Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Not in a Marriott sort of way. The company will release its Facebook Home mobile application software — the all-inclusive Facebook-ification of your Android device — to the rest of the world on Tuesday, pushing harder toward building its international user base by invading the fastest-growing computing devices on the planet: Smartphones.

Facebook Home made its debut in the U.S. recently, albeit in a somewhat limited capacity. Initially, the software will work on only a handful of Android mobile phones, and comes preloaded on the HTC First, the “first” device to come with Home slapped on it directly out of the box.

This won’t be the case for long. Facebook doesn’t want its sweet, sweet content relegated to the inside of an app container forever. It’s the whole point behind Home, which allows items like Messenger Chat Heads to pervasively follow you around the device as you weave in and out of other apps. It’s the philosophy behind Cover Feed, a never-ending flow of shared friend photos and status updates streaming through the front face of your phone at all times.

“We’ve been trying to get that content out in front of people first for a long time,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday. “Facebook Home gives you an opportunity to see content during those in-between moments on your phone.”

So, the end game, then, is to get that sort of experience on as many phones as it possibly can — which means heavily targeting Android, the mobile smartphone OS currently dominating global market share. To get there, Facebook can either secure more deals with carriers and manufacturers to preload the software on the phones, or, more likely, try to drum up enough excitement to get consumers to download it from the Google Play store themselves.

International markets are clearly important to Facebook (and as I’ve argued, those markets are pretty much the whole point of building Facebook Home). Most everywhere outside of North America are key areas of expansion for the social network, which has already largely penetrated the U.S. population.

These are also the areas in which Facebook faces its stiffest competition. Smaller companies like WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat are dominant in parts of Europe, Asia, South America and other potential growth areas. Facebook needs to move in and act fast to deal with the massive influx of competition.

Time to watch the Facebook Home downloads flow — or not.

Chat Heads are a clever update on the notification system most smartphone users are already familiar with — instead of getting a text update when a pal wants to talk to you, you’ll see a circular picture of your pal’s … head.

You should be able to download the new version of the app later today, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer and mobile head Cory Ondrejka announced at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

Other new features include “stickers” (everyone has to have stickers in their messaging app), as well as a new version of the iPad layout, which mirrors the version Facebook recently brought to the desktop News Feed.

This might have been what a Facebook executive was talking about yesterday, when Bloomberg reported that the company was talking about making a “version of its new mobile software for the iPhone.” That certainly makes a lot more sense than the notion of Apple giving a third party control of its mobile OS, in the way that Facebook (and Amazon, and others) have been able to do with Google’s Android.

Meanwhile, if you really, really love Chat Heads on Facebook Home phones, you may not be satisfied with the Apple version. Unlike “real” Chat Heads, which show up no matter what app you’re using on a Home phone, the iOS Chat Heads will only work when you’re using the Facebook App.

Around the globe, mobile technology is reshaping lives. For the affluent, the smartphone and the tablet have emerged as the dominant means of communication. The introduction of the iPhone six years ago forever changed what was imagined possible, and Apple now faces stiff competition from Google’s Android and such would-be rivals as Microsoft and Mozilla. On the device side, the pioneers of computing are pitted against traditional phone makers as well as startups that have emerged in the smartphone era. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the rise of sub-$100 smartphones means that billions more will have their first connection to the Internet. And the basic cellphone not only delivers communication but also provides a channel for previously unavailable information about health care, weather and crops.

Like the signature D: All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, running today and tomorrow, pointedly avoids the usual slides and speeches, instead spotlighting candid interviews with an array of the most interesting and outspoken execs in the business.

The first D: Dive Into Mobile event, held in 2010, explored the dawn of the smartphone era. This year’s Global Edition will look at the broader impact mobile technology is having on how day-to-day life is carried on across the world. This event was originally slated for last October, but Hurricane Sandy forced a sudden change in plans. We are immensely grateful to all of the speakers, sponsors and attendees who stuck by us. We promise that things will be even better than what we originally had planned for last fall.

