Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today are launching a nonprofit, open-sourced joint online learning venture called EdX, with the first courses to start in the fall of this year.

Basically, Harvard is jumping in as an equal partner to a previously announced project called MITx, with each school contributing faculty leaders and putting up $30 million in funding.

EdX (which was pronounced both “ed-ex” and “ee-dee-ex” at a press conference this morning) will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free; in the future, other schools will be invited to join.

The two Boston-area schools are essentially leapfrogging Stanford University, where a set of online classes last year gave rise to the creation of two for-profit companies led by the Stanford professors who taught the classes — Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng’s Coursera. Stanford is still figuring out its own approach to online learning.

EdX will bring MIT and Harvard courses to students around the world, with no admissions requirements, free classes, and “a modest fee” for credentials earned by students, according to plans posted today.

The open source platform will include “self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories.”

The first courses have not been chosen yet, and many other details have yet to be figured out.

“Online education is not an enemy of residential education, but rather a profoundly liberating and expanding ally,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield at a press conference this morning.

EdX is also an opportunity to push forward education research, said the project’s leaders.

EdX President Anant Agarwal

EdX is inspired in part by Sal Khan’s Khan Academy, and will include videos made in his style, said Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Agarwal will be the first president of EdX.

Of other online learning initiatives, including those that are for profit, Agarwal said, “Of course, all of us are looking at each other. At the end of the day, I think the more online educators there are, I think the better off the whole world is.”

James Duncan Davidson

Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she has done her own research on these topics and published a book about them last year called “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” (here she is talking about the book with Stephen Colbert). Her talk clearly resonated at TED, where attendees in the main auditorium aren’t allowed to use their phones or computers, a rare occasion for the many technologists here.

But I don’t think there’s any doubt that after their enthusiastic standing ovation, those twitchy techies were back on their smartphones as soon as the session ended.

What’s so bad about the “I share, therefore I am” mentality, where people live their lives thinking of the pictures they will take and the status messages they will post?

It’s that we’re hiding from each other and real relationships, Turkle said. “We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch. Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and demanding. And we clean them up with technology.”

All this time spent communicating digitally gives us “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” Turkle said. “If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely.”

Turkle asked people to create spaces in their offices and homes that are designated for conversation. She told them to work on solitude and to listen to each other.

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In an unusual appointment for the longtime public servant, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Silicon Valley venture powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz as a part-time “Special Advisor.”

Summers got to know the firm with an assist from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was a student of his when he was a professor at Harvard University.

Summers was later president of Harvard, as well as director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration until late last year.

“I am doing this because I feel technology in general and information technology in particular is now having a real pervasive macroeconomic impact in our time,” said Summers in a phone interview this afternoon from his home in Boston. “Long after people have lost their memory of the dramatic financial crisis in recent years, they will remember what technology has done to transform our economy in these same years.”

Summers said he increasingly wanted to become closer to this important trend and thought he could contribute to the innovation in Silicon Valley by helping its portfolio companies better understand the global economy.

He was introduced to Andreessen Horowitz at first by Sandberg, who was also Summers’ chief of staff while at the Treasury Department, and was attracted to its investment philosophy.

“They have distinctive elements of strategy that seemed to be a good fit, such as their emphasis on market disruption,” said Summers. “They also have an audacity of the vision and were really supporting transformation.”

Summers said he would serve as an advisor to Andreessen Horowitz companies, focusing on global opportunities they should take advantage of.

He will not become a VC, though. “My life to date has been as a professor and public servant, so I am not in a position to be a major investor,” said Summers.

That said, Marc Andreessen quickly noted in the interview that “if Larry brings in a company, we are going to take a serious look at it.”

While he was not a partner, Andreessen said Summers’ compensation would be linked to the long-term performance of the firm.

Summers will travel between Massachusetts and the West coast, but will also continue to work on outside projects.

What he will not be doing is giving any long-winded economic lessons to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

“I am not sure there is the attention span for some of my lectures out there,” he joked.

Here is Andreessen’s blog post about the Summers appointment:

Meet Larry Summers, Our New Special Advisor

By Marc Andreessen

Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor.

A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date:

* Admitted to MIT at age 16, originally to study physics — clearly our kind of nerd.

* Became tenured professor of economics at Harvard at age 28, where he first started mentoring a young undergraduate named Sheryl Sandberg, who ultimately became his chief of staff at the US Treasury.

* Received John Bates Clark Medal for his research at age 38, one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics (the other is the Nobel).

* On the staff of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-1983. (For those of you too young to remember, Reagan was a noted Republican.)

* Undersecretary for International Affairs and then Deputy Treasury Secretary for President Clinton between 1993 and 1999. Intimately involved in resolving major macroeconomic crises in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Became US Treasury Secretary in 1999.

* President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006.

* Until late 2010, served as President Obama’s director of the White House National Economic Council.

* And, most importantly, a pivotal character in the recent movie “The Social Network”.

Larry will be an advisor to our firm and our entrepreneurs on several topics:

First, as technology continues its relentless colonization of broad swaths of the global economy, Larry will help us understand the scope and nature of the opportunities in front of us and our industry.

Second, many of our companies are seeking to restructure and revolutionize various markets — such as telecommunications, advertising, entertainment, education, health care, and financial services — and Larry will help us and our entrepreneurs analyze and understand the economics and dynamics of those markets.

Third, Larry’s deep insight into global economics and geopolitics will be highly useful to our companies that intend to expand globally — which is to say, all of them.

According to the New York Times, “Years ago, Henry Kissinger suggested that Mr. Summers be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas.” We can’t arrange that, but we are excited to have him on our team, both to do that and to contribute lots of new ideas to us and to our companies.

The project, called “Deep Shot,” shows how one might zap a page on a map, complete with links, just by taking a picture of it. But instead of getting just a picture of the screen, the phone is also getting the code needed to go to that place on the map. It works by taking advantage of widely used Web technology known as a uniform resource identifier, or URI. Programs use URIs to email links or embed code and Deep Shot transmits that URI to the cellphone camera. The project requires a small bit of code on both the phone and the computer.

The benefit, though, is not constantly having to email links when one wants to download a map or other information to a mobile device.

MIT graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang developed Deep Shot last summer, while an intern at Google, which owns the rights to the technology. Chang and Google’s Yang Li presented the technology in May at a computer-human interaction conference.

In theory, the software technique could be used to send data among different programs as well, but that would require Google to open up the technology and it is not yet clear what its plans are, MIT said.

