Thanks to Amazon.com, you can now preorder it on the e-commerce site for $799.99.

For those unfamiliar with the hotly anticipated phone, here are some of the details: It’s got a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, runs Android’s 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, has an eight-megapixel rear-facing camera as well as a front camera, and a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor. It also has “S Voice,” clearly inspired by iPhone’s Siri app, allowing a user to control certain functions on the phone using his or her voice. The phone is available in white and “pebble blue.”

But even if it’s a great phone — and even if Amazon’s Prime shipping applies — we have to say, that’s a pretty steep price to get a phone in advance of its release through carriers.

And, as the Amazon listing notes, the unlocked phone — which means its not tied to a wireless network — is “compatible with 2G GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and/or 3G UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA 850/900/1900/2100 wireless networks.”

What does all that gibberish mean? Basically that compatibility with certain wireless networks will be an issue. The Samsung Galaxy S III being sold through Amazon is a GSM phone, which means it won’t work on Verizon or Sprint’s networks. It’s not fully supported by T-Mobile, and while it will work with AT&T’s HSPA+ network, this device won’t work with LTE or 4G networks. (Even the Amazon listing encourages buyers to check with their network providers before purchasing.)

If you don’t mind being tethered to a carrier and would rather have a 4G/LTE-ready version of the phone at a much cheaper price, you’ll probably want to wait out the month, as the phone is expected to come to the U.S. sometime this summer. And at least you’ll know that it will work with your wireless network.

The engineer, whose name hasn’t been disclosed, explained his plans to other engineers and at least one senior manager involved with the project, known as Street View, in 2008, the FCC report states. Nevertheless, it says, Street View managers told the agency they didn’t learn the Google cars were collecting the personal information until 2010.

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In an effort to minimize the impact of massive layoffs that Yahoo’s top management has been planning, according to sources close to the situation, one of the latest ideas to save costs and presumably jobs by new CEO Scott Thompson is to sell off much of its advertising technology platform, including Right Media.

And among the possible buyers Thompson has been targeting in recent visits: Google and Microsoft, as well as Silver Lake, the private equity firm that had once been talking to the Silicon Valley Internet giant about making a large investment in the company.

(That particular deal has gone south, but there is always yet another scheme on the horizon at Yahoo!)

The concept behind such a sale, according to several sources inside and outside the company, is to turn a cost center into a revenue source, with Yahoo essentially outsourcing a business that was a cornerstone of its strategy. A negotiable number of employees affiliated with those units would then move over to the new owner.

The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology “stack,” including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.

According to info on the company’s site, it has “300,000 active global buyers and sellers and more than 11 billion daily transactions.”

Also part of the possible package is APT, a system Yahoo has built to make buying and selling online advertising easier. In addition, Yahoo’s technologies for display-ad serving have been mentioned as a possibility for sale.

It’s unclear what the potential sale means for the new ad strategy that U.S. boss Ross Levinsohn and his lieutenant Jim Heckman have been pursuing since last summer. That plan included its own acquisition of ad network Interclick and an attempt to sync up with rivals AOL and Microsoft in an effort to fend off Google and some third-party players, like ad networks.

But the reason for contemplating much a major move — which has been considered before, but never has been seriously offered — are obvious: While Yahoo once dominated this arena, it has steadily lost ground, especially to Google. The search giant has made almost all of its money in search-related ads, but has been moving aggressively via its DoubleClick and other ad-serving entities into higher-level ads.

Microsoft has also been trying to compete, as has AOL, but it’s getting to be an expensive race, and one where Yahoo would have to make major investments to once again gain momentum. Building up this business again had been the aim of co-founder Jerry Yang, who wanted to go big in the arena in a number of ways before he left the company earlier this year.

But those days seem to be over at Yahoo.

“A lot of what has happened so far under Scott [Thompson] has been trying to find more revenue anywhere it can be generated, and get out of businesses that are not growing,” said one person. “Right now, it’s a lot about what we shouldn’t do rather than what we should.”

That has meant visits to see both Google and Microsoft about possible deals by Thompson, with the involvement of CFO Tim Morse and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving.

Thompson (pictured here) has also recently been talking to Silver Lake about the ad-platform sale, in a deal that might include the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund. This would be a different kind of transaction, said sources, in which a separate company would be formed, with Yahoo owning a piece and contracting with the new entity to provide ad technology.

All this activity is related to the layoffs in the works of perhaps thousands of employees, which were to have been communicated to the company this week.

Sources said those have been delayed for some weeks for several reasons, including whether to consider more deeply if certain larger business units can be spun off, sold or somehow transformed. (To be clear: Major layoffs are still being planned, but now might take place in two parts, said sources, in what is a quickly changing and volatile atmosphere at Yahoo.)

Another area being looked at, said sources, is Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft, which has not been as successful as had been expected. While Yahoo has been working with the software giant about improving the results, Thompson has apparently been contemplating other possibilities, including working with Google (calling all regulators!) and/or laying off up to 900 employees who work on the company’s search offering.

Any of these moves could, of course, cause a firestorm of controversy, which Thompson appears to not worry much about. He was the driving force in Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook earlier this week, which is largely attracting a negative reaction across the tech landscape.

A number of prominent voices have spoken out against the legal action, including well-known VC Fred Wilson, who yesterday penned a poisonous blog post, titled “Yahoo Crosses the Line.”

It ends thusly: “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.”

Ouch!

Also weighing in publicly via Twitter was former Yahoo director Eric Hippeau, who was one of the company’s first investors, which is embedded below:

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Double ouch!

All I can say is that Thompson certainly has a lot of gumption. That has actually been his M.O. from the start, said several sources, with the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and dark horse cold-emailing his way into the Yahoo CEO job.

True story: He had not been among its list of possible candidates — largely because he had been placed in his job at eBay many moons ago by Heidrick & Struggles, which was conducting the Yahoo CEO search, and that’s a talent acquisition no-no to poach someone you placed.

That did not stop Thompson, who thought he might be good for the job and reached out directly to board members at the end of the selection effort, which then led to the search committee and soon enough to the job in what was a very quick vetting and secretive (although not secretive enough!) hiring process.

Since then, Thompson has been on a tear, from working on a restructuring to trying to assuage activist shareholder Dan Loeb to helping put the kibosh on its Asian stake sale talks to suing Facebook. And now this sale effort, too.

If the peripatetic Thompson — who might need a dose of Ritalin before this thing is over — wanted to get noticed by the tech powers that be: Mission accomplished!

“He’s definitely someone who appears to have decided on shooting the moon with a lot of these actions,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the move in the card game of Hearts, which is a risky gambit to capture every penalty card worth 26 points in order to win. “I just hope no one loses an eye in the process.”

(That would be triple ouch, by the way.)

No comments all around, but everyone was certainly cordial on this rainy morning.

In an interesting move, the Weather Channel Companies has added Andy Miller to its board.

While such adds are not usually the biggest of news, the appointment of the high-profile former CEO and co-founder of mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless as a director is an interesting early move by new CEO David Kenny.