D: All Things Digital founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher will spend time in the red chairs, to be sure. But they have graciously allowed much of the conference programming to be crafted by the two of us, Ina Fried and Liz Gannes, who spend much of our time reporting on and writing about the world of mobile. Together with Walt, Kara and the growing AllThingsD staff, we look forward to bringing you the stories and strategies behind this global mobile shift. Over the next two days, you’ll hear from some of the biggest names in mobile technology. Fresh from his travels to North Korea and beyond, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will be able to address Google’s wide-ranging mobile efforts, from Android and Chrome to AdMob and YouTube. Long dominant on the desktop, Microsoft and Intel have each had their own struggles in mobile. Intel’s Mike Bell and Microsoft’s Terry Myerson will appear separately to make the case why their company shouldn’t be counted out.

Facebook’s newly minted Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer will address the challenge — one that’s now closely watched by Wall Street — of following the migration of his company’s users from Web to mobile. Meanwhile, browser maker Mozilla is trying to shake up the phone market like it did the Web browser market, by introducing an open alternative to dominant operating systems. You will also hear from a range of speakers who will talk firsthand about how mobile is changing the lives of the young, the poor and those in crisis. We’ve invited Nancy Lublin from the teen activism organization DoSomething.org, along with Juliana Rotich, the Kenyan founder of open source crisis-information service Ushahidi.

Our Global Voices segment will give a place onstage to individuals whose lives have been personally transformed by mobile technology. This is a new project for D that aims to share some of our business and tech spotlight with the real-world people who are the reason all this technology is created in the first place.

And, of course, D: Dive Into Mobile will bring together some of the smartest people in the industry — in the audience. Our hope is that the talks onstage will be the start of a dialogue that continues into the breaks, over the meals, and long after the red chairs have been hauled away.

Tickets are scarce, and we understand that not everyone can make it there in person. But our editorial team will be covering the sessions live, and we will release full videos of every session in the ensuing weeks.

And, for one block of interviews, we are offering free live videostreaming.

These include some of our most timely speakers:

• Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose book “The New Digital Age” will be released later this month
• WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum (who says he’s not getting bought by Google), in one of his first onstage interviews
• Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, just a couple of days after the release of Facebook Home and the HTC First
• Juliana Rotich, the executive director of Ushahidi, the citizen report mapping project that just helped facilitate a mostly peaceful Kenyan presidential election

Streaming starts at 9:45 am ET on Tuesday, April 16. There will be a short break between the Google and WhatsApp sessions. There will also be a demo of an exciting new health-care startup that’s currently in stealth mode.

“Mike Schroepfer’s new designation as Facebook’s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company,” Facebook told AllThingsD in a statement.

The position was previously unoccupied due to the departure of former CTO Bret Taylor last summer.

Schroepfer — or Schrep, as he’s more commonly known — has been at Facebook for nearly five years, overseeing all of the company’s engineering, infrastructure and mobile efforts, a key figure as the company tries to reinvent itself as “mobile first.” He joined Facebook after a three-year stint at Mozilla, where he also served as VP of engineering, and did time as an engineer and CTO of Sun Microsystems’ DataCenter Automation and Clustering Software Division. (What a mouthful.) Schroepfer currently sits on the board of Ancestry.com, and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

He joins a strong executive team under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with Sheryl Sandberg continuing to manage operations as COO, while CFO David Ebersman continues to handle the books.

Good timing, too, as we’ll be sitting down with Schrep at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York City this April! How convenient. We’ll ask him all about what he’s got planned for the company going forward in his new role.

We had assembled some of the biggest names in mobile technology and a stunning array of demos for what was sure to have been an amazing gathering before a sold-out audience.

Sandy had other plans, of course, wreaking devastation across the area, including massive flooding in lower Manhattan, where we had planned to hold the event.

As we said at the time, we would be back. And now we are pleased to announce that Dive Into Mobile has been rescheduled for April 15 and 16, still in New York at the same (now dry) venue in Battery Park.

A number of our original speakers have confirmed for the new event, including Android chief Andy Rubin, Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, Verizon Wireless marketing chief Tami Erwin, Major League Baseball’s Bob Bowman and Fabricio Bloisi, head of Brazil’s Movile.

