“I never was a popular kid in class,” the Intellectual Ventures CEO and former Microsoft executive said at D10 on Wednesday. “I’m not going to be popular in this class. If I want popularity, I go to a chef’s convention.”

Although Myhrvold’s company does some of its own inventing — working on things like a new type of nuclear reactor and a broadband antenna — the company is best known for amassing a huge number of patents invented by others and then seeking to license those patents or else pursue revenue in court.

Myhrvold made the case to the crowd, though probably unsuccessfully, that his company serves a purpose similar to that of venture capital or private equity in the process of aiding innovation.

Myhrvold also quoted his own past statement at an earlier D conference, saying, “If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

That’s how Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, described the company he founded, when he last appeared on the D stage, in 2008. While Myhrvold likes to tout IV as a company that “invests in invention,” the truth is that it is often viewed quite differently by the very industry it professes to support. For IV, “investment in invention” has meant amassing an enormous patent portfolio — the seventh-largest in the U.S. and the 15th-largest of any company in the world — and licensing it. Aggressively. So aggressively that IV is often maligned as a “patent troll.”

Onstage at D10 this morning, Myhrvold disputed that characterization, saying IV is just like a venture capital company or private equity group.

“We believe it’s important for there to be a liquid capital market around any valuable asset,” Myrhvold said. “And we think there’s a lot of value in people investing in stuff and realizing a return. Think about the way venture capital and private equity revolutionized the economy. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re an ‘invention capital’ firm. We invest in invention. We feel inventors should get rich. They should get funding. We should have more invention.”

And we should protect it. Which is a big part of IV’s business model. As Myrhvold conceded, “Sure, we have sued some people.”

But does buying up patent portfolios and using them to squeeze licensing fees out of companies really help innovation and creativity?

“If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing,” Myrhvold said. “In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.”

To many, that view is contentious. And it has generated a lot of animosity toward IV, particularly in Silicon Valley. Does that bother Myrhvold?

Not at all.

“Look, this is a year when the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are doing exactly what I do. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They’re doing what I’m doing!

“So if you have animosity to me, that’s fine. I was never a popular kid in school. I can handle it. I’m not ashamed of suing people.”

So IV’s role is to monetize things that aren’t really products?

Not quite.

The company does have a few products in its portfolio that it is hoping to monetize: A super-high-bandwidth mobile broadband antenna, and a new nuclear reactor.

“Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel,” Myrhvold said. “So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It’s the reactor of your dreams.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

The latest evidence came Monday, as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures teamed with chipmaker Nvidia to buy approximately 500 patents from IPWireless.

The patents include some related to 3G and 4G technologies, including LTE, the companies said. Terms of the deal, which closed at the end of last month, were not disclosed.

Ownership of the patents will be split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia getting license to all of the patents it didn’t get to purchase.

Intellectual Ventures has already sued several major carriers over patents. In Febuary, it sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, and last week it added U.S. Cellular to the proceedings. (Verizon Wireless, not named in the suit, is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures.)

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

The Seattle company sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, alleging infringement of more than a dozen patents.

The suit, filed Thursday in Delaware District Court, seeks unspecified damages.

“The carriers have wireless communication networks that are vast and are integrated,” said Melissa Finocchio, chief litigation counsel for Intellectual Ventures, in an interview. “We have many patents that cover various aspects of that telecommunications system.”

AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile representatives declined to comment.

The fourth U.S. carrier, Verizon Wireless, is not named in the suit and is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures’ technology, Finocchio said.

Finocchio said that the company went to court after several months of discussions failed to lead to a business deal.

“Our first and strongest preference is to have a business relationship with the companies that are using technology covered by our intellectual property,” she said.

This is not the first time that IV has gone to court. In December 2010, it sued memory-chip makers Elpida and Hynix, and also has separate pending actions against several programmable chipmakers and with a number of security software makers.

The company, led by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, has also sued Motorola Mobility.

Being the huge fan of “Top Chef” that I am — hellllloooo, Padma! — it was even more a treat to see former Microsoft legend, controversial patent grabber and full-time fiddler Nathan Myhrvold as a guest judge this past week on the current season of the popular cable television show.

For those who usually associate him with geekery, he is also a big foodie and the author of fancy tome “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.”

