When people talk to one another long enough, they want to meet, and when they’ve been in one another’s presence, they want to keep in touch.

– Clay Shirky, talking to David Carr about the “ingredients of communication” in the digital world

As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world? And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.

– Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, in conversation with David Carr of the New York Times

In the message, first published by 9to5Mac, Cook says Apple is not “ignoring the human cost” of its supply chain, and dismisses accusations that it is complicit in worker abuse as mendacious.

“We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern,” Cook wrote. “Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.”

And for evidence of that, one need only look at Apple’s supplier-responsibility efforts. If there are problems at overseas suppliers, says Cook, no one is doing more than Apple to prevent them.

“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain,” Cook explained. “As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”

Which is probably true. Apple has been conducting supplier-responsibility audits and issuing reports on them for years now. And it recently became the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, which will serve as an independent auditor for its supply chain.

That said, there’s still a lot more to be done, and Apple could likely do it. With the $13 billion in profits it reported earlier this week, and that $97 billion in cash it’s sitting on, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

As a former Apple executive told the New York Times, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

An overly simplistic argument, I suppose. The solutions to these issues are far more complex than threats over contracts. But again, more could be done. And not just by Apple. There are plenty of other big consumer electronics companies using offshore labor. And ultimately, the biggest driver of these issues isn’t Apple or HP, but our own buying habits.

Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

Specifically, the billboard is on 101 southbound in South San Francisco, just north of SFO. It heralds, “Bits: Everything you need to know on the business of technology.”

A spokeswoman for the Times said she didn’t know when the billboard went up, but said it was part of a broader promotion effort after the relaunch of Bits late last year.

Other Web companies who’ve recently bought billboards on Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area include Zynga, Groupon, Box.net and even the young travel search site Hipmunk.

Campaigns on 101 (warning: Locals frown at people who call it “the 101”!) cost an average of $10,000 to $20,000 per month, with some prominent spots costing more than $30,000 per month, said John Laramie, CEO of ADstruc, a DSP for outdoor advertising.

It should be noted that AllThingsD competes with Bits, obvi.

Also, please excuse the cellphone photo through my dirty windshield; I drove to L.A. this weekend and should really take the car in for a wash.

The schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational. It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.

– Yancey Strickler, a founder of Kickstarter, in an email — from an article by the New York Times’ David Carr about the dangers of SOPA

The New York Times published something of an exit interview with Palmisano over the weekend. It read a bit like a victory lap, and that’s not undeserved. The record books will show that IBM shares during the Palmisano era (2003-2011) rose by 125 percent; sales grew from $81 billion in 2002 to an expected $107 billion; and annual profits on a per-share basis went from $3.07 to a consensus forecast of $13.38.

But it got me to thinking about one of the highlights of the Palmisano era; one that generated a great deal of attention at the time: IBM’s decision to sell its personal computer division to Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker. It was a relatively small deal, worth less than $2 billion at the time, but it was a controversial move. Despite the fact that IBM wasn’t making much money on the business, IBM PCs, especially its ThinkPad line of notebooks, were generally considered to be pretty good.

Nearly seven years later, it’s worth noting that Lenovo is now the world’s second-largest PC vendor, behind Hewlett-Packard, having vaulted past Dell earlier this year, according to the market research firm IDC. It’s also worth noting that Lenovo is in fifth place in the U.S., behind HP, Dell, Apple and Toshiba, in that order.

IBM initially owned 15 percent of Lenovo and maintained a stake in that company until February of this year, when it sold its remaining 4.3 percent shares at a profit of more than a quarter-billion dollars.

Lenovo’s biggest shareholder is Legend Holdings, of which 36 percent is owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a.k.a. CAS Holdings, a state-controlled entity. The state has pared back its stake, though: When the IBM-Lenovo deal was announced in 2005, Lenovo was 57 percent state-owned.

There was a lot of natural controversy, and even national security concerns in 2005, about selling so red-blooded an American product as the IBM PC to China. But there was also a solid business case to consider. The PC business was a drag on earnings because of downward price pressure exerted by Dell and all the others, and it wasn’t even leading the market, as was the case with Hewlett-Packard, which engaged in some very public contemplation about spinning off its own PC division.

But there was also a potential strategic benefit, which Michael Useem, a professor a the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management, pointed out at the time: Making friends with China.

By selling an underperforming asset to a buyer willing to take it and run with it, IBM got solid access to the exploding Chinese market. In paraphrased remarks to the Times, Palmisano concedes the point:

Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, IBM enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.