Several other speakers are making sure the new date works, and we look forward to announcing them in the coming days and weeks. We are also working on adding a few big-name speakers that couldn’t make the earlier date.

While first crack at attending the rescheduled event will go to those who were initially registered, check our registration page to get in line for tickets.

In the meantime, we made the most of our time stranded in Times Square, filming video interviews with a number of the guests who were to have taken the stage in October. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop traveled all the way from Finland, only to be stuck in New York, while Xiaomi chief Bin Lin was in from China.

Especially worth a watch are our talks with three of the international Global Voices who had made it to New York. Asia Kamukama traveled from Uganda to speak at our conference and experienced her first hurricane instead. Thankfully, we still got a chance to sit down with Asia and hear about her work setting up solar-powered computer labs in rural Africa.

We also got to meet two of the amazing high school seniors who are part of MEET, a program that teaches technology and business skills to Israeli and Palestinian youths. Program alums Amin Manna and Yuval Yogev have come up with their own mobile app aimed at promoting impromptu events via smartphone.

Also up on our site are stories on several of the products that were to have demoed either onstage or in the App Showcase at Dive Into Mobile.

• Desti
• Panacast
• Zappar
• Snapchat
• Grubhub

While those products have now launched, we have our eye out for other incredible demos to share onstage in April.

Mobile leaders from Google, Facebook, Nokia, Verizon Wireless, Pandora, Mozilla, WhatsApp, Telefonica and more are set to join us in conversation onstage on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

We’ve lined up great new product demos, an interactive app showcase, and a series of short talks by end users from around the world whose lives have been significantly changed by mobile.

Ina Fried jetted to New York yesterday to greet the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 8, and I’m joining her soon, along with Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and most of the ATD team. We’ll see many of you at the conference in person (we have just a handful of tickets left available here), and invite the rest to join us for a selection of livestreamed sessions.

As with all other D: All Things Digital conferences, Dive Into Mobile won’t be livestreamed in its entirety. But we did pick some winners for you to watch from afar.

Here’s the lineup:

• Monday, Oct. 29 at 5:20 pm ET: Andy Rubin, Google
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 8:35 am ET: Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter, and
  Cheryl Mills, U.S. State Department
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 9:35 am ET: Mike Schroepfer, Facebook
• Tuesday, October 30 at 10:45am ET: Bin Lin, Xiaomi

Note: All times are approximate and subject to change. Due to the nature of a live conference, there may be delays or changes in the schedule.

Some guidance on why we picked these particular talks, and why you won’t want to miss them:

Rubin will be heading to Dive Into Mobile directly from Google’s major Android product launch earlier that day.

Mills and Stanton will be having a rare public meeting-of-the-minds between a major social media player and government.

Facebook is all about mobile these days, especially now that the Wall Street folks have picked up on how important it is, and its engineering leader Schroepfer (a.k.a. “Shrep”) will address how the company is sprinting to keep pace.

And Lin is just days away from the release of the highly anticipated Xiaomi Phone 2, the direct-to-consumer top-of-the-line Android phone that is dramatically shaking up the Chinese market and has implications for the rest of the world.

The social network has officially joined other Silicon Valley companies that are finding it valuable to have satellite offices in the Northwest, the home to Amazon and Microsoft.

Other companies with offices in the area include eBay and Zynga. Google has two (one for either side of Lake Washington, I guess).

Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, who addressed employees and government officials at the office, overlooking the Space Needle, said the company was unsure what it would find when it decided to enter the region two years ago.

“But in two years, there’s been a clear demonstration of the capabilities of the people in Seattle,” he said.

Apparently.

Ari Steinberg, who moved to Seattle in July 2010 to start the office, said it had grown from just him to 90 employees. The larger office, which they just moved into 10 days ago, has room to grow to 175 — making it by far the largest development center outside of Menlo Park. So far, the group has worked on projects such as the iPad and iPhone apps and voice calling.

After short welcome speeches from Senator Maria Cantwell and Rep. Jim McDermott, Steinberg was a little less formal, telling stories about how an employee once moved his desk into the bathroom, and when he moved it back he found a fake column — complete with an outlet — installed in his spot.

As a reminder of the last office, that column was moved into the new digs (see photo at left).