Right now, the six-volume, 2,400-page book set retails for $499 on Amazon. As described on the site: “The authors and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes.”

“Top Chef” is now set in Texas, so the topic was barbecue, an apparent fave of the techie too. But I really liked the competitor chefs’ race in the Quickfire Challenge to pull off some feat of molecular gastronomy best.

A side of patent troll pâté anyone?

Here are the videos:

Some of the best known companies are those that have built up huge war chests of patents and then go after companies that refuse to license their technologies. In this group of “non-practicing entities” are companies like Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures; and NTP, the company that successfully sued Research In Motion.

There are other patent-collecting companies that use their patent power to help companies that are already the target of patent litigation. And, of course, there are the armies of attorneys to litigate all the various disputes.

One lesser-known approach is the one taken by Article One Partners, a firm that helps companies being targeted for attack by seeking to invalidate the patents being asserted. Article One does this by tapping a global network of contributors that search for similar ideas that predate a patent — so-called “prior art.” Article One gets a flat fee or subscription from those who seek its services, while contributors that find prior art are given a monetary reward.

While Microsoft has publicly said it is tapping Article One’s services, most of the company’s more than 100 clients prefer not to advertise their association with Article One. That said, the demand for its services is huge, according to Ray Felts, who is president of the company’s North America practice.

“We are assisting clients in the middle of just about every major litigation out there,” Felts said in a recent interview.

To expand its practice and be closer to the majority of its customers, Felts has relocated to Silicon Valley, and Article One has opened an office in Palo Alto.

Although the company’s clients tend to be in high-tech circles such as Silicon Valley, Felts said those that that ferret out prior art have come from all over the world. Some $2 million in rewards has been paid out, he said, with one person in the Southeast U.S. having taken in more than $100,000. The privately held company has been doubling its revenue year over year, Felts said, without disclosing numbers. Its backers include Marshall Phelps, the lawyer that built up the intellectual property licensing businesses at Microsoft and IBM.

Much of Article One’s work is around protecting the makers of products against suits by the nonpracticing entities, such as Lodsys. However, more and more, the company is seeing disputes from one manufacturer suing another.

“You have what we call the circular firing squad of operating companies killing each other,” Felts said.

The mobile industry in particular has seen a surge in such litigation. Of the 250 patent studies that Article One has done for clients, more than half have been in the mobile and wireless areas.

“It’s driving our growth,” Felts said.

The patent amassing firm, which was started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, said it has filed suit in Delaware federal court.

“Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time,” Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach agreement on a license.”

Finocchio said the company’s preference is to negotiate deals rather than head to court, but Thursday’s move shows its willingness to do the latter.

“We have a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license,” Finocchio said. “Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business.”

Of course, Intellectual Ventures is far from alone in filing mobile patent lawsuits. Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing HTC and Samsung (and vice versa), Microsoft is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble, to name just a few of the court actions under way.

Unlike those businesses, though, Intellectual Ventures doesn’t make products of its own, making it tough to countersue them for patent infringement. For more on the company, check out our coverage from 2008, when Myhrvold appeared at D6.

IV vs. Motorola

Late Monday, IV filed suit against Hynix Semiconductor and Elpida Memory alleging the two companies have infringed several of its patents related to DRAM and Flash memory. Also named in the suit: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Logitech, Best Buy and a handful of other companies that make or sell devices running on Hynix or Elpida chips. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.

According to the complaint, IV approached Hynix Semiconductor in 2008 and Elpida in 2009 in an effort to negotiate licenses for the patents at issue here, but was rebuffed. “Despite Intellectual Ventures’ good faith efforts to negotiate a business solution, [Hynix and] Elpida [have] failed and refused to license Intellectual Ventures’ patents on reasonable terms and continues to use those inventions without permission,” IV explains in its complaint. “[It] has been irreparably harmed by Defendants’ acts of infringement, and will continue to be harmed unless and until Defendants’ acts of infringement are enjoined and restrained by order of this Court.”

The suit, IV’s fourth since it was first established, confirms once and for all that the company is willing to litigate to win the patent licensing deals on which its business depends. And that has wide implications for the tech industry. As IP attorney Bijal Vakil said last year when IV sued a handful of security software outfits, “It’s a pretty significant wake-up call for Silicon Valley companies that the threat of this type of massive litigation is real and it’s not going away anytime soon.”