The longtime digital and advertising exec just got there himself, and is likely to double down on mobile efforts at the media company interested in many fronts (fronts? weather? get it?!?). (Kenny also serves on the board of Yahoo.)

It makes sense, given that so many more people will be increasingly accessing all kinds of weather info — including video — on their mobile devices rather than the Web. Expertise in mobile advertising, then, will be key.

Miller, as you might recall, sold Quattro to Apple for $275 million in 2010, and became its head of mobile advertising before leaving that post last year. At Apple, he headed up the iAd division, which is the mobile advertising network for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

He is now at the venture firm Highland Capital Partners.

Here’s the official press release:

THE WEATHER CHANNEL COMPANIES APPOINTS ANDY MILLER TO ITS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ATLANTA — March 8, 2012 – The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) today announced the appointment of Andy Miller to its board of directors. Miller, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners, is a mobile expert and visionary entrepreneur who led mobile advertising at Apple and was the co-founder and CEO of Quattro Wireless.

“Andy is the ideal choice to be the first outside director on our board, and we will benefit from his vast knowledge of mobile and his perspective gained from years of experience successfully starting and growing companies,” said David Kenny, chairman and CEO, TWCC. “As a leader in mobile with potential for tremendous growth globally, Andy’s contributions will help guide as we grow mobile and our entire digital portfolio.”

“I have watched The Weather Channel’s progress in the digital space for years, both as part of my work and as a consumer and have believed in the strength and potential for this business,” said Miller. “I am certain that the opportunity to work with the company as it builds new products and sets it sights on global expansion will be a rewarding one.”

As a general partner at Highland Capital Partners, Miller is focused on identifying and working with the most promising technology companies in Silicon Valley. He currently represents Highland on the boards of Digg, Game Closure and Impermium. Miller joined Highland from Apple Inc., where he reported directly to Steve Jobs and was vice president, mobile advertising. At Apple, he headed up the iAd division, the mobile advertising network for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad line of mobile devices.

Previously, Miller was the co-founder and CEO of Quattro Wireless, the mobile advertising company that was acquired by Apple in 2009. Prior to that, he had responsibility for business development, sales and strategy for what became North America’s dominant mobile aggregator, mQube, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2006. Miller has also held the position of CEO of WatchPoint Media, an MIT Media Lab interactive TV spinoff, that was sold to Goldpocket/Tandberg Television in 2003.

Miller has a bachelor’s degree from Union College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. He lives in the Bay area with his wife and two boys. An avid baseball fan, he is a co-owner of the Colorado Rockies Advanced Single A franchise, the Modesto Nuts.

Have you never heard of Starboard Value?

Me, either!

But the New York activist fund is readying to make a splash as soon as today, several sources said, if it follows through on the expected naming of an alternate board to challenge AOL.

Saturday is the official deadline to nominate directors to the board of AOL, also based in New York, which will have all eight up for reelection.

Sources said Starboard has talked to several Internet types, but that it has plans to put up a slate made up more of Wall Streeters to present at the company’s annual meeting later in the year.

In a filing last week, Starboard said it had been in discussions with AOL management about its concerns, so it is certainly possible the investor and the company could come to some agreement over board seats and strategic direction before it gets Yahoo-ugly.

That would make it a kind of an East Coast proxy battle version of what’s been going on over at Yahoo and its tussle with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. He recently followed through on long-expressed unhappiness with the Silicon Valley Internet giant, and named a slate of directors — including well-known media exec Jeff Zucker — to replace current ones there.

The same kind of thing has been in the works at Starboard, which sent a letter in late December to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, saying his much-touted strategy around content was not a good one for investors.

Like Loeb at Yahoo, Starboard is one of AOL’s largest shareholders, with a stake of just over five percent.

The letter signaled an increasing impatience with the pace of Armstrong’s turnaround efforts, which are still in turnaround. Meanwhile, AOL’s stock has rebounded from last summer’s lows of near $10 a share.

The stock is up more than 22 percent this year, to $18.44. But that’s still down almost 20 percent from when AOL spun off from Time Warner and went public in late 2009.

The grumpy (and opportunistic) Starboard entered the picture late last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Starboard, which focuses mainly on small-cap companies, was spun off from Cowen Group Inc.’s Ramius Capital LLC in March. In October, the fund successfully waged a proxy fight against hair-salon chain owner Regis Corp. when three of its director nominees were elected to Regis’s board. AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009 after a failed merger, is its most high-profile target yet.”

One of the investment fund’s bugaboos is Patch, the local news network that AOL has sunk a lot of dough into. Also under fire is Armstrong’s content efforts and the pace of its display advertising sales, including the high-profile acquisition of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

I have emails into all the bigs at AOL and Starboard, so we’ll see who calls back first, if at all.

Rao (pictured right) will be joining the online communications network as VP of international revenue, and will be starting in April in San Francisco. In that job, he’ll be in charge of setting up direct sales operations in countries and in regions where Twitter is ready to monetize.

At Google, Rao was most recently head of Google’s display ads business for Asia.

McIntyre (pictured left) has joined Twitter as a director of online sales and operations, which is its self-serve product that will debut to small businesses in March. He will be based in Dublin, Ireland. He was most recently working on Google’s international self-serve ads team in Ireland.

Both will report to Twitter sales head Adam Bain, who heads a staff of 120 employees in the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Ireland.

The pair were not the only Google hires of late at Twitter. The company recently hired U.K. YouTube sales head Bruce Daisley to run its entire sales team there.

Mr. Robbins, a producer and director known for Eddie Murphy movies and TV shows including “Smallville,” plans to produce 120 hours of teen programming this year, all of it destined exclusively for the Web. “We consider ourselves a network,” he says.

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On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

It’s not a big surprise that the giant and perpetual-motion online news site would do this.

After all, in the new age of media, newspaper Web sites are turning more toward streaming and on-demand video, attempting to take text-driven reporting and present it in rich, feed-it-to-me news packages.

But whether consumers want to tune in on schedule or call up news videos when they feel like watching is still up for debate.

In the HuffPost’s case, the video will be streamed to its flagship site, as well as to other AOL Web sites.

Jeff Bercovici of Forbes had the scoop on this a couple weeks ago, laying out Arianna Huffington’s ambitions to meet the increasing demand — at least, on the part of advertisers — for good video content.

Ambitious is probably the right word, since the Huffington Post and AOL plan to stream 12 hours a day, five days a week, with eight hours of content produced in New York and the rest out of Los Angeles.

Eventually, Huffington Post founding editor Roy Sekoff said that the network is aiming to reach 16 hours a day of live daily programming. With 2012 elections looming, the network will also feature lots of political reporters from Washington, he added.

The plan will also be costly — with the AOL media unit putting a hundred employees behind the streaming video effort, culling from the current HuffPost-AOL editorial staff of 320, as well as new hires with video-specific skills.

Will it work?