The office is located just north of downtown Seattle, basically in the same neighborhood as Amazon, which has slowly been taking over for the past year. As Schroepfer rightly pointed out, once Amazon completes three new office towers — at one million square feet apiece — Facebook may no longer have a view of the Space Needle.

But that’s another eight years off, so they have some time.

Here’s a short tour of the office on the 18th floor, including a shot of Cantwell signing the Facebook wall. Unlike the company’s headquarters, you won’t find professional graffiti, but there are two Starbucks (well, kind of).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120412/facebook-not-sleepless-in-seattle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111209/the-furious-five-of-facebook-meet-its-new-product-princes-and-their-domains/ http://allthingsd.com/20111209/the-furious-five-of-facebook-meet-its-new-product-princes-and-their-domains/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:38:42 +0000 Liz Gannes and Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=151966

Facebook confirmed our report that it has reorganized its technical teams around key product areas, naming Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin as leaders of product groups reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

So who are these newly elevated execs and what are the details of their new roles?

Sources said the company is still figuring out what to officially do about shuffling the five mens’ titles. Currently, its public-facing management page remains unchanged and a press release is nowhere to be found.

Facebook seems to be trying to get the most out of every last second it has as a private company, not revealing important bits of information. That includes which person is assigned to which product area, and even what those product areas are.

If Facebook PR wants to get all cryptic about it, that won’t stop AllThingsD.com! (We’re like the War Operations Plan Response (W.O.P.R.) computer in “WarGames” — soon we’ll have all the launch code numbers and let loose the missiles.)

Before that, the first and most important thing to remember is that CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg remains the king of product power at Facebook. It all rolls up to him, seated at the dead center around which all these new spokes turn.

Of the new arrangement, what’s also key to keep in mind, as one source aptly describes it, is that this is a ”verticalization” of Facebook, which had largely been horizontal before, with top execs covering a wider range of areas.

Now, it is more siloed and — presumably — more nimble, with more powerful lords of product areas in charge.

That’s a lot like the management rejiggering Google has done recently under its aggressive new CEO and co-founder Larry Page, although Facebook’s slicing and dicing seems to be more a matter of addressing internal growth and making the organization more functional.

Here’s the rundown that we have pieced together so far:

Privacy and Identity — a critical area for Facebook, since it seems to have an ongoing issue with it (or lack thereof) — will go to Lessin.

Communications and Apps — the real guts of the product — will get the leadership of Cox.

Infrastructure — the nuts and bolts of keeping the global megopolis of Facebook humming — will be the purview of Schroepfer.

Mobile and Platform — the big forward-looking areas — will be run by Taylor.

And Monetization — which includes advertising products and will pay for this whole shebang — will come under the sway of Badros.

But, until all is revealed by the social networking giant, here are some details of the newly named product potentates of Facebook — all men, it should be noted — you might want to know about:

Bret Taylor: As was previously reported here, Taylor is currently leading Facebook’s “Buffy” phone project, which is its HTML5-oriented smartphone effort.

Taylor was named Facebook CTO in June 2010 and has historically had no direct reports. His projects at Facebook have included platform, search, News Feed and mobile.

Taylor is a consistent presence at Facebook’s big public events. Even though he presents about technical stuff, his delivery is considered by many observers inside and outside the company as much smoother than his often awkward boss, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Prior to Facebook, Taylor co-founded FriendFeed, a geeky social app aggregator bought by Facebook; the app’s influence is seen in many of Facebook’s social products today. Prior to that, while at Google he helped create Google Maps.

Taylor has a young family and is a really big Stanford football fan.

Chris Cox: Chris Cox is Facebook’s well-liked product head and the company’s only real home-grown management star. He joined Facebook in 2005, shortly after graduating from Stanford, and has worked on products such as News Feed early on in their gestation. At one point as a young staffer, he was promoted to be in charge of Facebook’s human resources and helped set a tone for the company’s culture.

Cox often appears at Facebook events to talk about the human impact of Facebook’s products, and the merits of “social design.”

The charismatic exec got married this year and has played in a reggae band.

Greg Badros: Outsiders have been less familiar with Greg Badros. Badros had been in charge of advertising engineering at Facebook for the past two years.