[Image credit: Jan Tik/Flickr]

“The space is just out of control,” Dashwire CEO Ford Davidson said in a phone interview with Mobilized. “You can’t even keep track of who is suing whom.”

Google, for example, said this week that it is bidding $900 million to acquire a pool of patents from bankrupt Nortel, citing the increased mobile litigation over Android as a motivator.

While much of the attention is on moves by big players such as Nokia, Microsoft and Apple, patent disputes among less well-known firms are also becoming more common. Dashwire, for example, is facing a suit, filed in January, from rival Synchronoss.

In the wake of that suit and with all of the other patent litigation in the industry, Davidson said Dashwire started conversations with Intellectual Ventures that ultimately led to the licensing pact. RIM also recently signed a licensing deal with Intellectual Ventures, a patent firm started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.

“All of these things were coming together,” Davidson said.

Davidson said, as a small company with about 25 employees, he’d like to be focused on building products, not dealing with litigation.

“In starting a tech company these days, one of the realities is that at some point you are going to get hit with an infringement suit,” Davidson said.

For its part, Intellectual Ventures said it has seen an increase in mobile-related patent activity, particularly now that the smartphone has taken center stage.

“You’ve seen a lot of patent assertion and patent licensing and also litigation from all size companies,” Intellectual Ventures Vice President Joe Chernesky said in a phone interview. “There’s been such a massive integration of technology in mobile phones.”

Whole sectors that used to be separate, like the PDA, are now just one feature of a smartphone. “All of that technology has been merged into one product,” Chernesky said.

What’s more, the industry is filled with start-ups, many of whom haven’t built up much of a patent portfolio to fend off litigation, particularly since patents can take years to acquire.

“We’ve actually gained a lot of customers who develop and sell products in the mobile space,” Chernesky said. “They are all facing significant intellectual property threats and patent threats.”

Among the start-ups it has signed deals with is Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass., provider of voice-to-text software for smartphones.

Although mobile has always been an area of interest for Intellectual Ventures in terms of both invention and patent acquisition, Chernesky said the company will probably be investing even more now that its customer base is growing.

“We tend to focus acquisitions and investment based on actual customers,” he said.

With the deal, RIM will now have access to Intellectual Ventures’ collection of 30,000 patents as it winds its way through the murky litigious waters of the smartphone market. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Intellectual Ventures offers an efficient way to access the invention rights companies need to stay competitive within the market,” Intellectual Ventures’s telecom licensing head Mario Obeidat said in a statement Wednesday. “RIM has always been an innovator on the forefront of the mobile communications world, and by becoming a licensing customer of IV, they can have access to a broader set of patents to assist them in the management of their IP-related business matters.”

RIM knows firsthand what it is like to be on the wrong side of a patent infringement verdict, having been through a long and costly battle with NTP.

The smartphone market battle continues to be fought in the courthouse as well as in the marketplace. Apple and Nokia are locked in courtroom battles, as are Microsoft and Motorola, and Google and Oracle, just to name a few.

Intellectual Ventures, the IP shop started by former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, has thousands of patents, including at least some in the smartphone space.

The closely held firm was co-founded by former Microsoft Corp. chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, who had avoided litigation for years but never ruled it out.

Intellectual Venture’s lawsuits focus on patents in the fields of computer security and semiconductor technology. One suit names Symantec Corp., McAfee Inc., Trend Micro Inc. and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

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Toshiba said it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Mr. Gates. Intellectual Ventures, based in Bellevue, Wash., is run by a former Microsoft Corp. executive, Nathan Myhrvold.

Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said the two sides were talking about how they could collaborate on nuclear technology. He said the discussions were still in early stages and that nothing has been decided on investment or development.

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For goodness sakes, the controversy over Sarah Silverman’s appearance at the tail end of the TED conference last week can be distilled to this:

You either like the gutter-mouthed comic or you don’t.

BoomTown does and thinks the whole bit about adopting a mentally-challenged kid was very funny, although decidedly sick. If you listen to even a tiny bit of her act, this is pretty much what you might expect to hear from Silverman.

But, we press on!