So how has that worked out? It’s a little hard to tell from reading Big Blue’s Byzantine financial statements. In fiscal 2005, the year the deal closed, IBM reported $18.6 billion, or about 20 percent of revenue, came from the Asia-Pacific region, including China.

And though it declined to provide specific dollar amounts, it said that year that sales in China had dropped by 19 percent, but after after stripping out the PC division, would have grown by 8 percent.

For the first nine months of fiscal 2011, IBM reported that the Asia-Pacific region accounted for exactly the same dollar figure — $18.6 billion — amounting to 24 percent of its overall sales of $77.4 billion, and there’s still a quarter to go. That would put Asia on track to account for a little less than a quarter of IBM’s revenue.

In its earnings statement, IBM also makes a point of calling attention to what it calls “growth markets,” which are generally the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. These markets combined for 23 percent of sales in IBM’s most recent quarter.

This is about as close to understanding the size of IBM’s business in China as we’re going to get. On balance, it looks to have been a positive move, especially when you consider that if IBM had kept its PC division, it would have likely only gotten smaller and become more of a profit drag on a company that’s increasingly focused on high-margin businesses like services and consulting.

Nor can we judge by IBM’s headcount. Globally, as of the publication of its last annual report, IBM employed 426,751 people. But it has stopped providing a geographical breakdown. A report in the Times of India in 2010, mentioned by The Wall Street Journal, suggested that Big Blue’s headcount in India might be as high as 130,000; which, if true, would make it one of that country’s top 10 employers.

There is no question that IBM’s presence in China has grown. You can tell by the press releases. There was for example, a new IBM Research lab in Shanghai in 2008, and another in 2010. Just last month, IBM announced that it had closed a significant IT deal for a major health-care provider in Hong Kong, and another with a Chinese province to improve the safety of pork (which included a food-safety video I embedded below).

For better or worse, Palmisano will be remembered as the man who traded PCs for access to China. On balance, it seems to have been a good trade, but the jury is still out.

Tomorrow is the first business day of IBM’s Rometty era. Assuming she retires at age 60, a well-established IBM tradition, she’ll have about six years to make her mark. One wonders what she’ll be remembered for most.

Another indicator that things moved very quickly: While the Times has said it will conduct an internal and external search for a successor, it has not hired a search firm for the job, according to spokesman Robert Christie.

That said, the Times has contracted with executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International to fill a board of directors seat vacated by former Drugstore.com CEO Dawn Lepore in June. People familiar with that search say the company has been looking for candidates with digital expertise — something they’ve also indicated will be important for Robinson’s successor.

The threat comes from the direction of everyone who competes with us for the readers’ attention. Even Angry Birds, for that matter, because it consumes people’s time.

— New York Times associate managing editor Jim Schachter, in an interview with Israel’s Globes, talking about who he sees as a threat

The companies aren’t disclosing details except to note that it’s a cash and stock deal. Smule has more of the former because it just raised a $12 million funding round, and some of that is being transfered directly to Atlanta-based Khush.

The logic here is pretty simple: The two companies can combine tech, and just as important, they can combine their installed base — together they’ve moved 35 million apps — to promote/distribute more apps.

All of that activity, by the way, remains confined to Apple and its iOS ecosystem. Neither company makes apps for Google’s Android operating system, pretty much for the same reasons that Smule co-founder Jeff Smith explained to me more than a year ago.

If you want to raise a skeptical eye, it would be perfectly fair to point out that both companies traffic in novelty items that rely on gimmicks like “auto-tuning” people’s voices. And that while both companies insist that they’re really trying to make music-creation a social experience, you probably don’t want to hear most of your friends’ attempts to make music.

But who cares? If people like the apps, they like the apps. For insight into the brains that make the apps popular, check out this excellent profile of Smule’s chief brainiac Ge Wang, via the New York Times magazine’s Rob Walker.

You can also see Wang, Smith and their new employees Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia in this clever announcement video; below that is the interview I shot with Smith back in March 2010.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/music-app-maker-smule-adds-more-voices-buys-music-app-maker-khush/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111201/the-golden-geek-vs-the-start-up-whisperer-in-yahoo-savior-faceoff-not-yet-but-delicious-to-imagine/ http://allthingsd.com/20111201/the-golden-geek-vs-the-start-up-whisperer-in-yahoo-savior-faceoff-not-yet-but-delicious-to-imagine/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:23:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=149087

Last night, the New York Times dropped a juicy little tidbit into its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink daily update of the board mishegas at Yahoo around the deliberations yesterday over two competing private equity bids to buy a partial stake in the company.

