Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

First things first, for those emailing me frantically about getting into our D@CES onstage interview event later today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: We’re sold out and have a very long wait list.

That said, people in Sin City tend to flake out, so if you show up at the Marcello Ballroom at the Venetian Hotel at 3 pm, you might snag a seat, as people did last year at the same event.

No guarantees, but it’s a betting town, so you might want to do so.

And, if you throw craps, our crack All Things Digital staff will be posting photos, reports and video quickly.

I am hoping there will be some juicy news for them to chew on, as we interview three fascinating subjects:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer browser team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Our latest event comes after our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference, part of the D: All Things Digital juggernaut.

(Actually, it is more like a tiny red wagon, but it is really cool.)

This is our second D event at the CES, which is taking place this week.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

As usual, our event will be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

The D@CES program is only this afternoon, with the new trio.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real, live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

As noted before, I will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

So get ready for some fun–after all, it’s Vegas, baby.

This is going to be good.

The iconic singer and performance artist Lady Gaga will be appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show later today to unveil “creations” she came up with for Polaroid.

Gaga announced last year here that she had been named the creative director of Polaroid.

As part of the collaboration that will debut her Polaroid “Grey Label” project, Gaga said a year ago that she would be coming up with “prototypes in marrying the fields of fashion/technology/photography innovation.”

Oh, goody. Fishnet stockings that can post pictures to Instagram!

I am considering going to the event–as ordered to by the shy and retiring Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel.

But it will likely be a mosh pit of nerdy dudes, so I’ll need to frontload starting at 10 am.

And you can watch it on Polaroid.com at 3:30 pm PT.

Maybe it’s just me, but is this video from Microsoft, featuring “Chet”–the software giant’s “creative presentation consultant” for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week–freaky or not?

It’s a Zen-style joke, of course, but what is the sound of one hand clapping?

CEO Steve Ballmer will be giving his usual keynote speech on Wednesday night and is about as anti-Chet as it gets.

Until then, here are the two Chet videos:

Sean Ryan (pictured here), who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources.

Currently, Facebook does not create social games, but hosts third-party publishers of them on its king-making platform. Its most stunning success has been Zynga, maker of Farmville and CityVille.

The move seems sudden, since he just got his latest position. But sources said Ryan and execs at the Silicon Valley social networking giant had been talking about a job there before he went to News Corp.

Thus, at this point at least, Ryan’s main job will be a high-profile developer relations dude–in essence, keeping Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in line and also, presumably, happy.

Translation: Adventures in babysitting former Facebook COO and now Zynga COO Owen Van Natta!

Ryan, whose title will be director of gaming partnerships, will report to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Facebook is clearly building out its gaming talent bench.

Ryan will work closely with Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers–who joined Facebook after the acquisition of their social gaming start-up Walletin in November to head platform games engineering efforts.

Sources said that News Corp.’s efforts will now be taken over by John Welch, who came to the media giant after Ryan acquired his casual games company Making Fun.

At the time, Ryan said he was working on a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Apple’s iPhone Google’s Android mobile operating system and News Corp.-owned Myspace.

Ryan got to News Corp. a little after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer. He had the title of EVP and GM of Games at News Corp. Digital.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown is awaiting comment from Facebook and News Corp.

But Ryan and George Kliavkoff throw their 17th Annual “After-After” Party at the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas at 11:59 PM Thursday, so come by and say congrats!

To say BoomTown is not a person who likes to hear when I arrive at a vacation spot, “Have a magical day,” is an understatement.

In fact, if I were a Disney character, I would be an unholy mash-up of Cruella de Vil, Grumpy and Scrooge McDuck.

Yet, here I am for the rest of the week–after just barely escaping snow prison in New York–at Disney World in Florida, with the wife and kids and a lot of preternaturally peppy folks from all over the world.

In other words, it’s a small world after all, instead of just a smaller Yahoo via layoffs and exec departures. Or, Pirates of the Caribbean and not Pirates of Silicon Valley.

You get the idea.

(Although since Walt Mossberg and I will be interviewing Disney CEO Robert Iger at D: All Things Digital, our ninth conference in June of next year, it’s kind of work-related.)