There’s little question that Web video viewing is on the rise. According to a 2011 Nielsen report, U.S. consumers now spend an average of four hours and 20 minutes per month watching video on the Web, an hour and 10 minutes more than the amount they watched in early 2010.

But Huffington and Sekoff believe that, despite the fact the HuffPost is mirroring the cable TV model and a lot of the programming will be live, consumers still aren’t all that interested in watching on a set schedule.

What Huffington Post is doing is not unlike what the Wall Street Journal Digital Network has been building over the last few years.

(Full disclosure: The WSJ, for those who aren’t aware, is owned by News Corp.’s Dow Jones, which also owns this Web site. I also previously worked at the WSJ’s video unit.)

Like WSJ’s video product, HuffPo will offer on-demand clips in addition to the live-streaming, deploying in-house staff as talent, plus Patch local reporters and sources in from the field using Skype video. It will also distribute the news video content on mobile phones and tablets.

The New York Times has also gotten into the streaming video game with its latest effort, Business Day Live, which launched yesterday.

Sekoff dismissed the idea that HuffPost was mimicking other news organizations, or even cable.

“No offense to the WSJ, but I think we got more comments this month than the WSJ did last year,” Sekoff said, referencing the more than six million comments on the main HuffPost site in January alone. “People don’t want to be talked to when they get their news; they want to converse with.”

And he said that HuffPost has no plans to become a cable TV network, although they’re open to potentially sharing the video content with interested networks. In terms of revenue generation, Huffington Post currently doesn’t have advertisers committed to the streaming network, but is seeking a handful of partners for launch.

Right now, there are no plans for a set schedule of programing, said Sekoff, because he feels that Web video consumers ultimately don’t care when the video is on.

“People don’t come home from work and say, ‘Oh it’s 9 pm, I think I’ll watch sports on the Web now,’” he said. “We just don’t think it’s there yet.”

Huffington concurred and said her own casual Internet video-watching habits — which include bouts of “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central and “The Good Wife” — reflect this.

“We don’t think Web video is about appointment-watching.” she said. “But just because people are watching Web video one way, doesn’t mean it’s the end of other kinds of consumption.”

Now, as the company prepares to answer the questions put to it by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s hoping to set the record straight, once and for all, by publishing a definitive report (embedded below) on the functionality of its software, including an in-depth analysis of the video that inspired the allegations against it.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart, and Andrew Coward, the company’s VP of marketing, discuss that report, why its software isn’t opt-in, and how it handles law enforcement requests.

John Paczkowski: Tell me about the new document you’re publishing. This is your third official statement on this debacle. Why is it necessary?

Larry Lenhart: I think over the last few weeks we’ve learned a lot about transparency. And we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, how we can reach out to everyone — consumers and carriers — and help them understand in more depth what we do and how our software works. This is an ongoing document. It took a lot of time and effort, based on meetings with industry experts, security experts, and Trevor Eckhart, who published the video that brought this issue to everyone’s attention. Of course, we also knew that we were going to have some conversations on Capitol Hill, and drafting the answers to the questions that were asked of us helped inform the document, as well.

Andrew Coward: Well, from our perspective, some of what was shown in the video was erroneous and wrongly attributed to Carrier IQ, so we obviously wanted to correct those misperceptions, and that took some effort. And, of course, there’s been a continuing clamor for understanding more about what Carrier IQ does. So we thought we’d put together a definitive document that says “Look, this is what we do, and we do want you to understand it and how we do it.”

You folks have been relatively transparent about this whole thing, once it blew up in the press. Your carrier partners have not. Do you feel the carriers have done you a disservice by not clearly disclosing their relationship with you to their customers?

Coward: Many of our customers have gone out on the record and described how they use our technology, and we have worked on this document with our carrier customers.

You say your software doesn’t keep a log of location, keylog and SMS information, yet Trevor Eckhart’s video appeared to show that. What was going on there?

Coward: What he was looking at there was an Android log file. And to be blunt, there was information there that shouldn’t have been. In order for Carrier IQ to get information off a device, we work with the manufacturers to deliver that information through an API. That information shouldn’t show up in an Android log file. We don’t read from Android log files; we don’t see Android log files. That info just shouldn’t be there. And, ultimately, what goes in that log file is up to the manufacturer.

So that’s not your log file in the video?

Coward: No. It’s just an Android system log file. And one of the problems with that video, and something we’ve been working to clear up, is that, while you could see that information had been passed to Carrier IQ, there was no video of what happened to that information afterwards. Was it actually captured by Carrier IQ; was it stored or taken off the device? No. And that’s really what we’re trying to clarify with the document we’re publishing.

The document you’re releasing today says that a bug in your software may have caused some SMS messages to be unintentionally collected. Can you talk about this a bit? Should we worry?

Coward: As we went and did a deep dive into our technology to prove to consumers that there is nothing untoward in it, we found a bug. We found that if an SMS was sent simultaneously while a user is on the phone, the SMS would be captured by our software. Obviously, this is something that doesn’t happen very often, but we discovered that it could happen, and we caught it. Now, that information was never used. It wasn’t decoded. It sat on a server in encoded format, and no one could really get to it.

Lenhart: We didn’t even know the data was being captured. The actual information is in nonreadable format. And our customers didn’t know it was there. So it was never looked at. Over the past few weeks, we worked with our customers to resolve the issue.

In the document you’re publishing today, you describe three scenarios for how your software gets on user’s phones: Preloading, where manufacturers install it on devices prior to shipment at the carrier’s request, and it has access to no more data than any other app on the device; aftermarket, where the consumer downloads and installs it at the carrier’s request; and embedded, which requires actual integration work by a device manufacturer, again at the carrier’s request. You say carriers more often than not choose the embedded option over the others you provide. Why do you think that is?

Coward: Really, it’s because embedded was the first option we offered. We’ve only added the others this year.

Why isn’t Carrier IQ opt-in? Shouldn’t it be?

Lenhart: Our technology is defined to do either opt-in or opt-out. But it’s the carrier’s call on whether or not they’re implemented.

Okay. But shouldn’t they be implemented?

Lenhart: Well, the carriers have the privacy relationships with the end user. But we’re certainly supportive on the dialogue going on around this issue.

Coward: We think there’s a quid pro quo between consumers and operators. Consumers expect their phones to work. They expect that if they have problems with their phones, the carriers will do something about them. They also expect that if they call in for help, the carrier will actually have a clue about why their phone is crashing or their calls are dropping. So there’s an implicit understanding that the carrier knows enough to be able fix the problem.

But wouldn’t it be better to just ask consumers to agree to that quid pro quo right up front?

Coward: Well, that’s a good question for the industry. Should there be opt-in/opt-out? And if there is, what does that mean for customer service; what does that mean for the end-user experience?

Why do the carriers need you? Couldn’t they capture a lot of this information themselves?

Coward: Certainly, the network provides a huge amount of information. But the network can’t tell you why your battery won’t hold a charge or an application is crashing. So there’s a missing piece here in the diagnostic puzzle, and that’s what we provide. And what you need to understand is that this is a technology that’s hard to implement. If you’re a handset manufacturer, it’s much easier to work with an industry player like Carrier IQ.