No, not the one about Jeff Jordan — former eBay exec, OpenTable CEO and now VC at Andreessen Horowitz — possibly taking a big role at Yahoo if the firm’s bid with Silver Lake prevailed — which was mysteriously removed very soon after it posted (’cuz he will not, so good move, NYT!)

I mean the one about the venture firm’s big-kahuna partner, Marc Andreessen — who will indeed take a board seat and play a strong role in Yahoo’s future if his bid wins — getting a possible competitor in the Silicon Valley savior section of the ongoing show.

That would be in the form of Reid Hoffman, the well-known entrepreneur, VC and angel investor, who the Times said had talked with TPG Capital, Silver Lake’s rival in the Yahoo bidding, about becoming a possible partner.

Wrote the Times:

“TPG has held discussions with Greylock Partners, another venture capital firm, about a possible alignment, two people said. TPG is hoping to draw on the expertise of Reid Hoffman, one of Greylock’s partners and the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, these people said.”

Translation: If Silver Lake has a tech icon of substance on its team to give uber-geek appeal to its offer — dagnabbit — then TPG was going to raise with another one, whom the very same Times reporter who wrote last night’s article recently nicknamed “The Start-Up Whisperer” in a recent glowing profile of Hoffman.

While I am still trying to grok what a start-up whisperer exactly means (and how someone as self-effacing as Hoffman would react to such a twee moniker without snickering), it’s a move that has likely already irritated Silver Lake.

After all, TPG aiming at nabbing Hoffman is akin to two crazy neighbors trying to one-up each other in holiday-lighting lawn decor. (You have a singing Santa, so I’ll have a singing Santa — and I might even add a Lady Gaga-themed crèche for good measure!)

But it’s not a bad instinct, either, to get your own live-action Silicon Valley legend, even if it is only half true in Hoffman’s case.

Because, according to sources who know such things, while Hoffman and TPG have had conversations, there have been no commitments, and nothing is close to being agreed on to link the pair.

That could certainly change, and quickly, but Hoffman or Greylock aren’t currently in TPG’s proposal to Yahoo.

That’s in contrast to Andreessen, who is all in (I am not even going to bother with “sources said” here, since everyone and my mother has seen the proposal) with Silver Lake on the deal to purchase 19.9 percent of Yahoo for about $16.50 a share.

As I reported earlier this week, for Silver Lake’s money and expertise in fixing broken things, the bid includes: Silver Lake getting three board seats; cash going to a buyback of stock or granting of a dividend to shareholders; the ability to select a CEO; approval of its strategic plan for Yahoo, and its solution to come to terms with Yahoo’s unhappy Asian partners; and all the purple wearables you could ever hope for (perhaps Yahoo’s best asset, IMHO, especially worn by such obviously cool dudes, as seen here).

Also, controversial Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang gets to stay around on the board (but only if he becomes very, very quiet, so as not to rile the activist shareholders).

TPG’s bid is less formed, although its price is slightly higher. And the PE firm has yet to check the “Big Geek Included” box.

Hence, the floating of Hoffman as a contender to take on Andreessen, who was once dubbed the “Golden Geek” by Time magazine.

I hope TPG does, soon, since what a matchup it would be!

But, for now at least, the pair — who share big investments in a range of Web companies, most especially Facebook (Andreessen is on the board of the social networking giant, and Hoffman was an early investor and adviser) — are at peace.

Dagnabbit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/the-golden-geek-vs-the-start-up-whisperer-in-yahoo-savior-faceoff-not-yet-but-delicious-to-imagine/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111121/for-sale-on-itunes-free-on-youtube/ http://allthingsd.com/20111121/for-sale-on-itunes-free-on-youtube/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:30:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=146113 Here’s a YouTube ad for a $1.99 iTunes video, featuring a pre-Victoria’s Secret Bob Dylan, going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and getting booed.

And here’s the full version of the song, for free, also on YouTube:

As the New York Times points out, the first version comes from The Speek, a British firm that specializes in selling vintage music videos, most of which are available for free, with a minimum of work, on the Web.

The Speek is never going to be a big business, because video music downloads are a small business that’s getting smaller: Last year, Americans paid a mere $36 million for videos, down from $41 million in 2008. But the fact that there’s any business at all is a good reminder that you can still sell digital goods even when the Web makes it easy to get them without paying a penny.