Deep Shot is the latest in a series of efforts that recognize the cellphone camera as not just a means of taking pictures, but rather a sophisticated input mechanism capable of scanning bar codes and recognizing objects.

For some folks, Deep Shot may stir memories of a technology Timex built into a line of watches in the mid-90s — DataLink, a wireless, optical data transfer developed in partenership with Microsoft. Users would build a contact database on the computer, and then point the wristwatch’s imaging sensor at the screen while the data was transferred through a series of bar code-like flashing lines.

Here’s a look at Deep Shot in action.

The move marks Intel’s vote of confidence in the post-Mubarak Egypt, in the earliest days of establishing a new political, cultural and economic identity. In addition, as one of the worlds leading global technology players, Intel has embraced the growing quality of innovation and engineering talent in their first acquisition in the Arab world. Dr. Christian Mucke, Vice President of Intel Mobile Communications, notes that “Egypt has a young, growing talent pool across multiple specializations, including the field of engineering, and we remain committed to Egypt as a strategic market.”

SySDSoft’s CEO and founder Dr. Khaled Ismail is a classic start-up story. Having received his PhD from MIT and the highest recognition from leading engineering institutions, Ismail founded his company out of passion and necessity. When the U.S. company for whom he built the Cairo operations failed to survive the bubble burst of 2001, he saw significant market and talent opportunity in region. Starting with two employees, he reflects on those early days, “It was not very difficult as I was blessed with a great team. My main challenge was always to find new customers abroad, who were willing to trust an Egyptian company to deliver top-notch technical work for them.” Find them he did, and as his operations grew to nearly 100 engineers, SySDSoft quickly moved from offering engineering design services to developing its own IP in the 4G telecom world. SySDSoft was named the first Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurial Company in the Middle East in 2007.

Ismail has been active in fostering and mentoring young Egyptian entrepreneurs in technology and telecom. Between his success at SySDSoft, sitting on the board of Orascom–the largest telecom operator in the Middle East–and actively advising government and business leaders in how best to incubate new tech ideas, he is optimistic for the new generation following in his footsteps. “What will change,” he hopes, “is that young entrepreneurs may have more guts now to take the risk and hope for a good upside in case they are successful. After Jan 25, 2011, in fact, I am much more optimistic, since the overall environment is very crucial, and we hope that the change that has happened will entice a lot of young Egyptians to have a dream, take the risk, but have the patience to not simply chase quick profit.”

SySDSoft had received two offers to sell in recent years, but now, with the exponential growth in mobile services and pressure on time to market, the time was ripe to harvest opportunities in consolidation. Ismail notes, “During the past six months, there have been so many acquisitions in the domain or wireless technologies more broadly. We witnessed most of our small- to medium-size customers being acquired by big companies during that phase, which indicated that big consolidations are happening.” When Intel bought one of the leading wireless companies last August, Infineon Wireless, it also acquired one of SySDSoft’s most important customers. Ismail concluded, “We had an excellent working relationship with them. Also, Intel is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world that would allow our product, which we believe is best of its class in the world, to reach the hands of hundreds of millions very soon. Our IP is a part of their road map, and as our business is not capital intensive, we represent far less risk than other industries.”

Mucke agrees: “SySDSoft designs software IP solutions and RF/analog circuits embedded in mobile platforms and enhances Intel Mobile Communications’ existing multi-communications portfolio, specifically accelerating its 4G LTE efforts.”

Ismail will remain with Intel as the head of Intel Mobile Communication Egypt. “I have currently no other plans but to make it one of the most successful teams with Intel worldwide, and to win the 4G chipset battle such that an Egyptian product will be in the hands of more than a billion users within five years from now.”

Intel is sizing up the best approaches in Egypt and the region overall. “Intel remains committed to the Egyptian market and the region has a young, growing talent pool,” Mucke explains. “We are currently in the process of evaluating the market and the financial impact to Intel as a result of the Egypt revolution, and are working with the ecosystem on identifying how Intel can help rebuild and restructure the Egyptian PC market.”

Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington, DC-based angel investor in U.S. companies and CEO of the leading collection of condition-specific, social health web sites at healthcentral.com. He recently returned from Cairo, Damascus and Dubai, examining the region’s start-up community, and was a delegate in the State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program as a judge for Egypt’s new venture business plan competition. He can be followed at @cmschroed.

Here are three companies you’ll likely be hearing about again:

In recent weeks multiple people have told me about Bubbli, saying it’s a see-it-to-believe-it experience. At TED on Wednesday, the company gave the first public demo of its augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos.

Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a picture with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that “bubble” by holding their own phones in front of them. When their phone is moved up or down or left or right, they see what you would have seen in that same direction.

At least, that’s how I think it works. The Bubbli demo was a bit raw, in part due to connectivity issues.

Bubbli co-founder Ben Newhouse gained recognition for building the Yelp Monocle feature, which was the iPhone’s first augmented reality app. It uses the phone’s built-in compass to overlay Yelp restaurant ratings onto a camera view of the surrounding area.

Bubbli, which is funded by August Capital, describes its goal as to “build the matrix by defining a new medium to express the physical world around us.”

Meanwhile,

Bluefin Labs co-founder Deb Roy used his full-length speaking slot to describe the process of surveilling his house with video cameras to capture the process of his son learning to speak. In order to analyze more than 90,000 hours of video, his MIT team created machine learning systems that helped trace the evolution of his son’s learning moment by moment.

Roy has now taken a leave of absence from MIT to extend these machine-learning techniques to social media discussions of television programs. His company, Bluefin Labs, raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

In a previous conversation with NetworkEffect, Roy told me that Bluefin now analyzes 30 television channels 24/7 and computes their intersection with Twitter Firehose data, Facebook updates and blog posts in real time. Bluefin’s customers are big brand advertisers, agencies and media companies, who want to better understand how ads and programs resonate with online audiences.

TED attendee and financial commentator Paul Kedrosky was effusive about Roy’s talk on Twitter, calling it the best ever.

“Epic, moving and wondrous. Generated biggest standing O in ages,” Kedrosky tweeted.

And on Tuesday,

Push Pop Press showed off a reimagined digital version of former Vice President Al Gore’s book “Our Choice” built for the iPad and iPhone with interactive infographics, videos and voice overs. For instance, one demonstration of wind energy generation can be manipulated (as pictured) by a user blowing on the device’s screen. That was a big crowd pleaser.