Who decides what your software does and does not track?

Coward: We work with the carrier to determine that. There is a line in the sand between what we would collect and what we would not collect. And we draw that line at content. We absolutely do not intend to capture content from subscribers. We collect information about their mobile phone experience, and about what happens.

Have you been asked to collect content?

Coward: We’ve not been asked, nor would we do it if we were.

How does Carrier IQ handle the usernames, passwords and other personal information that is embedded in an HTTP’s URLs?

Coward: We’re investigating that issue at the moment. And we recognize that it’s a sensitive one. It is not our intention to capture information that might be confidential.

So you have about two more days before you have to answer the questions put to you by Al Franken and the Senate privacy panel. Can you give me an idea of what you’re going to say?

Lenhart: Well, if you read the document we’re publishing, I think you’ll find answers to most of the questions that Senator Franken asked. … We’re actually in Washington right now, and we’ll be meeting with the folks that have asked for information about Carrier IQ over the next few days.

Are people right to be concerned about Carrier IQ? Could your software be misused?

Lenhart: No. We’re a diagnostic software company. We love diagnostic information. We are not interested in content. And that’s where we draw the line. We don’t want content, and we don’t have the ability to capture it. Remember, the information that’s captured off a user’s device is determined by the carrier, according to their privacy agreement.

You say you are not permitted to analyze, resell or reuse any of the information gathered for your own purposes, or to pass it to any third party, unless required by law. Do you know if law enforcement uses Carrier IQ data, and in what manner?

Lenhart: We have been approached by law enforcement about using our technology, and every time it’s happened, we’ve determined that that’s not an appropriate use of it. A lot of data that we capture is historical, so if you really want to find out where somebody is and what they’re doing, our technology isn’t going to give you that. Remember, this is diagnostic data. And we don’t share it with anyone.

But you do say that you would hand over data if required by law.

Lenhart: We would refer them to the carriers, because the diagnostic data collected belongs to the network operators, not Carrier IQ.

How damaging has this whole ordeal been to Carrier IQ? Or has it been damaging at all? Certainly, a lot more people know who you are today than did a few weeks ago.

Lenhart: Our world has been turned upside down. We love what we do, and we have a lot of passion for it. And to see it misunderstood like this has been painful. We want to make sure people really understand who we are and what we’re doing.

Read Carrier IQ’s report on the functionality of its software:

Understanding Carrier IQ technology final 12 12 11 –

Related Posts on Carrier IQ:

• Exclusive Interview: Carrier IQ Gets Transparent About Its Mobile Monitoring
• Carrier IQ: How to Hack Back Your Phone
  
• Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Monitors Service Messages, Ignores Other Data
• Apple: We Stopped Supporting Carrier IQ With iOS 5
• RIM, HTC, Google on Carrier IQ: Blame the Carriers
• Carrier IQ Improves My Wireless Service by Logging My Keystrokes? Please Explain.

Full Carrier IQ Coverage »

Disney, which has been busy reorganizing its interactive group, is buying Babble Media, a New York-based parenting platform that features several hundred mom bloggers.

The entertainment giant declined to provide the purchase price for the New York-based start-up, which was founded by aiming at urban hipster parents and has garnered more than $6 million in funding since it was spun off from Nerve Media several years ago.

Babble’s venture investors include Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures and iNovia Capital.

Co-founders Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman and the rest of the 40-person Babble staff will join the Disney Interactive Media Group unit as part of its Moms and Family portfolio, Disney said in its official press release (see below).

Disney described Babble as the “premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents.” To me, that roughly translates into Brooklyn-living, Bugaboo-pushing, organic arugula-eating, yoga-calm moms and sensitive New Age dads.

But don’t take my word for it — today’s front page features on Babble include “15 Vegan Recipes for Thanksgiving” and “Is It Selfish to Have One Child?” (Yum and kinda!)

The next obvious stop for its audience, after the kids get a little bigger: Gwyneth Paltrow’s fabulously twee and irksomely addictive GOOP.

But Brooke Chaffin, who is SVP of Moms and Family in the Disney Interactive Media Group, said in an interview that the highly interactive content site with a definite “sophisticated” editorial voice has become mainstream, and is actually where the whole category is going.

“Babble is sharing the experience and stories on a daily basis through the parents lens,” she said. “And it brings in a blog network that is so important to this audience, because it’s by, for and about parents, and that’s far more important for them than experts.”

There will be that, too, said Chaffin, who noted the site has grown 100 percent year over year. It is now up to four million unique monthly visitors.

Disney plans to add its more evergreen family-focused content to Babble, to give it more heft to compete with other similar parenting sites, such as Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, NBC’s iVillage, Parents.com and CafeMom.

Interestingly, Disney had taken a gander at buying CafeMom a while back.

Chaffin, who came to Disney earlier this year after a stint at Auditude and a long time at Yahoo, said Babble has carved out a unique niche in combining content with social — the current gold ring for a lot of publishers.

“What Babble is doing is best of breed … it is just a different approach to blogging,” she said. “It felt like we at Disney are about storytelling and Babble does an amazing job doing just that.”

Added Jimmy Pitaro, co-President of Disney Interactive Media Group: “Disney has a long legacy of storytelling, and no mom-blog platform empowers storytelling better or more powerfully than Babble. Babble is a strategic complement to our Moms and Family portfolio of sites, which together make up a business that is critical to Disney Interactive’s mission of delivering world-class products and content and growing engagement among our guests.”

In other words: Mainstream and hipster!

Here’s the Disney official press release:

THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ACQUIRES LEADING ONLINE PARENTING PLATFORM BABBLE MEDIA, INC.

Burbank, California — November 14, 2011 — The Walt Disney Company, through its wholly owned subsidiary Disney Online, has acquired Babble Media, Inc., a leading online parenting platform featuring more than 200 influential mom bloggers. The acquisition of Babble further strengthens the position of Disney Interactive Media Group’s Moms and Family portfolio as a leading online resource for moms and families.

Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family portfolio is a trusted resource for parents today, giving them the online tools and information they need and the ability to share their experiences. Through the acquisition of Babble, Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family business gains a blogging platform that elevates the first-person stories of parenthood.

Since its inception in 2006, Babble has become one of the most celebrated parenting sites on the web, named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Websites for Women. Its stable of bloggers contribute daily to parenting topics including pregnancy, child care, health, food, family activities as well as lifestyle topics such as home, fashion and family products. As the premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents, Babble has created a vibrant community of parents who support, encourage and celebrate the highs and lows of raising children.

Babble attracts a broad and engaged audience with its nearly constant stream of posts, written for and by moms. Disney Interactive will infuse its Moms and Family evergreen content into Babble, thereby enriching the Babble user experience and extending the best of what Disney has to offer to today’s parents.