In any case, I won’t be posting much–except for putting up the last of the D: Dive Into Mobile full videos–until a week from now.

But, all week, All Things Digital writers will be weighing in on the year past and the one ahead, starting with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka later today.

When I return, I’ll be setting the stage for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (my kind of theme park!), where we will be putting on an afternoon of interviews with big names in tech for D@CES.

After that, it’s right into the expected move of Apple iPhone to Verizon and more, since the tech parade–just like the Electrical Parade on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom–never seems to stop.

So, until 2011, have a magical day. And I mean that in the Cruella-ist way.

That’s because, here’s a video of Disney World 3D in Google Earth that is already causing me to freak out:

After our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week, the D: All Things Digital train keeps chugging away and is now headed to Las Vegas just after the new year.

There, we will do a second D event at the Consumer Electronics Show, which will take place from January 6 to 9, 2011.

It will, natch, be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

Unlike our other conferences, the D@CES program is only one afternoon, on Friday, January 7, at the Venetian’s Marcello ballroom, followed by a party at the hotel’s V Bar.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

This year, the trio will be: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real-live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

BoomTown will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

D@CES is invitation only, but if you want to go, email me at Kara@AllThingsD.com and I will send an invite, as long as supplies last.

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

Also, while in Vancouver, BoomTown tried to avoid the happiness-fueled stalking by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online retailer Zappos.

To no avail.

I interviewed Hsieh (as well as Groupon’s Andrew Mason) onstage at the Grow2010 conference. Hsieh’s topic was his new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.”

It came out in June and is all over the bestseller lists, and Hsieh is now headed on a nationwide bus tour to promote it.

You can see my video interview with him below, in which he discusses his fervent intent to hug me. Also other stuff.

Amazon (AMZN) certainly gave a bear hug to the company, buying Zappos last summer in a deal valued at about $850 million.

It was a good idea, since Zappos is well known for its culture of intense happiness, both in its high level of customer service and the enthusiasm of employees of the company, which started as a Web shoe retailer but has been expanding its offerings.

I actually went to Zappos’s Las Vegas HQ and terrorized its very friendly “Mayor” Jerry Tidmore, and also talked to Hsieh then. Both videos are also below.

Here is the update with Hsieh:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100824/update-zappos-tony-hsieh-on-magical-happiness-bus-tour-and-hugging-it-out-with-boomtown/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100428/palm-ceo-jon-ruby-rubinstein-talks-about-hp-deal-hes-staying-will-always-love-the-pre-mirror-and-still-will-not-be-touching-any-iphones/ http://allthingsd.com/20100428/palm-ceo-jon-ruby-rubinstein-talks-about-hp-deal-hes-staying-will-always-love-the-pre-mirror-and-still-will-not-be-touching-any-iphones/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:03:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27824

After an All Things Digital report last week on Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) being the most likely suitor for Palm (PALM)–despite multiple reports of intense interest from HTC and Lenovo from China–CEO Jon Rubinstein jokingly asked how we knew about the deal.

We didn’t! It was a complete guess, Ruby!

Actually it was a very informed one by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, but his cogent analysis of the synergies between Palm and HP is pretty much what Rubinstein said drove the action.

“We’ve got great intellectual property with webOS and a great team assembled,” he said, in an interview with BoomTown this afternoon after the $1.2 billion acquisition was announced. “HP is the largest tech company in the world and they are now going to invest in driving it to scale, which we could not do at Palm.”

Getting its innovative webOS mobile operating system software to scale–or, more precisely not being able to at its size–was one of the major issues that Rubinstein pointed to in doing the deal (and, it goes without saying, Palm’s struggles).

“This industry became much more competitive very quickly than we had hoped or could have predicted,” he said, referring to the giant investments in the space by Google (GOOG) with Android, Apple (AAPL) with the iPhone and even Microsoft (MSFT) with its new Windows Phone 7. “We did predict the right marketplace and thought the smartphone market was going to explode, so it was the right direction.”

Now it will be up to HP to drive Web OS, although Rubinstein said he expects most of the team at Palm–including himself–to move over intact.