TEDsters (you’ll notice they’re an effusive bunch) called the demo “mind-blowing” and “amazing.”

I’ve written before about how Push Pop Press is highly anticipated given its founders’ background. Mike Matas, who showed off the app on stage at TED, was formerly a design prodigy at Apple.

Caveat: I am not at the conference myself, but have a press pass for the live stream. TED continues through Friday, and session videos will be posted online in the coming weeks.

Photo credits, via TED:

Mike Matas in Session 3: Mindblowing, on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

That’s similar to other shopping apps such as those from e-commerce powerhouse Amazon, but Smoopa has a few neat features.

First of all, Smoopa always includes shipping costs in its prices. It also shows recent prices for the 12 million products in its database, so you can get an idea of whether to buy now or later (kind of like what Farecast/Bing Travel does for air flights). And it gives users the ability to track the price of a product and be alerted when it comes down. Users can also share a product price with friends through in-app Facebook integration.

Boston-based Smoopa currently has data from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Buy.com and TigerDirect. CEO Mendel Chuang said the company doesn’t carry Amazon feeds yet, in part because the company obscures shipping costs in the product listings it provides through its API.

Chuang reported that retailers are increasingly comfortable with customers pulling out smartphones while they browse, even if it makes them likely to spend their money elsewhere. Best Buy has a policy of matching its own online prices, which are apparently often lower than those on its shelves. And after all, you’re already in the store, so you may value the convenience of buying a product right there, where shipping is always free.

Smoopa is available for free in the U.S. through Android Market, and online at www.smoopa.com. The company is working on an iOS version.

Chuang, who formerly led marketing for Google Friend Connect, launched Smoopa with a team of three other MIT grads. The company is bootstrapped and expects to make money from affiliate revenue sharing. It built its bar-code-reading technology in-house.

Barack Obama, June 4, 2009, Cairo, Egypt

In past 8 days at least 12 #Egyptians set themselves on fire out of desperation: unemployment, poverty, corruption. #Jan25 #Egyptprotest
@monaeltahawy, January 25, 2010, Cairo, Egypt

I will keep on saying this. Youth Entrepreneurship is key in creating a long lasting impact in the Arab world! #Jan25 #Lebanon #Sidibouzid
@habibh, January 25, 2010, Beirut, Lebanon

As we left Cairo ten days ago to travel home to the U.S. after taking part in the first delegation of the State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program, we saw Egyptians huddled around TVs in the airport watching video of the Tunisian uprising on Al Jazeera. We had no idea then that a single “slap to a man’s pride” in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia could lead days later to fierce protests in Cairo and the defacement of posters of Mubarak. While there is a good chance that the protests will settle down in the coming days in the face of a growing military presence, it’s clear that Egypt is at a tipping point–politically, socially and economically.

The pent-up frustration that Egyptians feel about the current regime is felt in different ways across the population. Our focus in Egypt was on a growing class of educated, tech-savvy entrepreneurs. While the frustration they feel may not be as intense as that of a fruit vendor subsisting on two dollars a day, there are a number of economic and cultural impediments that have historically limited their chances for success. Based on what we found, the promises of Egypt’s start-up scene lie in stark contrast to the desperation of its poor. The next few weeks and months will tell us a lot as to whether there is enough stability in the country to make external investors comfortable with its prospects.

Amr Ramadan is the kind of entrepreneur investors look for: he started his company Vimov with only $1,060 and begins his investor pitch by openly admitting the failure of his first product. His next product was a simulator for iPad developers that sold thousands of downloads at $32 each. His third product was the most popular paid weather app on the iPad, with over 350,000 users paying $.99 each. The next product in his pipeline, an ingenious take on personalized news, sounds even more promising. In Silicon Valley he would have a few hundred thousand dollars of angel money in the bank, and a couple of Series A term sheets from VCs in his pocket. But Amr is not in California, or even the United States. He is in Alexandria, Egypt, and he’s just one of a new class of young, educated and Internet-enabled entrepreneurs in the region.

We watched this narrative unfold firsthand in Egypt, which was selected as the pilot country of theU.S. State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program. The GEP is the government’s effort to promote and spur entrepreneurship around the world, led by passionate advocate (and successful entrepreneur) Steven Koltai. We met with a series of senior government officials, including Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, who are committed to building a startup-friendly business environment. The Egyptian government recognizes that a nucleus of successful entrepreneurs is critical to catalyzing a sustainable middle class. While no single company is going to cure unemployment or increase the poverty line, an inspiring story of upward mobility could be an important populist spark.

Over the course of four days, we reviewed 32 presentations–culled from over 100 applications–from a variety of Web, mobile and hardware startups. Our delegation included the former CEO of CarMax; an investment banker, an MIT management scientist and a Silicon Valley VC. After two rounds of interviews, we awarded $20,000 to two companies: semantic search engine kngine and hardware accelerator SilMinds.

Haytham AbdElFadeel, the creator of kngine, is a 20-something hacker. His older brother works for him managing servers, while his father works from home as a day trader. “Search engine” are two of the most halting words known to investors. As a prominent VC emailed us, “a direct assault on Google doesn’t strike me as the right approach,” but Haytham doesn’t know any better than to pursue his passion for creating a better Google. He is using the prize money to purchase more servers, since the two desktop computers at his home are limiting his ability to index more of the web.

Dr. Hossam Fahmy is the co-founder and CTO of SilMinds, which has created the only decimal hardware financial accelerator card available in the market. He is a Stanford PhD, a professor at Cairo University, and he helped formulate the IEEE standard for floating point arithmetic. By shifting number processing from general software to specialized hardware, SilMind’s card increases server performance for certain financial service applications as much as 5X.

As an emerging market, Egypt doesn’t suffer from the irrational behavior seeping into the U.S. Internet market (unproven ad technologies raising $30mm, local discount services selling $20 gift cards for $10, etc). Instead, the start-up community in Egypt reminds us of the U.S. Internet market circa 1995, when it was tough to raise capital and when there was less glamour in being a technology entrepreneur; as opposed to the U.S. where Facebook raised $1b at a $50b valuation and “The Social Network” is poised to win an Oscar.

Some investors, sensing that the U.S. Internet equity is “priced to perfection,” are turning their sights towards emerging markets like Egypt. Usually, they look for foreign applications of successful domestic business models, like who is the “Facebook of Africa” or the “Groupon of Indonesia”? Many entrepreneurs (including freshly minted MBA grads returning to their native lands) are quick to adopt this strategy. About half of the start-ups that we saw in Cairo were localized versions of successful U.S. models.