Another reminder: Music sales, period. The digital era has poleaxed the music business, shrinking it from a $37-billion-a-year industry to a $16 billion one in a decade. But it’s still a $16-billion-a-year business, which means that plenty of people are paying for stuff they can find for free with a couple of clicks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111121/for-sale-on-itunes-free-on-youtube/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111110/meet-the-man-behind-mixel-an-instagram-for-collages-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111110/meet-the-man-behind-mixel-an-instagram-for-collages-video/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:23:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=142742 More than a year ago, Khoi Vinh quit a Big Deal job as design director for the New York Times’ Web site. Last night, he took the wraps off his newest gig: Building a social art app called Mixel, along with co-founder Scott Ostler.

There’s a promo for the iPad app at the bottom of the post, but you can also watch Vinh describe and demo the app himself in this video I shot with him earlier in the week; even on the shakycam, you can get a good sense of what he’s trying to do here.

Will it work? Impossible to tell, of course. Not only because I haven’t played with the thing myself, but because almost no one has, and until actual, run-of-the-mill people start adopting a social app, there’s no way to tell if it will become … social.

And while Vinh says he was clearly influenced by the wildly popular photo app Instagram, that app took an activity that people were already doing — sharing their iPhone pictures — and put a twist on it. In order for Mixel to take off, it will require people to do something they likely haven’t engaged in since middle school: creating collages.

That said, it sure looks fun. And Vinh’s pedigree makes it worth watching.

Introducing Mixel for iPad from Mixel App on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111110/meet-the-man-behind-mixel-an-instagram-for-collages-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111108/exclusive-saul-hansell-departs-aol-to-be-eir-at-betaworks/ http://allthingsd.com/20111108/exclusive-saul-hansell-departs-aol-to-be-eir-at-betaworks/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:57:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=141912

Saul Hansell, the prominent former New York Times tech reporter who went to AOL several years ago to head one of its content efforts called Seed, will leave the company to become an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks.

The move to the New York venture firm is the right one now, said Hansell in an interview today.

“I have been watching people go starts thing for a long time and now I want to go start things,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas around news that I want to explore.”

Hansell, in a blog post, did try to not paint the move as as anti-AOL one:

“I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on [AOL CEO] Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision.”

Hansell joined AOL the day after it split from Time Warner to run what he jokingly calls the “free-range, organic content farm” of Seed and has remained through its many iterations, including the purchase of the Huffington Post.

He is currently the “Big News” editor in that unit, which centers around topics.

Here’s Hansell’s blog post on the move:

Heading into the workshop.

Two years ago, when I explained to my children why I left the New York Times, one of the greatest spots ever to be a reporter and writer, I told them that I wanted to be an inventor. Since then, I’ve had the thrilling experience of being part of AOL, which is doing more than nearly anyone else to rethink the way that news is gathered, presented and paid for.

Now it’s time to strike out on my own and seek my fortune as an inventor. I’ve left AOL, and Monday I started as an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks. If you’re not familiar with it, Betaworks has started and invested in a number of companies that are on the vanguard of real-time social experiences — several of which relate to news and publishing — including Bit.ly, ChartBeat, TweetDeck, and News.Me. It’s run by John Bortwick, whom I first met in 1997 when he sold his startup, Total New York, to America Online. We’ve become friends, and I couldn’t think of a more fertile environment in which to germinate a new idea than the bustle of creativity bursting out of the Betaworks loft in the meat packing district.

I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision. At AOL, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest and most dedicated journalists, engineers and product executives I’ve ever met. And the brilliant acquisition of the Huffington Post brought in many more people who have been outpacing the industry through journalistic innovation.

I will always be grateful to Tim for giving me the chance to prove that I had more to contribute to a journalistic organization than simply articles and to Arianna for inviting me to join the HuffPost team. And I’m in debt to so many who offered so much advice –some of which I ignored to my own detriment — on the nuances of technology, product design, PowerPoint, and the ways of big companies. Yet as AOL continues to refine its organization, it became clear that this was the time for me to try my hand at starting a company.

It’s too soon to say much about what I’m doing. But I think there is a lot left to invent around both how to present news to people that takes advantage of the technology available today.

I expect you’ll see a lot more soon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111108/exclusive-saul-hansell-departs-aol-to-be-eir-at-betaworks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111107/ny-times-digital-boss-to-retire/ http://allthingsd.com/20111107/ny-times-digital-boss-to-retire/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:54:07 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=141290 Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations for the New York Times, is retiring at the end of this year. A 16-year veteran of the Times, Nisenholtz quarterbacked the company’s online efforts, beginning with NYTimes.com in 1996. Additional details at paidContent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111107/ny-times-digital-boss-to-retire/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111105/louis-c-k-uses-twitter-louis-c-k-hates-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20111105/louis-c-k-uses-twitter-louis-c-k-hates-twitter/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:33:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=140921 If you’ve seen Louis C.K. do stand-up (and you should) or his FX show (and you should), the fact that he both employs and detests Twitter won’t surprise you. His summary, via his interview on Conan O’Brien Thursday night: “I kinda hate it. I think it’s awful. I have Twitter just so I can tell people what I want them to buy, and give me money.”