Rubinstein, who once worked at HP, said more details over who the rivals to nab Palm were will be revealed when regulatory documents are released, although he declined to comment specifically now. Now, it is up to him and HP to sell it to Wall Street.

He said he expected the deal “should not attract significant” government scrutiny, given the high amount of competition in the space.

Which he predicted would be heightened now that HP is backing Palm as its new owner, rather than struggling on its own, as it has been.

“Certainly from a tech point of view, the ability to compete is now profound,” he said. “I think this is a logical and natural match and the synergies are obvious.”

As to missteps, such as its creepy lady advertising and questionable marketing, Rubinstein said no CEO likes to focus on those.

Which is why when I asked him about the silly exchange I had with Silicon Valley VC and Palm backer Roger McNamee about last year’s D: All Things Digital conference about the mirror on the back of the Palm Pre that the “ladies” would love, he joked that—even though McNamee was now out–the overly loquacious Elevation Partners investor would be brought back from time to time to liven things up.

As to Rubinstein’s own controversial quote to me in an onstage interview at a D event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, where the former Apple exec said he had never used an iPhone, he quipped: “I still haven’t touched one.”

In truth, Palm never really did.

Here is that video, as well as highlights of the appearance by Rubinstein and McNamee at last year’s D7:

Video clip: Jon Rubinstein says he’s never used an iPhone.

Video clip: Mirror, mirror, on the smartphone…

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100428/palm-ceo-jon-ruby-rubinstein-talks-about-hp-deal-hes-staying-will-always-love-the-pre-mirror-and-still-will-not-be-touching-any-iphones/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/zappos-tony-hsieh-talks-about-his-new-book-delivering-happiness-get-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/zappos-tony-hsieh-talks-about-his-new-book-delivering-happiness-get-it/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:34:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26974

Tony Hsieh is unusually quiet in person, especially for someone whose innovative company is well known for its incredibly friendly customer service.

He has a new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” which comes out in June, so I chatted with him outside the Zappos HQ in Henderson, Nev., about this and more.

Zappos was bought by Amazon (AMZN) last year, but Hsieh still runs it pretty independently of the mother ship, employing a set of “core values.”

Here’s the video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/zappos-tony-hsieh-talks-about-his-new-book-delivering-happiness-get-it/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:33:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26971

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

The company is well known for its culture of intense happiness, both in its high level of customer service and the enthusiasm of employees of the company, which started as a Web shoe retailer but has been expanding its offerings.

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

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

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

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/terminally-happy-mayor-of-zappos-meets-born-grumpy-dictator-of-boomtown-hijinks-ensue/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100413/digital-bromance-producer-lloyd-braun-and-msns-scott-moore-talk-about-online-content-on-a-tv-set/ http://allthingsd.com/20100413/digital-bromance-producer-lloyd-braun-and-msns-scott-moore-talk-about-online-content-on-a-tv-set/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:49:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26515

Yesterday, BoomTown interviewed Hollywood producer Lloyd Braun (pictured here) onstage in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters annual confab about the future of television in the digital age.

While broadcasters finally seem to finally be embracing the fact that everything in their world is going digital and that business models are fast-changing, it’s still a long and complicated road forward.

Braun, as well as many other longtime entertainment execs, are trying to forge the gap, by trying to operate in both worlds. While his stint as the top media exec at Yahoo (YHOO) did not go so well, he kept on the rocky digital content path, even as he continued to produce more traditional fare for television.

So last week, I motored down to Long Beach to the set of a very elaborate pilot for an action drama that he is shooting for NBC called “The Cape,” to talk about television, as well the latest Web site he launched in partnership with Microsoft’s MSN.

Called “Glo,” the Web site is a highly stylized women’s lifestyle destination in partnership with magazine giant Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.

Glo is the second dramatic site designed, created and run by the Los Angeles-based BermanBraun, which is headed by Braun and his business partner, Gail Berman.

The first was an innovative celebrity site, Wonderwall, whose consumer engagement metrics have pleased advertisers so much that MSN ordered up another one aimed at fashion, decor, relationships and beauty.

Here’s the video of an interview I did with Braun, as well as MSN U.S. head Scott Moore, in the bowels of the Queen Mary’s engine room, where “The Cape” is being shot:

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