The impressionability of these emerging market startups raises important questions. Although there may be a clear opportunity for the “Zynga of the Middle East” to get acquired in the near term by its namesake, one cannot build a sustainable business based on somebody else’s vision. Will those entrepreneurs who define themselves based on our business models look back at us, years from now, as startup imperialists? If so, will they shut us out from participating in their own economic transformations, just as they begin to scale? One need not look any further than China or Russia for cautionary tales of markets closing down to foreign investors at the most inopportune times.

There are a variety of reasons why Egypt could fail in its attempt to become a start-up mecca: poverty, political instability, poor education, lack of rule of law, difficulty to raise capital and cultural norms that do not embrace risk. For example, it takes two days to form a new company in Egypt, but takes two years to dissolve one, which is problematic because without bankruptcy reform, it is impossible for entrepreneurs to “fail fast” and move on to their next venture.

Despite these risks, there are a number of advantages that Egypt has in its favor: innovation is real, valuations are reasonable, engineering talent is available, real estate is cheap, and the government is motivated to help foster entrepreneurial success stories as a means of inspiring its disaffected youth. Egypt represents a market of more than 80mm people, and is the gateway to the broader MENA market of 320mm people (larger than US, Brazil or Russia). The region’s growth rates of mobile penetration and Internet usage are among the highest in the world.

In recent months, a few venture funds have started to finance these early stage opportunities: Arif Naqvi, founder of Abraaj Capital, the largest private equity firm in the region, recently announced multi-hundred million dollar funds dedicated to early and mid-cap technology companies in the Middle East; Ahmed Alfi, after two decades of successful investing in the United States, returned home to Cairo to form Sawari Ventures, complete with a SoMa style incubator housed in a classic 1940s building on the Nile.

Is it time to invest in Egyptian startups, or will the current political and social instability inhibit exits and investment returns? Who knows if companies like kngine and SilMinds will ever exhibit the same power in Egypt that Google and Intel exhibit in the US–what matters now is that there are Egyptian entrepreneurs with the drive and skill sets necessary to compete in global technology markets. With the Egyptian government’s support, and the organic growth of the population and its technology adoption, we believe that a framework is now in place for Egypt and the broader MENA region to emerge as an important market for early stage investment.

Seth Goldstein @seth is a San Francisco based angel investor and start-up entrepreneur. Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington, D.C.- and New York-based angel investor and CEO of the online health start-up healthcentral.com.

Rambus, whose nominal specialty is designing ways for chips to pass data back and forth but which is better known for more than a decade of bitter legal battles, earlier this month filed a complaint with the ITC, saying that products from several companies contained chips that infringe on its patents.

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous patent battles around smartphones knows, the ITC is generally seen as a fast track to a settlement of a patent dispute. Since federal courts are slow and litigation is expensive, companies often go to the ITC ostensibly to block the import of products found to infringe on patents. Since practically every technology product is built outside the U.S., sales of an infringing product can be subject to an exclusion order, the usual outcome when a violation is found.

What’s interesting is the wide range of companies that Rambus has named in its complaint: Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, Broadcom, Seagate, Motorola, Garmin, Asus and Hitachi are among the better known ones. The full list contains 34 companies, including some subsidiaries.

Some of the patents involved in this complaint were the subject of a prior case that Rambus took to the ITC against Nvidia. The commission ruled the patents–known as the Barth family of patents–were valid and issued an exclusion order, prompting Nvidia to come to the table and sign a licensing agreement in August. Rambus is obviously looking for a similar outcome from Broadcom and Freescale, which it says are among those now infringing on the Barth patents.

Additionally there’s another set of patents known as the Dally family, which Rambus didn’t invent but to which it holds a license. The patents are owned by MIT and are based on the work of Bill Dally, a former MIT professor of electrical engineering who’s now at Stanford University. The patents had been licensed exclusively to a small private firm called Velio Communications, where Dally had been CTO and which was acquired by the chip maker LSI Logic in March of 2004.

In a twist that could happen only in the strange world that is patent law, Rambus acquired the exclusive license to Velio’s serial interface patents–the Dally family–in a separate deal in the waning months of 2003. The irony is that LSI is among those being sued for infringing on the Dally patents. Some M&A lawyers at LSI must be kicking themselves today.

A nice little bit of back-to-school marketing for Apple (AAPL), which likely has an eye trained on education sales as the new school year begins.

Who: Ben Zotto, lead everything (it’s a one-man shop).

Ben was at Microsoft and worked for Xoopit, the email-enhancement start-up acquired by Yahoo (YHOO).

What: Ben’s Penultimate brings a Moleskine notebook-style user interface to the iPad. He just released an update that allows you to rest your palm on the screen while writing, the same way you might with a pad and paper.

Why: It has been in the top tier of the Apple (AAPL) App Store for weeks.

Where: cocoabox.com (Web site); @cocoabox (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who Else: Apps like PaperDesk and Idea Boards use the pen-and-surface interface. Penultimate does drawing a little differently, though. Ben says it’s about the ink.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I’ve been pretty privileged. I was a short-term photocopy runner for the Junior World Ice Hockey Championships in Geneva when I was in my teens. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t suppose it played to all of my strengths.

School Days: I grew up in Boston, but we moved to Switzerland during my high school days. I left eighth grade in Massachusetts, maybe never before having left the state. And within a month of arriving in Geneva, we were on a history class trip to Florence. It was awesome.

Geek Crush: There are a lot of guys from my Microsoft (MSFT) days who are my programming heroes. Guys like Tracy Sharpe and Dinarte Morais. I’m also a big fan of Wil Shipley.

It’s something about his combination of making beautiful and functional software and being fiercely independent–you know, a coffee shop denizen–that I’m attracted to. I actually found the designer I worked with on Penultimate through him.

Gadget Freak: I don’t carry a lot of gadgets. I am pretty picky about my work set-up, though. I use an Apple extended keyboard from the 1980s with the heavy-duty key switches that I rescued off eBay (EBAY) and the Microsoft optical IntelliMouse, which is, for my money, the best mouse developed so far.

Early Internet Memory: Right after I moved to Switzerland, I had a friend back in Boston who would email me. It was probably 1992, so it wasn’t really email. He found some dial-up number at MIT that had an open gateway.

It wasn’t obvious then how you would send an email to an internal address where my dad worked. It was one of those early u-u gateway/bang-this/bang-that things. He finally figured out how to get it to work, and my dad’s secretary would print out these letters from my friend Micah back in Boston.

