured out a way to fix the dropped calls crisis on the AT&T (T) mobile network–a tech solution I would nominate for a Nobel Prize if it ever came to pass.

In all seriousness, due to the speculation around what Cisco will unveil, its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday–up 92 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $26.13–and analysts were speculating on what the company will say.

The consensus: A new router to improve–please, oh Lord, please–wireless transmission of Web video and heavy data that often slow mobile and ISP networks.

It’s part of a new focus on the ever-growing but ever-slowing wireless data networks.

Google (GOOG) said recently that it was planning to build a superspeedy broadband service. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil its own ambitious plan to improve high-speed Internet access across the United States.

Well, it’ll be good, since the consumption of video online is growing like crazy and a constant bottleneck is likely without some relief.

Cisco has gotten deep into video of late, both in pushing networking gear and in acquiring video device maker like Pure Digital, the company behind my beloved Flip digital camera.

It is also working on innovative holographic and television-based home telepresence technologies.

So, is it too much to ask Cisco for a simple jet pack that works? I think not!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/what-is-cisco-announcing-this-morning-to-forever-change-the-internet-a-foursquare-enabled-jet-pack/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20091012/viral-video-clintons-diplomacy-in-the-conan-newark-mayor-feud/ http://allthingsd.com/20091012/viral-video-clintons-diplomacy-in-the-conan-newark-mayor-feud/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:15:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19311

It looks like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will have her hands full with pretty dicey nuclear and terrorism issues in North Korea and Pakistan this week, but she managed to find time last week to try her diplomatic hand at working out the comic state of emergency between late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

It started when O’Brien joked on “The Tonight Show”: “The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, wants to set up a citywide program to improve residents’ health. The health-care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark.”

As a counter-joke, Booker went to YouTube to make his comedy case several times via video messages, including one barring O’Brien from flying out of Liberty International Airport in Newark.

O’Brien whacked back with some good gibes, until Clinton stepped in this week in a spoof.

Maybe she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091012/viral-video-clintons-diplomacy-in-the-conan-newark-mayor-feud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090917/how-to-make-money-with-web-video-books-and-dvds/ http://allthingsd.com/20090917/how-to-make-money-with-web-video-books-and-dvds/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:28:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11053 Eric  Spiegelman has a Web video hit on his hands. “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” a series of short clips featuring exactly what the name suggests, is popular, viral and cheap to make.

Alas, it’s not profitable. Spiegelman says he spends considerably less than $1,000 for each one-minute episode, and the 50 episodes he’s made so far have generated some four million views since February. But advertising for the series, sold via Web video distributor blip.tv, doesn’t cover his costs.

Spiegelman is pretty sanguine about this, but I find it a bit frustrating. We’re several years into the Web video era–almost three years after Google (GOOG) bought YouTube–and this is the kind of stuff that should work by now. It’s original, ad-friendly, and made on a shoestring budget. If that can’t work, what will?

In any case, Spiegelman can afford to wait a bit for things to right themselves. His company, Jetpack Media, is a unit of indie movie studio Greenstreet Films, so he has a bit of a cushion while he figures out how to crack the code.

And in the meantime, he’s hedging his bets by using his Web series as a way to get back into old media, where you can actually get paid for stuff you make, in advance.

Spiegelman has repackaged the first season of his clips into DVD form, which will be sold by First Run Features (you can pre-order the first disc for $19.95).

Next up: A book deal with Bertelsmann’s Random House, via its Villard imprint, with photos from Gawker contributor Nikola Tamindzic (anyone who follows the blog-to-book minimarket will not be surprised to learn that ICM agent Kate Lee brokered the deal).

And Spiegelman can imagine other ancillary products down the line. Perhaps an audio show based on jokes that people submit via a hotline. Use your imagination. Which I guess is what you have to do if you want to make a living making Web video in 2009.

Oh, the videos themselves? They’re a lot of fun. You may have heard of a few of the joke-tellers–former New York City Mayor Ed Koch is a contributor/performer, as is real estate mogul Harry Macklowe–but the rest are fairly anonymous types who have a way with a story and a punch line. Below, a quick interview I taped with Spiegelman last week, and below that, a few of the joke-tellers themselves (Warning! These feature a couple of judiciously chosen curses).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090917/how-to-make-money-with-web-video-books-and-dvds/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081223/how-to-dupe-the-new-york-times-a-letter-to-the-editor/ http://allthingsd.com/20081223/how-to-dupe-the-new-york-times-a-letter-to-the-editor/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:13:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2393 The New York Times (NYT) admits that it has been duped by someone who pretended to be the mayor of Paris. How did the duper ever get one over on The Paper Of Record? By writing a letter to the editor. NYT:

Editors’ Note: December 22, 2008
Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.

We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.

We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.”

Expect this story to generate a lot of new media rulz! from the blogosphere. But you can file that in the same place you put the “Twitter is like a news wire, only better!” arguments. I’m just glad the Times can afford to have a staff big enough to verify the authenticity of every letter it prints. And I worry that this won’t be the case in the near future.

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