Prior to joining Facebook in June 2009, Badros worked at Google for six years, where he was particularly instrumental on its well-known AdSense and Gmail products.

“Star” is the word multiple of Badros’s acquaintances and former colleagues used to describe him.

Badros is technical, entrepreneurial, articulate and humble, said former Keval Desai, his Google colleague and current VC at Interwest Partners.

“He can speak to a crowd of engineers and sales people with equal ease,” he said. “He was a star at Google and instrumental in scaling the AdSense platform.”

Badros has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and did his undergrad at Duke.

Mike Schroepfer: Along with Cox and Taylor, Schroepfer has been at the top of Facebook’s org for a while as VP of engineering.

Schroepfer, who’s known internally and externally as Schrep, was previously VP of engineering at Mozilla and, before that, at Sun Microsystems.

He’s recently done a bunch of traveling with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to encourage women in tech and to open Facebook’s New York engineering office.

The affable exec also has a young family and just bought a Nissan Leaf.

Sam Lessin: The most recent addition of the group to Facebook, Lessin joined last October when Facebook nominally acquired his start-up Drop.io. Along with other “acqhired” CEOs, he has been influential within Facebook as a product manager.

Lessin was the major driver of Facebook’s upcoming Timeline redesign, which makes users’ profiles into visual journals of their lives. Timeline has not rolled out as soon as Facebook said it would, but it’s a major ongoing project that it seems natural for Lessin to continue to lead.

While still at Drop.io, he started a side project called letter.ly for paid personal email newsletters. Before that, he worked at Bain & Company.

Lessin went to Harvard at the same time as Zuckerberg and seems to be tightly integrated into the inner Facebook social circle. He recently became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro.

(Full disclosure: Dow Jones owns both The Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD.com. Dow Jones is owned by News Corp.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in Liz’s ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111209/the-furious-five-of-facebook-meet-its-new-product-princes-and-their-domains/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111208/facebook-confirms-reorg-names-five-product-heads/ http://allthingsd.com/20111208/facebook-confirms-reorg-names-five-product-heads/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:36:14 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=151950 Facebook today confirmed our report from last night that it has shaken up its organization around major product areas.

Here’s the statement:

“We can confirm that in order to streamline the product development process, we have reorganized our technical teams into product groups that report into Mark. These groups will be lead by Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin.”

As I wrote last night:

Facebook has done a major corporate reorganization in an effort to be more nimble, sources said.

The new structure integrates design, product and engineering teams around key product areas such as privacy and communication.

We’ll have more details as we get them.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

(Image credit: Flickr user Scr47chy)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111208/facebook-confirms-reorg-names-five-product-heads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110920/facebook-turns-newsfeed-into-a-social-magazine-to-highlight-big-pictures-and-top-stories/ http://allthingsd.com/20110920/facebook-turns-newsfeed-into-a-social-magazine-to-highlight-big-pictures-and-top-stories/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:32:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=122552 Little Google+ popped its head up this morning to launch a few features and open to the public. Not so fast, growled Facebook: This is our week! So even though Facebook is essentially holding the tech news cycle hostage through a two-pronged attack of leaks and announcements in the run-up to its f8 developer conference on Thursday, the company called us to talk about a bonus launch today.

Here’s what’s new: Facebook will today start rolling out a revamp of its newsfeed that will make it more like a social magazine, weighting big pictures and important stories.

Yes, yet again, Facebook is redesigning a core feature and taking away options users have come to expect. Instead of the “top news” and “most recent” toggle options, users will see a newsfeed with the most important items since they last visited Facebook. So if they incessantly check the site, they’ll see new stuff every time. If they go out of town for a week, they’ll see highlights from the time they were gone.

And lest people feel as though the pace of Facebook is slowing down, the site is also offering an alternate view, one that will constantly scroll down a sidebar at the side of the page. This “Ticker” — which some users have had in tests for a while now — shows a live feed of nearly every action a users’ friends are taking across the site, including likes, statuses and comments.

Meanwhile, the size of photos displayed in the newsfeed will double. Larger photos is probably the change users will notice the most, Facebook VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview today.