That was how I heard the news from Massachusetts for a little while. Micah is a recent recipient of a Ph.D in computer science from UPenn. Not a fool.

Bio in 140 Characters

Ben had an international childhood. He has worked at Microsoft, Xoopit and Yahoo. He writes software that he hopes is beautiful and useful.

The Five Questions

How long have you been developing Penultimate? Why is it a killer app when so many others don’t seem to be?

Originally, I developed an app called Handwriting for the iPhone. There was potential there, with the touchscreen, to give a personal touch to messages through handwriting that wasn’t there before. For that reason, I spent a lot of time working on the graphics math for the ink.

I wanted the input to really resemble the handwriting of the user. It turns out that getting digital ink to look real is a really subtle thing. I spent a lot of time getting it to move right, getting it to feel smooth and whatnot. I finally got it where I was happy with it.

I released the app and basically, nobody bought it.

People responded well, but I realized that anyone who used the app would only use the surface that they could see within the bounds of the iPhone screen, even though I made it so that you could scroll around easily to get a bigger surface for writing.

Size was clearly an issue.

The iPad coming out meant that all of a sudden something that was just more of a single tool like handwriting could be scaled up into an app with real uses, and all it took was more screen real estate.

Steve Jobs, in his iPad release presentation, said that if they’d added a stylus, they’d have gotten it wrong. Does the success of your app fly in the face of that vision?

It’s funny, I’d never heard that until now. I didn’t watch that speech.

When the iPad came out, I got this vision of doctors walking around making notes, and it looked like there would be lots of use cases where a keyboard just wasn’t ideal.

People would need to input info standing up, while moving and in portrait mode. From the pictures, it wasn’t clear the keyboard would be great for that.

I developed Handwriting and Penultimate to be used with your finger, and that’s how I use them most. And I think Apple has good reasons for not pushing that. They could have developed handwriting recognition, but for them, that draws away from what they are really trying to sell.

Handwriting recognition is really hard, and as soon as you do that and say you are going to do it with a finger, you have people saying, “Why doesn’t this thing recognize my handwriting better?”–instead of marveling at all the amazing things you can do with the platform.

Have you faced issues from Apple, developing a popular app that goes a little against the grain?

I’ve heard complaints about the App Store, but I’ve had a pretty good experience so far. It usually takes them about 48 hours to approve updates for my stuff. That said, there are some hardware things I’ve run into.

A big one is trying to get palm rejection in my app so that you can place your hand on the screen to write and not have it register as a touch.

On the iPad, Apple doesn’t expose those drivers to developers. On the MacBook, for instance, you can hook in the driver and get all the data–the width of the touch, rotation, everything.

All that is closed off for the iPad, so getting the natural handwriting position has been really challenging. I’m playing with that right now because it’s been one of the loudest requests.

You are embracing this use case that Apple seems to wish wasn’t there. What other requests are you getting from users who want to be able to write on their iPads?

I think form-filling is a big one. There are apps that do that, but their ink technology isn’t as good as mine, which is why I think I get those requests even though there are other apps in the field.

I got this great email from the head of a police department, who said that out in the field there are all these forms he has to fill, and he wants to take them with him and not have to bring paper.

There are all kinds. I got mail from a roofing contractor who wants to be able to snap his drawn lines to a grid to draw quick plans.

I’ve got friends who are doctors who think it’s a great idea, but say they could never use it because of HIPAA.

There seems to really be a lot of uses for being able to write by hand and make notes in this very natural way.

You worked in regular software before you did this. What is fundamentally different about developing for this platform? What are people missing about that?

I think a big difference today is that people expect updates much faster than before. It’s fundamentally different than shrink-wrapped software world, where you would spend lots of time making and refining a product, packaging it and shipping it out.

Today, people expect to see some kind of update or fix every couple of weeks and they expect them to be free. If you don’t issue an update for a while, people might begin to think you are dead.

Because the mobile platform apps are these single-use things, there is a perception that they are smaller or more simple and that therefore there is an entitlement to future updates. It’s great for users but really hard for developers.

There’s this ever-present question: “How much software is ‘three dollars worth’?”

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100528/almost-famous-ben-zotto-of-cocoa-box-design/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100508/weekend-update-05-08-10-boys-of-summer-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20100508/weekend-update-05-08-10-boys-of-summer-edition/#comments Sat, 08 May 2010 22:46:04 +0000 Drake Martinet http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40105 The flowers are blooming in Silicon Valley and the scoreboard shout-outs at AT&T Park, where the San Francisco Giants play, are stacked up, as all the fashionable little start-ups treat their staffs to a dog, beers and some baseball. AllThingsD continues to watch the seasons change from inside our dimly lit HQ, crumpled over computers, smartphones and tablets to keep the news flowing. We’re going to be as pale in August as we were in February, all in the service of our readers. We’re glad to have you, so read on and catch up on anything you might have missed from this warm and wonderful week.

BoomTown started off at what has become a magically bottomless trough of posts. Kara reported on yet another exec, this time Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing, Entertainment and Content, scurrying down the gangway of the SS MySpace. Kara mused that while posts on executive departures from My Space and Yahoo have been plentiful lately, they can’t keep coming forever. Midweek, she got on a plane to Beantown and caught up with Walt Mossberg at MIT’s new Media Lab facility. The video she came back with features foldable cars, cities of the future, awesome electro-opera gloves and the weirdest glowing-eyed owl-thing Weekend Update has ever laid eyes on. Seriously: Worth a watch. Toward the end of the week, Kara got deep in a piece she wrote for the Washington Post, where she worked back when newspapers were king. She wrote about what she thought the world would benefit from being rid of, namely physical keyboards and computer mice. Full disclosure: She wrote the post on her Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Digital Daily was a posting machine this week, starting early with some bad news for Steve Ballmer and the Internet Explorer fanboys out there (theoretically there should be some right?). It looks like IE’s dominating market share dropped seven percent, down to 59 percent since this time last year, under pressure from other browsers, according to a Net Applications study. Midweek, John moved on to a post about recent speculation that low AT&T (T) data plan prices for the iPad 3G may indicate an extension of the exclusive deal between AT&T and Apple. John finished things off with a nice post that brings some perspective to all the Apple ogling by the press. The comScore (SCOR) report names Samsung as the top mobile device maker in the U.S. market, even if an analysis of media coverage volume might suggest otherwise.