Here’s a video I did from the event, the highlights of which were Nathan Myhrvold’s demo in which he lasered mosquitoes, Jake Shimabukuro’s masterful ukulele playing, chef Jamie Oliver’s wish for better nutrition and a lessening of obesity, and, perhaps, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder and now megaphilanthropist Bill Gates’s interesting focus on stopping all CO2 emissions stat.

You can see the Oliver video below, and the rest of the talks soon on the TED site.

And here’s my video, in which I take a tour around TED and interview a variety of folks, including former RealNetworks (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser–who used to work for Microsoft–praising Gates’s speech:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100216/karas-ted-video-no-sarah-silverman-cussing-but-shocker-rob-glaser-touts-bill-gates/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100114/boomtowns-1998-rob-glaser-profile-a-web-pioneer-does-a-delicate-dance-with-microsoft/ http://allthingsd.com/20100114/boomtowns-1998-rob-glaser-profile-a-web-pioneer-does-a-delicate-dance-with-microsoft/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:48:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23045

BoomTown did an interview last night with outgoing RealNetworks (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser after the announcement yesterday of his departure from the company he founded and led for 16 years.

That will be posted later today, but here is a profile of Glaser I wrote after spending time with him in Seattle, when I was covering the Internet for The Wall Street Journal.

It’s from Feb. 12, 1998–yes, that means Rob and I are genuine Web antiques–and focuses on Glaser’s decidedly complicated relationship with his former employer, Microsoft (MSFT).

As you will see, it comes from a much different era of the Internet, when Microsoft was much scarier, RealNetworks represented innovation and the medium was still in its infancy. My favorite line is a description of Glaser as “radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist.”

Here it is:

Rob Glaser learned the software business as one of Bill Gates’s most aggressive proteges at Microsoft Corp. So he knows all too well the anguishing strategic decision that most software entrepreneurs inevitably confront: Go head-to-head against Mr. Gates and risk annihilation. Or cooperate with him–and risk annihilation.

Now an Internet entrepreneur himself, Mr. Glaser thinks he has another strategy: A delicate dance with Microsoft that combines a little bit of competition and a little bit of cooperation.

His newly public company, RealNetworks Inc., popularized the use of realtime audio and video on the Internet’s World Wide Web. It already has more than 18 million registered users of its free “streaming” software for receiving multimedia over the Net. It also has a rapidly growing business selling server software for transmitting audio and video to Website operators.

But it stands squarely in the path of the strategy that has drawn Microsoft into trouble with antitrust regulators: Emulating innovative products, integrating them into its operating systems and then giving them away free. RealNetworks’ daunting task is to prove it can do a better job of outmaneuvering Microsoft than Netscape Communications Inc., the browser pioneer whose market share and profitability have been devastated by Microsoft’s integration strategy.

Mr. Glaser insists he and the software giant can coexist. “I learned an amazing amount from Bill,” he says, speaking in staccato bursts and radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist. “We knew we could either compete head-on like Netscape or do something a lot more interesting.”

His strategy is known internally as “coopetition.” Out of mistrust, Netscape two years ago rejected an unsolicited offer from Microsoft to become a partner and investor. But Mr. Glaser approached his former colleagues last summer seeking just such an alliance. In July, he sold a nonvoting 10% stake to Microsoft for $30 million, and licensed RealNetworks’ technology to the software giant for another $30 million. Microsoft also agreed to bundle RealNetworks’ software with Internet Explorer.

In making the deal, Mr. Glaser helped himself to Microsoft’s cash and prestige and calculated that Microsoft wouldn’t consider streaming technology to be as strategic to its future as the browser.

“What we were trying to do in the partnership is to set it up so that our success would not disadvantage their core business,” Mr. Glaser says. “Microsoft is a very paranoid company and so we have tried to create an environment where while they might be covetous of some of our success, analytically they would not fear it.”

The deal gave Mr. Gates the opportunity, if he so desired, to clone RealNetworks’ products during the period when they were licensed to Microsoft. “There’s no question they could use our own technology to become extremely vigorous competitors and try to put us out of business,” says James Breyer, a director and member of Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm that helped finance RealNetworks.