Schroepfer said he disagreed with my assertion that Facebook seems to be overcomplicating and expanding its feature set. “The new news feed is, in our mind, a simplification,” he said.

“The thing I personally find exciting is realizing three quarters of a billion people use the product and that range of experience can be someone with 15 friends to someone with tens of thousands of subscribers who uses the site for four hours every day,” he added. “We are adding some features but trying to do our best to simplify what we can and make them optional.”

Maybe next year if Facebook has this much stuff to launch it should just schedule a two-day f8 conference!

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement. 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110920/facebook-turns-newsfeed-into-a-social-magazine-to-highlight-big-pictures-and-top-stories/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100913/boomtown-talks-girl-geek-at-facebook-hack-event/ http://allthingsd.com/20100913/boomtown-talks-girl-geek-at-facebook-hack-event/#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:08:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33669

This Saturday, BoomTown gassed up the Mini and motored on down to Facebook’s newest building in Palo Alto, Calif., for a Developer Garage and Hackathon, which the social networking giant did in partnership with Girls in Tech.

The goal was to focus on women developers, although there were plenty of dudes in attendance, as per usual at any all-night nerd-off.

While there, event wrangler Randi Zuckerberg fobbed off to me a panel for lady geeks she was slated to moderate, which was a decidedly risky move on her part.

Here is the video of that panel, which included: Facebook Engineering Director Jocelyn Goldfein; Meebo co-founder Sandy Jen; Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America; and Catherine Herdlick, a game producer for Electronic Arts (ERTS).

Natch, I also did a video of my own at the Silicon Valley event that features interviews with Zuckerberg, Facebook Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer, GIT Managing Director Dhana Pawar and Goldfein, which is also below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100913/boomtown-talks-girl-geek-at-facebook-hack-event/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100422/a-mean-video-boomtown-annoys-to-a-cavalcade-of-facebook-execs-at-f8/ http://allthingsd.com/20100422/a-mean-video-boomtown-annoys-to-a-cavalcade-of-facebook-execs-at-f8/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:15:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27482

Here is a video BoomTown did yesterday at Facebook’s bustling f8 developers conference in San Francisco.

At a press conference at the Silicon Valley social networking event, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–trying mightily not to answer a question I proffered about the competitive landscape–said I wrote “mean” posts.

Oh, Mark, man up or get a big dose of a sense of humor from your delightful sister, Randi.

In any case, I hope Zuckerberg enjoys these interviews about the innovations and partnerships announced yesterday that I did with many of his minions, including:

Biz dev guy and guerrilla hugger Bubba Murarka, latest Google (GOOG) refugee David Fischer, PR honcho Brandee Barker, deal dude Vaughan Smith, moneybags investor Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, engineering head Mike Schroepfer and product guru Chris Cox, on whom I might have developed a man crush for his good humor while I poked at him.

Which is not mean at all!

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100422/a-mean-video-boomtown-annoys-to-a-cavalcade-of-facebook-execs-at-f8/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091209/walts-and-karas-cavalcade-of-gadgets-on-zdnet/ http://allthingsd.com/20091209/walts-and-karas-cavalcade-of-gadgets-on-zdnet/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:06:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21712

Last week, Walt Mossberg and I hosted the seventh annual gadgetfest, called “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology,” at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.

Every year, we show off a range of innovative new tech toys to the crowd, helped by our regular gadget freak, Greg Harper, and by guest “tech geek” celebs.

This year, they were Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer, the social networking site’s VP of Engineering.

Before the show, Walt and I displayed our wares for ZDNet, which posted videos, below

Here are the videos:

Walt

Kara

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091209/walts-and-karas-cavalcade-of-gadgets-on-zdnet/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091204/freaky-geek-bear-nooks-3d-cameras-head-massages-and-a-facial-for-boomtown-the-churchill-club-gadgetfest-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20091204/freaky-geek-bear-nooks-3d-cameras-head-massages-and-a-facial-for-boomtown-the-churchill-club-gadgetfest-video/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:05:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21458

Last night, Walt Mossberg and I hosted our seventh annual “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” program for the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.