Over at MediaMemo, Peter brought us a post early in the week on Google’s investment in Invidi, a start-up working on “addressable ads” in the TV space. We aren’t sure if Google (GOOG) is looking more Appley or if Apple is looking more Googley these days. From the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel files, Peter posted that Time Inc. saw gains in both ad and subscription dollars last quarter. The question remains: Will it be a V- or a W-shaped recovery? At least it’s not just a backslash. Delivering a much anticipated piece of news, Peter posted that it appears Facebook will finally start rolling out location services sometime in the next several weeks. Advertising Age reported that McDonald’s (MCD), the international corporate face of individualized services, will be a partner for the launch. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. At Mickey D’s, you can have it any way you want, as long as it’s the McDonalds way.

Personal Technology this week was a little more of a conceptual piece than a gadget review, but Walt always mixes it up at the right time. He devoted his entire column to demystifying some of the concepts around cloud computing and explains what it may mean for Joe and Jane user. Walt seems keen on the change with allows flexibility and interoperation among devices, and his explanation brings it down to ground level. Katie rounded us out with a hands-on review of Microsoft’s new Kin One, a roundish little smartphone designed to be a social platform as much as a phone. She liked the design and execution in most areas, though felt that the polish on this first Microsoft smartphone reincarnation was a little lacking. Best of all? Seems like Kin’s constant wireless upload of all content to the cloud might be the feature to beat.

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and tweeting out with our new Meebo bar. We’re in the final countdown to the D8 conference now, and we’re ready to level up to full-tilt awesome. Stay tuned!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100508/weekend-update-05-08-10-boys-of-summer-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100507/walt-and-kara-tour-the-new-mit-media-lab-geektastic/ http://allthingsd.com/20100507/walt-and-kara-tour-the-new-mit-media-lab-geektastic/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 11:44:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28092

Earlier this week, Walt Mossberg and I visited the new geek wonderland at the MIT Media Lab.

Officially opened in early March and designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, the Cambridge, Mass.-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology complex has been in the works for a dozen years.

The open and airy building screams digital innovation, with seven interlocking “cubes” around a main atrium. It is connected to the original Media Lab cube, designed by I.M. Pei, called the Wiesner Building.

Walt and I visited some of the new labs with Director Frank Moss, checking out everything from a foldable City Car in the Smart Cities group to some really strange opera gloves in its music group, to…well, you’ll see.

Here’s the video, which is kind of long, but has lots of robots (of course!):

[Photo credit: Andy Ryan/MIT]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100507/walt-and-kara-tour-the-new-mit-media-lab-geektastic/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/ http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:48:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25653

According to numerous sources inside and outside the company, Yahoo is poised to slam dunk–I apologize, but sports puns are so easy–an acquisition of an online sports site this week.

And, predicted several of those sources, it is most likely to be San Francisco-based Citizen Sports, a maker of popular apps and games that allow fans to interact on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and Facebook.

Interestingly, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz is the keynote speaker at the high-profile sports business conference IMG World Sports Congress Wednesday morning in Los Angeles.

There is a plethora of interesting Web sports sites for Yahoo to choose from, including Yardbarker, SB Nation and Rotowire.

With Yahoo’s strong sports content business, especially in fantasy sports and news, and Bartz’s recent statements about making smaller talent and tech acquisitions–as well as the company’s recent focus on social networking and mobile integration–Citizen Sports is a perfect choice.

Citizen Sports started off in 2005 as ProTrade, an “athlete stock market entertainment company,” with $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partners Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie through Radar Ventures.

Other investors included Kleiner Perkins partner Will Hearst, said the Citizen Sports Web site, “as well as major sports figures, including former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champ Troy Aikman; Arizona Diamondbacks General Partner Jeff Moorad; legendary NFL Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh; and Northgate Capital Venture founder Brent Jones, the former all-pro San Francisco 49ers tight end.”

But the site has morphed into an innovative digital enabler of interaction among fans of all kinds of sports, via its fantasy sports games and Sportacular iPhone app, as well as numerous apps on Facebook.

It also has tight relationships with Sports Illustrated magazine and other sports partners.

Most interesting is that one of its co-founders, Jeff Ma, was one of the members of the infamous MIT blackjack team, made famous in the book, “Bringing Down the House” and the film, “21.”

It is unclear how much Citizen Sports would sell for, but estimates put its price at about $40 to $50 million.

Both Citizen Sports and Yahoo declined to comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/mit-unveils-new-digital-sandbox/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/mit-unveils-new-digital-sandbox/#comments Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:52:22 +0000 William M. Bulkeley http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=22252 The famed Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled its new home, a $90 million, six-story playpen. It’s designed to let some of the world’s smartest and most creative engineers explore their inner robot, create new social networking tools or build intelligent music systems.

Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab, and a former entrepreneur and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) executive, said the new building is designed to foster interdisciplinary cooperation by having floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding every lab. That makes work in each lab visible from primary-colored stairways that cross the building’s soaring atria.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100305/mit-unveils-new-digital-sandbox/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100120/mit-researchers-read-consumers-faces-to-make-a-better-taste-test/ http://allthingsd.com/20100120/mit-researchers-read-consumers-faces-to-make-a-better-taste-test/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:00:47 +0000 Jennifer Valentino http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=20295 It happens all the time: Companies spend large amounts of money on focus groups and market research, only to have a new product fail when it’s introduced to the public.

Researchers at MIT are hoping to help change that, using some high-tech tools that measure the emotional reactions of people as they’re testing a new product.

Part of the problem, the researchers say, is that people have a tough time accurately describing how they feel about something.

“We know that self-reported feeling is very inaccurate,” said Rosalind Picard, an MIT professor who directs research into computing and human emotion. “We’ve measured when people say they like something, but their face is leaking all kinds of disgust.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100120/mit-researchers-read-consumers-faces-to-make-a-better-taste-test/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/ http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:16:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12350 Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around “real-time” sharing and conversations.

That’s the core of Twitter’s pitch, of course, and it has helped the microblogging service raise $155 million, a $1 billion valuation, and forge partnerships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Not surprisingly, investors are looking to place money on related bets, from search engines that parse real-time data to location-based social networks with real-time updates, and even real-time photo-sharing sites.

The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet.

But that hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn, N.Y-based company from raising about $1 million, sources say, in a round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures. A group of smaller investors, including Betaworks, the incubator that specializes in real-time companies, and Ron Conway, the angel investor best known for his Google bet, are also backing the company.