“Parents’ relationships with Disney are founded in stories, and Disney’s best stories are about families. We believe that Babble and Disney can harness the power of storytelling to inform, entertain and empower parents everywhere,” said Brooke Chaffin, SVP of Moms and Family, Disney Interactive Media Group. “With more than 3.9 million mom blogs in the US alone, Disney Interactive recognizes and values the important and powerful role moms have taken on in new media.”

“We can’t imagine a better next step than joining the world’s leading media company for families, The Walt Disney Company, and look forward to bringing together Babble’s resonant voice and community with Disney’s expansive family audience, wide range of content and multi-media platform,” said Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Co-Founders of Babble.

Babble will remain headquartered in New York. Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman will join the Disney Interactive Media Group.

Maybe get something cooking in the whole what-will-Yahoo-do stakes, now that one of Yahoo’s more active board members is back.

And by “back,” I mean that Kenny — no longer a candidate for CEO — has no further need to recuse himself from the strategic process in which the Silicon Valley Internet company finds itself.

In an interview with Advertising Age last week, Kenny — the well-regarded online ad exec who recently stepped down as president of network infrastructure giant Akamai — released an unusual statement:

As a matter of policy, I do not comment on matters related to Yahoo as a Yahoo director. However, as a personal matter, I want to clarify that I believe Yahoo is a great company with enormous potential, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for the CEO position. I look forward to my continued service on the Yahoo Board of Directors.”

By removing himself from the fray, that means, according to several sources, that Kenny will be diving back into sleeve-rolling duties at Yahoo, as one of its — how can I put this? — less comatose board members.

In fact — until he was sidelined by the obvious conflict of interest inherent in wanting to be CEO, while also directing the fate of Yahoo for shareholder value — Kenny had been deeply involved in a lot of the changes that had taken place of late, after a long period of board inaction.

That included the ouster of CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired for a number of reasons, including lack of strategic vision. It was relatively new board member Kenny — he became a director in February — who led the strategy committee that had asked Bartz for her road map, which she did not deliver to their liking. Obviously.

Because of the swirl around his possible CEO candidacy — Kenny was a noticeable inside candidate, since he is well known in the Internet advertising world for running and then selling Digitas to the Publicis Groupe for $1.3 billion in 2006 — he gave up leadership of the committee to Intuit President Brad Smith.

Sources said it is unlikely Kenny will get that top job back, but he remains a member of the transactions committee, which is leading the strategic review of the company.

That’s the key slot for the independent board members of Yahoo, who must ultimately be the ones to determine what path or offer the company will take.

One plus: Kenny has close relationships with most of the bidders — largely private equity firms — looking at Yahoo, and also is well known among the media and tech companies poking around, too. He also has advertising — and now tech — experience, which will be much needed as Yahoo explores its options.

Most importantly, Kenny is an independent director, which will be very important to the process going forward, especially since a lot of the spotlight has fallen on Yahoo co-founder and director Jerry Yang.

Yang — who has been a bit of a Yahoo lightning rod at times — has been involved in some of the meetings with those interested, along with interim CEO Tim Morse. The company recently noted that this was at the behest of the board.

While these were only informational meetings so far — and not negotiations, as some reports have surmised — Yang’s involvement will likely have to be more curtailed, at least publicly, especially if any of the deals include using his own large stake in Yahoo.

“This process has to be above board, since it is so easy for those wanting a better deal to try to cause all kinds of trouble,” said one source. “The company is already under attack in that regard.”

That’s a reference to a recent salvo by hedge fund activist Dan Loeb, a major Yahoo shareholder who has taken aim at the board and, last week, at Yang. Loeb essentially accused Yang of double-dealing in the process.

Enter Kenny, along with Smith and — to an increasingly lesser extent, of late — Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock. While there are other independent board members involved, these are the three to watch most closely now.

While some think Kenny still would like to be CEO of Yahoo — he was also on the short list several years ago when Bartz was hired — sources said he is more likely to take a job at another consumer Internet company.

While he certainly could slot into a large advertising firm or into the digital division of a big media concern, sources said Kenny is looking to be a CEO.

Just not at Yahoo.

At least for now, since down the road it is unclear what will become of Yahoo and who will run it in years to come.

In fact, it might even be Kenny in the end.

Courtney Holt, who stepped down as president of Myspace Music early this year, is taking a new job as COO of Maker Studios.

Holt has been an adviser to the Venice, Calif., new-generation production company — which makes and distributes more professional original content to the Internet, mostly via Google-owned YouTube — since the summer.

“It’s a natural fit to work with a great team and a natural evolution for me,” said Holt, who has been monitoring the online video space, despite many years in the music sector. “Being able to create an ecosystem of talent, distribution and production is a perfect storm of opportunity.”

The focus of Maker is to make Internet-only videos using better shared production tools, distribute and cross-promote them via a myriad of channels on YouTube and make money using the Google unit’s advertising system. Videos are original, and Maker also distributes those of other Web stars.

So far, the start-up has garnered $4 million in total funding from Greycroft Partners and GRP Partners, grown to 140 employees and logged 500 million monthly page views from its 300 videos per month.

“We have done a great job getting Maker up and running, but we wanted to take it to the next level with someone who gets what we are doing,” said co-founder Dan Zappin. “[Holt] has spent some time here, totally got it and we thought it was time to formalize the relationship.”

Zappin said Holt’s role will be to help Maker grow the business, still mostly on YouTube, but also make it in new ways. “Obviously, mobile is a big opportunity,” he said, while also noting Maker’s social efforts on Facebook and Twitter.

Recently, Google announced that it was handing out more than $100 million to dozens of partners to create new channels.

Maker is producing three of these channel categories, but hopes to be more than just a content creator.

“There need to be networks to do distribution and marketing for Web content creators, to be able to do so at a cost per minute and drive audience,” said Holt. “It is unclear if all will get that right and we think Maker can help.”

To get an idea of what it does, here’s an ultra-hipster video Maker did, as well as one I did earlier this year at Maker (which also has a newly redone Web site here):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111031/former-myspace-music-head-holt-lands-as-coo-at-maker/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111026/exclusive-like-marketing-yahoos-customer-advocacy-org-gets-sliced-and-diced-this-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20111026/exclusive-like-marketing-yahoos-customer-advocacy-org-gets-sliced-and-diced-this-week/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:01:31 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=136772

As happened last week to its centralized marketing division, Yahoo has broken up its Customer Advocacy organization, with its staff distributed to the various regions and the product unit of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Customer Advocacy has been led by EVP Jeff Russakow, whose fate is now similarly unclear as it is for CMO Elisa Steele, whose division was diced up to the regions last week.

Both execs — who were hired by fired CEO Carol Bartz — plan to remain at the company until at least January, sources said.

Russakow, according to his Yahoo bio, has had “global responsibility for all of Yahoo!’s customer support functions, including audience, small business, ad operations, and search network quality.” He came to Yahoo from previous jobs at Symantec and Adobe.

Interim CEO Tim Morse sent a memo to employees about the change, noting Russakow is looking for his next opportunity, using much the same language as Steele used in her internal email.