So Mr. Glaser needs to stay ahead of Microsoft by rapidly improving his software, accumulating enough customers to become the standard for sending audio and video over the Internet and diversifying into related businesses.

Last month, for example, he announced an agreement with one of Microsoft’s archrivals, Sun Microsystems Inc., to finetune his software to perform better on Sun’s popular Internet servers than on Windows-based servers.

“They are neither friend nor foe, but Microsoft is most certainly the environment we live in,” says Mr. Glaser, now 36 years old. “It’s how we work within that environment that will make all the difference.”

Mr. Glaser’s own personality seems suited to the relationship’s contradictions. He has been a committed liberal since his days at Yale University, where he wrote a column called “What’s Left” for the student newspaper. He initially named his company Progressive Networks to reflect his politics. And he donated 700,000 RealNetworks shares to causes related to freedom of speech and environmental issues after the public offering, and promises to contribute 5% of the company’s future profits as well.

But he became a notoriously hardcharging and sometimes arrogant manager after he joined Microsoft in 1983, at the age of 21. Some colleagues dubbed him a “screamer.” When deadlines approached for projects, several former colleagues at Microsoft say he became increasingly revved-up, downing one Diet Coke after another and erupting at even tiny mistakes. “My intensity sometimes manifested itself in less positive ways,” Mr. Glaser concedes.

“Like Microsoft, Rob was smart, young, perhaps a little hard to take, and convinced he was absolutely right about a lot of stuff,” recalls Mike Slade, a friend of Mr. Glaser’s at Microsoft who now runs an Internet publishing company, Starwave Corp. “But that was what was rewarded at the company and everything was going too fast there for a lot of management training.”

The pace did take its toll. Even though Mr. Glaser rose to become vice president of multimedia systems and one of Mr. Gates’s favorites, his last years at Microsoft were rocky. Some at the company point to an internal power struggle with Microsoft’s head of technology, Nathan Myhrvold. “They both wanted to be Bill’s boy genius and visionary for the company,” says a colleague. “Obviously, Nathan won.”

Mr. Glaser dismisses tales of infighting, blaming his departure on a diminishing feeling of “joy” in his work. “I began to think that Bill had the best job of all,” he says. In 1993, at the age of 31, he resigned, with about $15 million of stock in his pocket.

His retirement didn’t last long. Soon after, he saw a version of the Mosaic browser, the first graphical interface software for navigating the Web. He had an epiphany, he says, realizing that the Internet could eventually become a major purveyor of audio and video.

Mr. Glaser sank about $1 million of his own money into a start-up that would first produce software for compressing and transmitting sound. With additional funding from friends, such as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, RealAudio 1.0 quickly made its debut in April 1995.

RealAudio was greeted with more than a little disdain from the Internet elite because it was a tinny and unsatisfying experience for most users. But it gave the Internet a voice, and Mr. Glaser kept plugging away, improving fidelity and striking deals with more content providers to use it on their Web sites. The hook: Free player software for consumers.

He is attempting to repeat the process with RealVideo. It currently provides small, jerky moving pictures but will, he believes, someday transform the Internet as data transmission speeds increase. In a recent demo of the player, Mr. Glaser selected a music video by the languid singer Jewel, he joked, “because she doesn’t move around too much.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been developing its own Media Player and NetShow streaming software, partly with technology acquired by purchasing VXtreme, a RealNetworks competitor.

The Microsoft products are now free. But the company may decide to charge for the latest version of NetShow coming out this year, which would be good for RealNetworks. Meanwhile, Microsoft will continue to bundle RealNetworks’ player software with the Microsoft browser, also good for RealNetworks. And the day after RealNetworks’ Sun deal, Microsoft announced an agreement to make its own Media Player compatible with RealNetworks’ server software, yet another positive development for RealNetworks.

“The user only wants it to work,” says Rich Tong, a Microsoft marketing vice president. “So it is good business to work with RealNetworks to set standards for compatibility and expand the market for all of us.”

Skeptics assert that RealNetworks has forged only a temporary truce with Microsoft. Like Netscape, it must continually confront the challenge of trying to make money on technology that Microsoft gives away. RealNetworks charges $29.95 for an enhanced version of the player it gives away free, and $695 and up for its most powerful server software.