Hot Potato is led by Justin Shaffer, an eight-year veteran of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, pro baseball’s well-regarded Web unit. Shaffer has recruited three other MLB.com employees (one of whom subsequently left to get an MBA at MIT) to join him.

Shaffer wouldn’t comment about his funding round, but was willing to discuss his start-up’s general plans. They are finishing an iPhone app and plan to submit it to Apple (AAPL) in the next few weeks, he said, and will open their doors once that’s approved.

The big idea is an interesting one. People are already using Facebook and Twitter to converse about events in real time–think about Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Balloon Boy, or last night’s Yankees-Angels game.

Shaffer’s critique of those platforms, though is that “they break at scale–there’s no good way to filter the chatter so that  you, your friends, and a group of strangers with something relevant to say can all connect. Hot Potato, he says, will offer a “curated stream” in real time of all the data coming out of the event in real time. What we’re really focused on doing is bringing together the entire audience of an event, whether they’re at the event or watching at home.”

Business model? TBD, of course. But there are a couple of obvious ways to go. For instance, Shaffer thinks people who opt-in to a particular conversation–say, about an NFL game or a U2 concert–would be okay with seeing “in-stream” ads, as long as they were relevant.

But that’s a problem that’s best tackled once the service is up and running. We’ll check back then.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090908/former-yahoo-tech-star-eric-boyd-to-microsoft-via-mochi-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20090908/former-yahoo-tech-star-eric-boyd-to-microsoft-via-mochi-media/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:44:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18243

Eric Boyd (pictured here), a high-profile techie from Yahoo who left the company for a start-up last year, is now headed to Microsoft to work for its digital group, now run by another ex-Yahoo, Qi Lu.

UPDATE: Microsoft confirmed the hiring, although declined to provide further details.

Boyd, who is well-known for his card-counting team exploits while at MIT (which were later made into the movie, “21”) had been VP of platform engineering at Yahoo (YHOO) and worked on a variety of projects there.

With the addition of Boyd, sources said, Microsoft has acquired a huge swath of the top tech talent of Yahoo, many of whom came to the software giant because of Lu and to escape the turmoil at Yahoo.

At a recent tech offsite at Microsoft held by Satya Nadella, SVP of Research and Development at its Online Services division, in fact, one person remarked that a full 10 percent of the techies were former Yahoo execs.

There will be more to come, up to 400 or more, if the search partnership the pair recently struck passes regulatory muster, although Boyd is not part of that deal.

He had worked at Yahoo for a decade, but left last spring to take over as VP of engineering at Mochi Media, a San Francisco-based gaming-related start-up backed $14 million in funding by Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners.

He will be working for Microsoft (MSFT) in Silicon Valley, in its group related to search and advertising, sources said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090908/former-yahoo-tech-star-eric-boyd-to-microsoft-via-mochi-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090812/boola-boola-yahoo-marketing-heads-cheerleading-memo-post-microhoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20090812/boola-boola-yahoo-marketing-heads-cheerleading-memo-post-microhoo/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:07:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17509

BoomTown just got an interesting memo that Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele sent out to her staff immediately in the wake of the deal for Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search technology business two weeks ago.

I render it unto you, dear readers, since it shows just how intent the top managers of Yahoo (YHOO) are, especially internally, in reassuring those concerned that Yahoo had not just gutted itself and how it can remain as innovative as ever.

Also amusing–for reasons I cannot understand, since it is an internal memo–is the use of the code name for Yahoo, which is called Yale, after the famous university in New Haven, Conn.

(By the way, “Boola, Boola” is one of Yale’s old football fight songs, which you can hear here.)

By the way, Microsoft (MSFT) was known as Cambridge, Mass.-based MIT, as you can see below.

Also some fun facts, showing the give-it-the-old-college-try mentality of Yahoo dealmakers:

In past merger talks, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL’s moniker has been Amherst College in Amherst, Mass.

And, when Yahoo was considering the Yahoogle deal, the code name for Google (GOOG) was Georgetown, after the Washington, D.C.-based university. That must really rankle at the MIT-stuffed search giant, since–as a graduate of Georgetown–I can tell you, tech is not exactly its forte.

Here’s the Steele memo:

From: Elisa Steele
To: Marketing-all@yahoo-inc.com
Sent: Wed Jul 29 05:11:52 2009
Subject: Announcement today.

Marketing Yahoos,

Yale is already the place where millions go to see what is happening with the people and things that matter to them most, but our aspirations have always been bigger than that. Our vision is to be at the center of people’s online lives, and the deal we announced with MIT earlier today will enable us to focus even more of our efforts on realizing it.

At the same time, our role as marketers has never been more critical. We must focus our energies on engaging our users and our partners, and on making sure that our brand initiatives continue unabated.

Our consumer marketing teams will keep driving more users to our leading audience properties, mobile experiences and applications. Our b2b team will continue communicating to marketers that as the world’s largest media company, Yale offers the most compelling and unique advertising proposition in the industry. The Insights team will continue delivering industry-leading research that helps speed the flow of dollars online. The Global Communications team will be answering lots of important questions from the media and influencer community about this deal (in addition to building buzz around the other amazing stuff we’re doing). The brand team will not stray at all from its mission, as it’s as relevant as ever. And, our regional marketing teams remain in place, partnering with our business leaders to execute our global marketing strategy.

In a nutshell, this is our opportunity to further establish Yale mindshare and preference with all of our audiences through world-class marketing. Our work is more important today than ever before as we communicate our brand position globally.

We are making decisions that we believe set the company up for continued success—and enable us to take back our rightful place in the market.

It’s an exciting new day at Yale, and I couldn’t be more optimistic about our future.

Elisa Steele
Executive Vice President &
Chief Marketing Officer
Yahoo!

And below, I have posted a video of the Yale Glee Club performing all the university’s fight songs in a delightful medley, so Yahoos can start practicing now:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090812/boola-boola-yahoo-marketing-heads-cheerleading-memo-post-microhoo/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090708/sun-valley-diller-and-malone-pessimistic-on-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20090708/sun-valley-diller-and-malone-pessimistic-on-twitter/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:03:24 +0000 Julia Angwin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=13335 Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley, Idaho, media fest got off to a gloomy start Wednesday, with downbeat panel discussions on the economy (getting worse) and the digital future (looking murky).

Erin Burnett of CNBC opened the conference by moderating a discussion between investor Wilbur Ross, MIT professor Simon Johnson and American Express (AXP) CEO Kenneth Chenault.