The moves are interesting, given Yahoo’s current effort to find a new strategy, which includes a possible sale of all or parts of the company. But there is also a strong sentiment within the company to reorganize around strengthening its advertising platform and products.

I have a call into Yahoo PR for comment (but let’s assume I am accurate about this, shall we?).

More, obviously, to come.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111026/exclusive-like-marketing-yahoos-customer-advocacy-org-gets-sliced-and-diced-this-week/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it%e2%80%99s-all-about-content-why-tablets-help-hard-drives/ http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it%e2%80%99s-all-about-content-why-tablets-help-hard-drives/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:00:53 +0000 Mark Wojtasiak http://allthingsd.com/?p=128167 To paraphrase Mark Twain: “Rumors of the hard drive’s death have been greatly exaggerated — again.” If you follow computer industry news, you’ve likely heard the story: hard drive sales are in jeopardy because hordes of users are replacing PCs that use hard drives for storage with tablets that use flash memory for storage.

But given the widespread adoption of tablets like Apple’s iPad, coupled with everyone under the sun vying for a piece of the tablet market, it’s easy to see that consumption of content will continue to explode. And that’s the point — with that explosion comes the aftershock of storage demand. As more users adopt tablets as mainstream, more storage from hard drives will be needed from the backend servers and in the cloud to serve them. So while flash is appealing for use in consumption devices like tablets, let’s not let this obscure the main fact about tablets in the big picture of the storage market, which is that tablets aren’t hurting hard drive sales — in fact, they are helping.

When examining the storage market, we can look at present and future projections for HDD unit sales and by volume of capacity (in petabytes) shipped as per the chart below:

But we can also look at the data trends for consumption. In 2005, the world generated 150 exabytes (one billion gigabytes) of data. This year, it’s estimated that we’ll create and store 1,200 exabytes, and in 2020, a staggering 35,000 exabytes!¹ That’s 30x growth over the next 10 years.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard in the HDD world that the sky is falling. About a decade ago, MP3 player manufacturers shrank the device footprint and switched from hard drive storage to flash. Not long after, smartphones came on the scene, and those in the know posted that users would discard their PCs in favor of smartphones and, again, the hard drive industry would suffer. But the sky never fell, and neither MP3 players nor smartphones caused hard drive sales to decline. In fact, sales actually grew 14 percent between 2000 and 2005, and continued to grow 12 percent from 2005 to 2010.¹ The reality is that the more content consumption devices hit the market, the greater the demand for hard drive storage capacity, even when it is not local to the device.

Now let’s delve into some logic. Consumers didn’t discard their PCs for smartphones, and they aren’t going to chuck their PCs for tablets — the devices just aren’t that interchangeable. People are using their tablets for content consumption: to watch movies, browse the Internet, check email, play games, etc. But they aren’t really using their tablets for content creation, and certainly don’t rely on them for heavy duty applications. So logically, it follows that most people who own a tablet need a PC as well.

But just for argument’s sake, let’s assume users worldwide tossed out their PCs and replaced them with tablets. Right out of the gate, we would have a capacity problem. The bottom line is that all the flash in the world isn’t close to enough to meet the worldwide need for storage capacity, and that fact will remain true for a very, very long time. Here are some numbers to consider: In 2010, all the content created and replicated grew past a staggering zettabyte (one trillion gigabytes), and is expected to reach 1.8 zettabytes in 2011. Yet in 2010, the entire NAND flash memory industry manufactured just over 11 exabytes (you would need 1000 exabytes to equal every one zettabyte) of storage. Even with forecasts predicting that NAND flash production capacity will grow to 21 exabytes in 2011, only nine percent of that, or about two exabytes, will go to the flash memory used in tablets.² That’s not nearly enough capacity to meet demand.

Tablets with flash storage simply don’t have the onboard capacity to store the massive volumes of digital content that users want to access — anytime, anywhere. So all that data needs to be stored externally, in either local attached, networked or cloud storage — and all those formats rely on hard drives. So, once again, tablet popularity doesn’t hurt hard drive sales. In fact, some pundits see tablets as a net gain for hard drives: “For now, IDC sees the rise in demand for iPads/tablets as additive … for HDD makers in terms of the growth of information and digital content that has to be stored somewhere. That content and information consumed by these devices most likely will be stored on hard disk drives in data centers, cloud infrastructures, or on USB or network-attached personal storage devices in homes.”³

So in the end, even if some users do opt to replace their PCs with tablets, hard drives will still be in high demand. Content will continue its growth and storage will always be needed. Because nobody is saying worldwide demand for storage capacity is decreasing. Now that would be an ugly rumor!

Mark Wojtasiak is a Senior Manager in Product Marketing with Seagate Technology. For the past 5 years, Mark has been based in Seagate’s Shakopee, MN, design center where Seagate lives and breathes enterprise storage. Though Mark works in the middle of everything enterprise, his role at Seagate enables him to listen, learn, discuss, and share anything and everything related to storage. From the traditional desktop to external drives to the cloud, he develops insights on the latest storage technology, trends, customers, and users.

---

^{1 IDC Digital Universe Study, June 2011}

^{2 Gartner, Forecast: NAND Flash Supply and Demand, Worldwide, 1Q10-4Q12, 3Q11 Update, page 2, Table 15-3, September 2011}

^{3 http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/2010/11/storage-effect/a-tablet-with-a-side-of-storage-please/}

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it%e2%80%99s-all-about-content-why-tablets-help-hard-drives/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110928/for-lightsquared-a-high-bar/ http://allthingsd.com/20110928/for-lightsquared-a-high-bar/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:30:32 +0000 Amy Schatz http://allthingsd.com/?p=125768 To make good on its planned $14 billion investment in a national high-speed wireless network, start-up LightSquared Inc. must prove to the government that its network is perfect, or nearly so, in avoiding interference with global-positioning devices. And that’s just one of its challenges.

A November deadline is approaching for federal regulators to finish their interference tests, raising the stakes for a project already confronting financial hurdles and political resistance.

Amid complaints by GPS users, company officials say they realize the bar will be high for the start-up to show its network won’t disrupt other traffic.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110928/for-lightsquared-a-high-bar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110915/chegg-buys-zinch-in-another-move-toward-a-social-education-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20110915/chegg-buys-zinch-in-another-move-toward-a-social-education-platform/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=120370

Chegg — best known for online rentals of textbooks to college students — said it has just bought Zinch, a start-up that links high school students and college recruiters.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The purchase of the San Francisco-based Zinch, said CEO Dan Rosensweig in an interview earlier this week, is part of a larger plan involving a series of acquisitions aimed at “how we move from two-day relevance to relevance all year around for students.”

By that, he meant the short time period when students either buy or rent their textbooks for the semester.

That’s certainly been a good business for Chegg, which is the leader in the online textbook-rental arena, including digital distribution.

But to further solidify its relationship with students and expand its market base to include high schoolers along with college consumers, Chegg has picked up a number of start-ups like Zinch, using its stock and also the whopping $220 million in funding from a number of venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins.