Every year, we show off a range of new tech toys to the crowd, helped by our regular gadget freak, Greg Harper, and by guest “tech geek” celebs.

This year, they were Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer, the social networking site’s VP of Engineering.

They brought a range of old and new favorite and innovative gadgets, including a Squeezebox Wi-Fi music player, a bizarre plush bear with GPS and other such tech features, and a facial brush that Sandberg tested on BoomTown’s flawless skin.

Also on the bill: A tie that takes pictures, a camera that stalks smiley people, a 3-D camera and digital photo frame, an Android netbook, a Nook e-reader, a bizarre head massager and a “Harry Potter”-like remote-control wand.

Here’s a video I did at the event, including interviews with Sandberg, Schroepfer, Mossberg, Harper, the bear and my son, Louie, who manned the digital hand vacuum from Dyson:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091204/freaky-geek-bear-nooks-3d-cameras-head-massages-and-a-facial-for-boomtown-the-churchill-club-gadgetfest-video/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/ http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:32:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21168 This Thursday, my All Things Digital partner, Walt Mossberg, and I are hosting–for the seventh year running–the annual “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” program for the Churchill Club.

This year, our guest “tech geek” celebs–drawn from the gadget-mad players of Silicon Valley–are Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer, the social networking site’s VP of Engineering (pictured here).

In fact, Sandberg was scheduled to be our guest last year but had a last-minute snafu, so Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams filled in for her.

Among others, past geek celebs have included Google (GOOG) co-founder Larry Page, Yahoo (YHOO) co-founder Jerry Yang and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

Also along for the ride is our regular gadget freak, Greg Harper, president of HarperVision Associates and co-founder of Gadgetoff, who brings new meaning to the term. (He also packs so much hardware and software that he is on the TSA’s list.)

The evening starts at 6 pm with a buffet dinner at the Crowne Plaza Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif. That’s followed by the program, in which each of us shows off some of our favorite innovative or just plain weird gadgets, while the others opine on the selections.

You can sign up early online or get a pricier ticket at the door.

Here’s a rather longish video from last year, which is well worth watching for the animatronic Elvis alone:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080730/mozillas-john-lilly-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20080730/mozillas-john-lilly-speaks/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:01:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2456

I met John Lilly last October on a decidedly odd techie scavenger hunt in Hawaii–trapped in a van all day while searching for tikis and such, as if we were a geek Brady Bunch (yes, BoomTown works that hard for you)–and found him to be just the kind of quietly intelligent, thoughtful and self-effacing digital exec that Silicon Valley could use a lot more of in these often frivolous, look-at-me Web 2.0 days.

Soon after, in January, he was named CEO of Mozilla Corporation, after serving as its COO. Lilly took over from Mitchell Baker, who remains Mozilla’s chairman.

The open-source software nonprofit foundation, also a for-profit start-up, is most famous for its red dragon logo and, more importantly, its increasingly popular Firefox browser, whose share has steadily increased since it debuted in late 2004.

Here’s my video interview with him about what’s next:

Firefox now has about an 18-percent share, which has climbed from 11 percent just two years ago–against Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer browser juggernaut with 74 percent and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser with 6 percent.

Mozilla’s recent launch of Firefox 3 should help it grow further, even though IE 8 will soon emerge out of beta too.

But on its record-setting debut day in mid-June, there were 8.3 million downloads of Firefox 3 in 24 hours. Current overall downloads have just moved past 50 million.

That means more money in the bank, although mostly from Google (GOOG), which pays Mozilla royalties for Google ad clicks that come from Firefox searches (Google is the default search box on the browser).

All is not sunshine and daisies, of course.

Besides having to keep up the innovation, Mozilla also has to keep up its technical prowess–despite the fact that it is not likely to go public and shower employees with giant gobs of overhyped stock, given its unusual status as both a profit and nonprofit.

In addition, in case you haven’t noticed, the start-up game is still rocking and it remains awfully enticing to jump into the ever-crowded pool.

For example, Mozilla lost Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer last week to Facebook, where he will be the social-networking site’s director of engineering.

But Lilly took that departure calmly, wishing him well in a classy way on his own blog, just as he seems to do most things.

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