The prognosis for the economy from the experts was bearish, according to members of the audience. “It was interesting but gloomy,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who attended the meeting, closed to press.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090708/sun-valley-diller-and-malone-pessimistic-on-twitter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080604/facebook-gets-harvard-business-school-kudos/ http://allthingsd.com/20080604/facebook-gets-harvard-business-school-kudos/#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:21:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080604/facebook-gets-the-harvard-business-school-treatment/

While it is not yet clear exactly what kind of business case study Facebook will turn out to be in the end–a raging success or a raging something else entirely–that has not stopped Harvard from feting the hot and hyped social-networking site.

That would be the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, which will bestow upon Facebook its 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award on June 17 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.

Apparently, the glamour never stops for CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who will be at the event, leading the crowd “through Facebook’s remarkable journey.”

Well, that’s all BoomTown needed to hear, immediately ponying up the $225 for a seat for non-members (although we briefly contemplated the $10,000 “Centennial” table for six, which includes a private reception and preferred seating).

While neither Zuckerberg nor I have the fancy degrees–he dropped out of Harvard as an undergrad and I did not have a prayer of getting in in the first place–Facebook’s leadership is chock full of Harvard graduates.

(Much to the chagrin, I might add, of some of Facebook’s less collegiately endowed types, who sometimes grumble to me about the tony school’s influence there, much in the same way some at Google complain about MIT and Stanford.)

In any case, COO Sheryl Sandberg must have scored 800s on her SATs (BoomTown: a decent 720 in English and a less-impressive 640 in math, as near as I can remember)!

According to Facebook’s Web site, she “holds a master’s degree in business administration with highest distinction from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in economics from Harvard University.”

Meanwhile, new PR honcho Elliot Schrage “has been a contributor to the Harvard Business Review…holds a bachelors degree from Harvard College, a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.”

And let’s not leave out CFO Gideon Yu, who “holds a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School,” while VP of Product Management Matt Cohler’s “writings on the start-up economy have been published in Harvard Business Review.”

Here’s hoping some of this Harvard brain power rubs off on me over dinner!

And, using any excuse to post two video highlight reels from our recent sixth D: All Things Digital conference, here’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg in action, somehow withstanding my withering questions last week:

Part One

Part Two

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080604/facebook-gets-harvard-business-school-kudos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071126/the-100-laptop-still-not-a-bargain/ http://allthingsd.com/20071126/the-100-laptop-still-not-a-bargain/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:02:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071126/the-100-laptop-still-not-a-bargain/ With all the holiday hubbub, don’t miss this great piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, which chronicles the bumpy road of the much-hyped $100 laptop project, spearheaded by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte.

Walt Mossberg and I have had Negroponte at two of our D conferences to talk about the effort (pictured above), which is a great idea in concept, although a much more vexing challenge in reality.

Negroponte’s goal in 2005, which turned into a project called “One Laptop Per Child,” was simple and profound: Create a $100 laptop with interactive and connected capabilities to distribute to 150 million of the world’s poorest schoolchildren in developing countries.

Unfortunately, he is likely to fall well short of that goal now, due to unexpected and stiff competition from for-profit tech companies (most specifically the OLPC frozen-out and miffed Intel and Microsoft), too-high pricing for the product and the need for long-term technical support for its users.

“I’m not good at selling laptops,” Mr. Negroponte is quoted in the article as telling colleagues. “I’m good at selling ideas.”

And here’s the video that goes with the Journal story on OLPC:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071126/the-100-laptop-still-not-a-bargain/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070926/john-harvard-master-chief/ http://allthingsd.com/20070926/john-harvard-master-chief/#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:41:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070926/john-harvard-master-chief/

Add another memorable hack to the MIT practical joke canon. Earlier this week, pranksters from the school dressed up Harvard University’s statue of founder John Harvard in Halo warrior drag. “In recognition of the release of Halo 3, a highly anticipated video game by Microsoft and Bungie, MIT hackers adorned the John P. Harvard statue, in Harvard Yard, with a Spartan helmet,” MIT newspaper the Tech reports. “The back of the helmet, which is worn by the protagonist of the game, Master Chief, was labeled with ‘Master Chief in Training.’ The statue was decorated with an assault rifle (bullet count of 2E), as well as a Beaver emblem on the right shoulder.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070926/john-harvard-master-chief/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070820/monday-morning-quarterback-the-aol-ad-black-hole-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20070820/monday-morning-quarterback-the-aol-ad-black-hole-edition/#comments Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:10:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070820/monday-morning-quarterback-the-aol-ad-black-hole-edition/ AOL=Ads Online Loser?

What can we say about AOL’s ad miss, reported in the New York Times today by Miguel Helft, except to quote an email I got from a former AOL executive today: “Ad sales and no surprises were the reason these guys were supposedly brought in.”

Oops. Indeed, more analysis of this issue tomorrow, but it’s not a very good sign for AOL head Randy Falco, the television guy brought in to inject a dose of ad savvy to the service.

AOL has had by necessity to move its business from a subscription model to one supported by ad sales, hoping to take advantage of the 90 million visitors to its sites every month.

Not quite yet, it seems. AOL execs are calling a recent decline in growth of its ad revenue, which was 40% in the previous quarter and is 16% in the most recent (compared to overall online ads in the U.S. that are expected to increase close to 29% this year), temporary and due to vast changes being made in its offerings.

Well, renovation must hurt, because AOL also lost ad market share year over year.

Another big destination, Yahoo, is suffering from the same problem, with a falloff in ad growth and also market share (only Google, which is a horse of a different color from a portal perspective, is gaining). The culprits are small sites gaining ads, as well as savvier marketers looking for better results.

Top O’ the Blogging to You!

Walt and I are considering a European edition of our D: All Things Digital conference, which we are calling EuroD, as you might know from my various posts from our trip to the Emerald Isle recently to scope out sites.

While there, we met the Irish Times’ very sharp tech reporter, John Collins, to talk about the project. He did a nice story then and last week did a very nice post about BoomTown, too.

Here is one of the many videos I did from there with Walt, where we visit Dublin Castle and Walt turns into a tour guide:

MIT Geeks Continue to Invent Scary Geeky Stuff

And here is a great video by The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Saranow about some new stuff being created at MIT’s Media Lab’s Computing Culture Group.

Projects include an energy-consuming meter worn on the thigh that shocks you when you use too much (for those, its inventor notes, “with global-warming guilt”) and a jacket that also delivers a jolt to those who seek to mug its wearer. Ouch all around!

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