In late September, for example, the company bought CourseRank, which helps students share course schedules, take classes with friends, and read and write reviews on classes and professors, as well as find out how they grade.

Also scooped up by Chegg: Notehall, which is a student-to-student note-taking trading market; Cramster, a social homework helper; and Student of Fortune, a homework-answers site for student questions (which a recent filing by Chegg noted was bought for $5.9 million in stock).

Also being tested are such offerings as deals for students and other ways to leverage the original textbook relationship.

“This is the beginning of a connected student network that we hope to build into a giant platform,” said Rosensweig. “We want to have a student using us all the way through for a 10-year span, from high school on.”

In related news, Chegg said it has hired former Palm CFO Andrew Brown as its new CFO. Prior to Palm, he served as the CFO of Pillar Data Systems Inc., a storage start-up funded by Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

While a CFO hiring often indicates a soon-to-happen IPO, Rosensweig said that Chegg has more than enough capital, needs to focus on building up its offerings and is in no rush to go public.

We’ll see, but here’s the official press release from Chegg about Zinch:

Chegg Plans to Expand into $7 Billion College Recruiting Market and Increase Student Base By Over 3.5 Million

Chegg enters into a definitive agreement to acquire Zinch, the leading digital network that helps high school students research, connect with and pay for college

SANTA CLARA, Calif., September 15, 2011 – Chegg today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zinch. The acquisition is subject to standard closing conditions and is expected to be completed by the end of this month. The acquisition will expand Chegg’s social education platform into high schools. Zinch, founded in 2007, connects prospective college and graduate students to scholarships, admissions officers and other students who have been through the same process.

The acquisition of Zinch, with over 3.5 million members, $1.9 billion in scholarships and over 5,000 school profiles, will significantly expand Chegg’s customer base and its social education platform. Colleges and students will be able to connect more effectively for less through Chegg, helping to streamline the college recruiting process globally. In addition, unlike any other company in the education space, Chegg will provide resources to students at every major milestone before, during and after their college career — including bridging the gap from high school to college.

“Our mission has always been to save students time, money and help them get smarter,” said Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Chegg. “With our acquisition of Zinch, we’re extending our mission to high school students through the $7 billion college recruiting market, while continuing to break down the barriers of a college education, from the high cost of tuition and textbooks to helping students make money, pick their courses and get the academic help they need.”

At Zinch, over 3.5 million students have built online profiles to showcase themselves as “more than test scores” to shine in the admissions process, and to be matched with schools and scholarships that might be a good fit. Colleges and universities worldwide, including more than half of the US News top ranked national universities, use Zinch for cost-effective student recruiting and outreach.

“Getting in and paying for school is daunting. Together, Chegg and Zinch can not only make higher education more affordable and accessible, it gives students an edge in finding the right school, getting admitted and reducing the cost. Students can put their best foot forward, be recognized for their achievements and be discovered by programs that fit their interests,” said Anne Dwane, CEO of Zinch.

The acquisition is subject to standard closing conditions and is expected to be completed by the end of this month.
To learn more about Chegg’s social education platform and its network of services, go to www.chegg.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110915/chegg-buys-zinch-in-another-move-toward-a-social-education-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110907/iridium-makes-satellite-connections-as-easy-as-wi-fi/ http://allthingsd.com/20110907/iridium-makes-satellite-connections-as-easy-as-wi-fi/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:15:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=117934 When you work on an oil platform in the middle of the ocean or in some remote desert somewhere and you need to make a phone call, chances are your iPhone or BlackBerry just isn’t going to do you much good. Wireless phone networks tend to work where people live and work, and not where they don’t. The same thing is essentially true for Wi-Fi networks.

It’s for reasons like this — and in no small part thanks to the fact that the U.S. has been engaged in two or three wars — that the Iridium satellite phone system that once seemed to perfectly symbolize the overreaching ambitions of the late 1990s telecom boom exists. Following the 1999 bankruptcy of the original Motorola-backed venture, it has undergone a fascinating reorganization and rebirth over the last decade. Iridium has not only survived but thrived as a data and voice platform that companies in specialized segments turn to when they want to build products and services designed to make voice and data connections possible in places where no other means are available. I talked with CEO Matthew Desch about all this in June.

So today, Iridium made a handful of announcements that give some interesting indications of future directions. One is a Wi-Fi-enabled device called the AxcessPoint. Think of it as a satellite-enabled Mi-Fi that will get an iPhone or notebook PC or Wi-Fi-ready BlackBerry connected to the Iridium data network from whatever ridiculously remote spot in the world you find yourself.

The AxcessPoint requires a physical connection to an Iridium phone, and it just so happens that the company launched one of those today, too, called the Iridium Extreme. You might think this would have been an obvious need before, but this phone has been ruggedized so it can survive the rough and tumble that its users might put it through. The company says it’s built to Military Standard 810F, which is a fancy way of saying something like it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

There’s not much need for making, say, a satellite-ready standalone smartphone, Desch told me when we talked last week. (That’s him holding the new phone and Wi-Fi gadget in the picture.) There is value in making your existing phones work in some way with the Iridium network. “We think it should be easy for other personal devices to have a satellite connection,” he said.

The connections aren’t exactly speedy. But they’re good enough to handle email and basic Web-browsing. Don’t bother trying to stream “Glee” via Hulu over an Iridium connection, though if you’re using it, you probably have other things on your mind.

Probably more important than the access point or the phone is what Iridium calls the brains of the hardware. If you have your own idea for a product that would connect to the Iridium system, you can license the technology and build it around its Core device, which is a credit-card-size voice and data module that some 200 or more Iridium partners use to build devices to track things and monitor equipment in remote places.

Those partners are making Iridium’s data business bigger. While voice is still its main business, accounting for about 60 percent of sales as of Iridium’s most recent quarter, data services, also known as machine-to-machine or M2M, are growing at a nice clip. The number of M2M subscribers surged year over year to 146,000 from 89,000 at an average revenue per user of about $22.

On the news, Iridium shares — the company went public in 2009 after being acquired by an investment company — rose by 25 cents, or more than 3 percent, to $7.50 a share, though they’re still down from where they were at the start of the year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110907/iridium-makes-satellite-connections-as-easy-as-wi-fi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:00:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=117602

The firing of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz leaves open one of the bigger and more difficult jobs in tech — one that has taken its toll on many.

Nonetheless, rapper Snoop Dogg stepped right up to the Twitter plate yesterday, as soon as news broke of the ouster.

Tweeted Snoop Dogg:

“Im takn over as tha CEO of Yahoo. Need sum of tha Snoop Dogg content ya digg. Nuff Said.”

Not nearly nuff!

Thus, while the Yahoo board has yet to begin a search, I have already been hard at work on selecting the next CEO.

(Last time, the company took none of my suggestions, but after the most recent result, the directors might want to pay mind!)

Sources said Yahoo is looking for an experienced Internet type, either from inside or outside the company.