Here’s the two-minute version:

And if you’ve got 10 minutes (remember, if you live in the U.S., you get a bonus hour tonight), here’s the whole interview. And here, via the New York Times, is more on his plan to stream his next concert from his own site, passing over not only pay cable but Netflix and iTunes, too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111105/louis-c-k-uses-twitter-louis-c-k-hates-twitter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111104/karate-kid-ii-this-time-its-the-nerdy-facebook-kid-vs-the-nerdy-kid-and-i-am-rooting-for-neither/ http://allthingsd.com/20111104/karate-kid-ii-this-time-its-the-nerdy-facebook-kid-vs-the-nerdy-kid-and-i-am-rooting-for-neither/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:46:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=140699 What is it about using the karate metaphor to depict Silicon Valley infighting between tech geeks?

In March of 2010 , the New York Times used the ju-jitsu theme to depict the fight between Google and Apple over smartphones. As you can see below, the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs faces off with an iPad and iPhone against then-CEO (and now Executive Chairman) Eric Schmidt, who is armed with an Android device.

Jobs gets to do the cool, in-the-air kick.

Now, this week, on the cover of Fortune magazine, it is Facebook’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg doing the floating hi-yaaa against Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page.

Leaving aside the fact that neither ever wears suits to do anything, let alone karate, it’s almost exactly the same, as you can see below.

Personally, I would have used Nerf guns at dawn.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111104/karate-kid-ii-this-time-its-the-nerdy-facebook-kid-vs-the-nerdy-kid-and-i-am-rooting-for-neither/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111030/sister-on-steve-jobss-last-words-oh-wow-oh-wow-oh-wow/ http://allthingsd.com/20111030/sister-on-steve-jobss-last-words-oh-wow-oh-wow-oh-wow/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:50:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=138054

Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs lived a life that read like an epic novel, so it should be no surprise that his very last words on this temporal plane would be just as dramatic.

And they were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

That’s according to his sister, Mona Simpson, whose moving eulogy was published in the New York Times today. It’s well worth a read, given what a gifted writer Simpson is — she is a much-respected novelist — and the amazing subject.

Simpson opens the piece by writing about her desire for her estranged father to return to her life and become the be all and end all. Instead, it turned out to be Jobs.

“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me,” she wrote. “For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.”

A fitting legacy, among many.

It’s a delightful piece, too, and here is my favorite part:

“For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.”

It’s lovely that his sister would be the one to give everyone that one more thing.

Most of us don’t get to stay goodbye quite so eloquently, if at all, as Simpson surmised about the message of her brother’s life. So, saying hello to life still remains our best option.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111030/sister-on-steve-jobss-last-words-oh-wow-oh-wow-oh-wow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111024/must-have-been-thinking-about-that-other-game-angry-pigs/ http://allthingsd.com/20111024/must-have-been-thinking-about-that-other-game-angry-pigs/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:20:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=136197

Correction: October 22, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the premise of ‘Angry Birds,’ a popular iPhone game. In the game, slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.

The New York Times sets the record straight

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111024/must-have-been-thinking-about-that-other-game-angry-pigs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111020/netflix-takes-a-short-breather/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/netflix-takes-a-short-breather/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:44:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=135127

We need to take a few deep breaths and not move quite as quickly. But we also don’t want to overcorrect and start moving stodgily.

— Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, reflecting on a very rough couple months, to the New York Times Magazine’s Andrew Goldman. “It’s causing, as you would expect, an internal reflectiveness.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111020/netflix-takes-a-short-breather/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111020/new-york-times-posts-profit/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/new-york-times-posts-profit/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:32:10 +0000 Russell Adams http://allthingsd.com/?p=135106 Cost-cutting helped New York Times Co. swing to a better-than-expected third-quarter profit from a year-earlier loss, despite a deteriorating market for print advertising.

Times Co. said total advertising revenue at its newspapers, which include the New York Times and Boston Globe, fell 7.3 percent in the latest quarter from a year earlier due to a double-digit rate of decline in print. That compared with a 2.5 percent drop in total advertising in the second quarter.

Digital ad revenue at Times Co.’s newspaper properties increased 6.2 percent to $50.3 million in the third quarter. However, overall ad revenue at the papers was dragged down by a 10.4 percent decline in revenue from more costly print ads.

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