Some large companies are snapping the products up. Mercedes Benz, Eastman Kodak and Lockheed Martin are buying RealNetworks’ latest software, RealSystem 5.0, to bring their internal networks to life. Boeing Co., for example, uses RealNetworks’ software to communicate with employees world-wide and conduct training sessions. A variety of media concerns such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Public Broadcasting System, AOL, Fox News’s 24-hour newsfeed and Paramount Pictures use it as well.

Mr. Glaser recently cut a deal with Macromedia Inc., the largest provider of animation-editing software, to transmit animated material over the Internet. RealNetworks is also operating multimedia Web sites for other companies, and has a joint venture with MCI Communications Corp. to create a broadcast network on the Web.

All these initiatives are running up big bills. Earlier this month, RealNetworks reported that revenue more than doubled for 1997, to $32.7 million from $14 million the year before. But heavy research and development spending tripled losses to $11.2 million, or 40 cents a share, from $3.8 million, or 14 cents a share. The company’s high costs, plus the looming threat of Microsoft, have depressed the stock, which hovers at around $16 a share, only slightly above the $12.50 a share it opened at when it went public in November.

But Mr. Glaser exudes confidence. His intense personality seems calmer these days. Once divorced, he now has a steady girlfriend and is traveling more frequently, including a summer trip to New Zealand, Australia and French Polynesia, where he made the decision to take RealNetworks public. His 13.5 million shares are worth $218.5 million. And he thinks he has Microsoft figured out. “People in Silicon Valley see things unnecessarily in black and white: You either hate Microsoft or you are a vassal of them. I am saying there is a third way.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100114/boomtowns-1998-rob-glaser-profile-a-web-pioneer-does-a-delicate-dance-with-microsoft/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090709/sun-valley-gates-and-schmidt-do-lunch-but-dont-comment-on-google-os/ http://allthingsd.com/20090709/sun-valley-gates-and-schmidt-do-lunch-but-dont-comment-on-google-os/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:45:33 +0000 Julia Angwin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=13376 Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt had an awkward encounter this morning at the Sun Valley mogulfest this morning — and after Google detailed plans Tuesday to create software it hopes will challenge Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system.

Mr. Gates and his former lieutenant Nathan Myhrvold were walking out of the morning session when two reporters, including this one, asked Mr. Gates for a comment on the new Google operating system.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090709/sun-valley-gates-and-schmidt-do-lunch-but-dont-comment-on-google-os/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090209/the-billionaires-dinner-at-ted-readjusted-for-the-2009-econalyspe/ http://allthingsd.com/20090209/the-billionaires-dinner-at-ted-readjusted-for-the-2009-econalyspe/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:13:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9492 Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.

Indeed, Brockman now calls the event the “Edge Dinner,” after his lively Edge Web site, where he presides over a variety of eclectic online debates and discussions (in January, for example, the topic was: “DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?”).

Since I managed to miss the fete entirely (embarrassing confession: I fell dead asleep at 7 p.m. and did not wake until the next morning) and could not chronicle it, Brockman allowed me to post some photos from the event taken by him and by former Microsoft research guru and current intellectual property mogul Nathan Myhrvold.

Here are some, and you can see the rest here (click on the images to make them larger):

Google co-founder Larry Page and Applied Minds’ Danny Hillis

Former AOL kingpin and Revolution Health’s Steve Case and Jean Case, Case Foundation

Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Neoteny’s Joi Ito

Nathan Myhrvold, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates and DEKA’s Dean Kamen

New Media Nabobs Tim O’Reilly and Arianna Huffington

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090209/the-billionaires-dinner-at-ted-readjusted-for-the-2009-econalyspe/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080919/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-3-of-3/ http://allthingsd.com/20080919/the-entire-d6-interview-with-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-3-of-3/#comments Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:12:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=4070 We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here is a video of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures.

In it, Mossberg wrangles with the former Microsoft (MSFT) CTO and research guru over his controversial company, which is assembling a large body of patents and inventions.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece earlier this week about Myhrvold’s efforts, discussing how he is “using that clout to press tech giants to sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.”

The video of the interview is in three parts.

In this third part, Myhrvold takes questions from the audience, including about whether Intellectual Ventures is making a patent land grab, putting resources behind inventions to make actual products, patent abuse and making research into a profit center.

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