“Yahoo has put its flag in the ground as a digital media company with a technology base,” said one source. “The job requires big buckets of expertise and needs someone who will grow the company.”

Here I go with the outsiders:

Peter Chernin: The former News Corp. exec has been eyeing Yahoo for a possible takeover with other investors. Both Yahoo and I had picked him when co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down as CEO almost three years ago, and he had declined the offer. This time, perhaps a big chunk of the company and total autonomy would work, even if making a hit like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is more fun.

Sheryl Sandberg: The COO of Facebook is sort of the anti-Bartz, with a smooth and efficient persona, and she is an experienced tech exec. But the former Google exec is at a place of growth at the social networking site, and is unlikely to want to leave the big show, especially since a blockbuster IPO is looming.

Jason Kilar: The Hulu CEO is in the midst of the process of selling the premium video service, with Yahoo as a bidder. While he has some tense relations with the studios, Kilar is top notch in his dedication to consumer products, and has a lot of experience from his stint at Amazon, too.

Dan Rosensweig: Currently CEO of IPO-headed Chegg textbook rental service, the former Yahoo exec never got a chance to run the company as its top leader. Well-connected and still well-liked by the troops at Yahoo, it still would be pretty hard for him to go home again.

Dave Goldberg: Sure, he’s married to Sandberg (see above), but the savvy CEO of polling phenom SurveyMonkey is one of the sharpest thinkers in Silicon Valley. He sold his music company to Yahoo many years ago and has a strong background in consumer online services.

Jon Miller: The chief digital exec at News Corp. almost got the CEO spot years ago when Carl Icahn was agitating for change at Yahoo, before Time Warner blocked him via a noncompete. With the mishegas at the media giant, and dwindling digital businesses there, it might be a good escape hatch for Miller.

Susan Wojcicki: The accomplished Google exec, who runs all its ad products, has the kind of calm, cool, collected persona that Yahoo could use right about now. The search giant was founded in her garage, and she has been a key part of its success since then. Wojcicki is also an understated class act in hey-look-at-me Silicon Valley.

Todd Bradley: The Hewlett-Packard exec just got blindsided when the company kicked webOS to the curb. While he is in line to run a possible spinoff of the device business, Bradley might also want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

Mike McCue: The CEO of Flipboard would certainly energize Yahoo with his intense focus on quality and consumer delight. The news app start-up could be a good addition to Yahoo, and McCue, the former Netscape and Microsoft exec who is well-liked in the Internet scene, would be, too.

Joanne Bradford: The former Yahoo advertising head bolted Bartz’s regime early on to run revenue for Demand Media. Well-liked in the ad business, she also knows where all the bodies are buried at Yahoo. Since ads and media are key at the company, she’d make an interesting choice.

Yusuf Mehdi: The Microsoft online exec would also be a left-field candidate to run Yahoo, given his even-keeled personality and longtime experience in the sector. And, though pricey, Mehdi’s impact on Bing search has been important. But he’s also been involved in the software giant’s lackluster ad and search partnership and still has not turned around the situation at MSN.

Kevin Johnson: The former Microsoft exec and current CEO of Juniper was once slated to be the CEO of Yahoo, had Microsoft managed to win the company in its hostile takeover attempt. In fact, Johnson was the architect of the idea of Yahoo running the media and Microsoft running the tech.

Tim Armstrong: Well, he might have been a good candidate before the downward slide of AOL and a recent series of questionable judgments. If Armstrong can’t keep a loud tech blogger in line, it’s not clear he can wrangle the Yahoo beast.

And here’s the insider scoop:

Ross Levinsohn: The former News Corp. exec is running the Americas for Yahoo, which puts him in charge of the company’s key businesses. But he’s still struggling to turn the ad business around, and how well he does that could be a major determinant of his success. But fantastic hair!

Blake Irving: The former Microsoft exec has an amiable nature and is well-liked at Yahoo, but he still needs to show that the company can ship some innovative products, and quickly. Like Livestand, the news reader, which is muchly late.

David Kenny: The Yahoo board member is now president of Akamai, which might preclude him from the job. But the well-regarded exec — he’s a snazzy dresser, too — ran one of the Internet’s top digital ad agencies and now has tech chops from the content delivery network.

Memo to Yahoo board: I have a million more ideas, from former Viacom exec Tom Freston to former Yahoo board member Eric Hippeau. Or why not bring back a passel of former Yahoos to advise, such as former CEO Terry Semel or former president Sue Decker?

Or Oprah! I hear Winfrey will be in Silicon Valley later this week, and she has a lot more free time now.

Like Snoop Dogg, she would fo shizzle be the bomb to cover.

Related posts

• As Yahoo Continues to Wobble, Investors (And Board) Eye Options
• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Carol Bartz’s Last F%*& You — Now Aimed at Yahoo Board
• Yahoo’s Statement on Bartz Ouster
• Wall Street Likes Bartz’s Firing — Yahoo Stock Spikes on News
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO — Maybe Snoop Dogg, Ya Digg?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:06:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=115291 Zite, the magazine-style reading app for the Apple iPad, has been sold to news giant CNN for $20 million to $25 million.

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110830/zite-sold-to-cnn-for-just-over-20-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110809/more-asiad-speakers-sony-google-microsoft-hollywood-huawei-and-hot-sv-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110809/more-asiad-speakers-sony-google-microsoft-hollywood-huawei-and-hot-sv-start-ups/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=107055

After our grand tour of Asia last week — with stops in Korea and Japan — it seems like a perfect time to update the speaker list for our upcoming AsiaD conference in Hong Kong in October.

As Walt Mossberg and I said, we are trying to mix both U.S.-based speakers with a pan-Asian selection of speakers from across the region, and the new additions are just that.

For the international confab — this one will be held Oct. 19-21 — we’ve already announced a great lineup, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; and Asus Chairman Jonny Shih.

Now, to add to that terrific lineup:

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. In that role, the dynamic exec is at the nexus of the Japanese company’s efforts around tablets, smartphones, gaming and more. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance over the arena, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use? It’s an important question and Horowitz’s job No. 1.

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android far in the lead, Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. The former top News Corp. exec is now a movie producer — his first effort, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” is a big hit. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. The former CTO of Nortel, he’s heading up global development of Huawei’s cloud services for both businesses and consumers. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there is no denying that it has been a golden time for Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including:

Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site that recently got a huge dose of funding and an equally large amount of controversy. How Airbnb can take the company to the next level, including across the world, while dealing with the kinds of challenges the small management team has to face, will be an interesting topic for discussion.

After stints as president of Asia Pacific and Latin America operations at Google and co-founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is trying her hand at a small start-up again. She’ll talk about how the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online, plans to expand globally.

Finally, longtime tech exec David Goldberg is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company. With stints as founder of music site Launch Media, which was bought by Yahoo, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital, he is the perfect person to explain what it’s like being an entrepreneur today in Silicon Valley.

We have even more speakers for AsiaD we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so get ready for what’s next.

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