We are thrilled to welcome another strong reporter to the AllThingsD team: Lauren Goode, who will cover consumer tech products and issues. She’ll be based in New York.

Lauren comes to us from the digital arm of our sister news organization, The Wall Street Journal, where she was a video producer and reporter, from 2008 to 2011. She helped launch the Journal’s live-streaming video programming and produced and co-hosted the daily “Digits” technology show, which regularly features our ATD staff along with Journal reporters and editors. (We hope to see her there from time to time as a guest herself now.) She was also a contributing writer to the Digits blog on WSJ.com, and wrote posts on consumer technology products.

Prior to joining the Journal, Lauren worked in cable television from 2003 to 2008, producing and writing shows for A&E Television Networks’ award-winning “Biography” series, after having started her career as a production assistant at ESPN in New York.

The addition of Lauren to AllThingsD is just the latest move in an expansion that has seen our staff more than double in the past year, including adding new reporters, editors and developers. This has allowed us to broaden and deepen our coverage, to break more news and also to begin doing different types of stories than many other blogs offer, such as our recent series on Facebook’s smartphone effort.

We have more new coverage and staff expansions planned, so stay tuned. And, as always, thanks for your readership, which has been increasing strongly quarter after quarter. We aim to keep earning your loyalty and trust.

Going forward, Lauren can be reached at lauren@allthingsd.com, and you can read more about her bio and ethics statement here.

– Walt & Kara

Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.

Remedy Health Media, a New York-based health information company, has bought HealthCentral, a start-up that offers online clinical and patient tools, community and content in a variety of topic areas.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Arlington, Va.-based HealthCentral has raised $50 million from investors such as the Carlyle Group, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Polaris Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Allen & Co., which was HealthCentral’s financial adviser for the transaction, was also an investor.

The market for online-based information about health has been a fast-growing one, but it’s still a nascent arena.

Here’s the official press release:

Remedy Health Media Acquires HealthCentral: Creates Industry-Leading Health Information and Technology Platform

NEW YORK, NY – Remedy Health Media, America’s fastest-growing health information and technology company, today announced its acquisition of HealthCentral, a leading provider of online clinical and patient community resources and tools that help millions of patients and caregivers take control of their health and improve their well-being. The acquisition brings together two companies with the shared mission of empowering patients and caregivers with the information and applications needed to efficiently navigate the healthcare landscape to receive better health outcomes. The acquisition is expected to close this week. Terms were not disclosed.

“This acquisition means Remedy now provides the health information industry’s leading portfolio of digital, mobile, and point-of-care information and technology products,” said Remedy Chief Executive Officer, Mike Cunnion.

HealthCentral’s CEO, Christopher M. Schroeder, adds, “This combination creates real opportunities for innovation in an industry segment that is growing rapidly and seeking new solutions. All of us at HealthCentral are very excited that the union of the two companies and the strength, scope, and reach of the new Remedy will be a unique force for better health and wellness.”

With the addition of HealthCentral, Remedy Health Media creates a market-leading platform for healthcare audiences seeking proprietary information and technology to manage their health concerns on their terms as well as marketing partners who want to connect with patients and caregivers on a number of platforms: online, in doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and through their mobile devices. The new Remedy Health Media will influence more than 150 million consumers annually. The company’s reach now includes 23 million unique monthly visitors to its health websites, more than 17 million patients and caregivers at pharmacy counters nationwide, a 20-million member customer database, and a network of more than 600,000 physicians.

“With the acquisition of HealthCentral, we’ve dramatically increased our online reach, sales capacity and our ability to create industry leading health information and technology applications,” notes Cunnion. “The combination creates exciting opportunities to provide even more value to our audiences, customers and strategic partners.”

Remedy Health Media is a Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) company; a leading global private investment firm focused on the information, education, media, communications and business services industries. “Communications growth will be driven by the convergence of technologies in digital and mobile platforms,” said David Bainbridge, Managing Director, Veronis Suhler Stevenson. “Nowhere is this more evident than in the health and wellness sector where the ability to access accurate information is paramount.”

HealthCentral is backed by leading interactive media and technology investors IAC/InterActiveCorp, Polaris Ventures, Sequoia Capital, The Carlyle Group and Allen & Company. Notes Alan Spoon of Polaris Ventures, “We are thrilled to join forces with Mike and the Remedy team. This combination is a unique opportunity to create the largest and most innovative platform for health seekers looking to take action on their terms, and connecting them with our partners and clients.”

Schroeder will remain involved in the business as a consultant to Remedy and the board of directors, and has been named an Advisor to Polaris Ventures.

In a statement Friday, AT&T said commissioners won’t be able to vote a proposal announced Tuesday from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that the $39 billion merger be sent before an administrative law judge. The carrier announced it had withdrawn its FCC application in the early hours of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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.

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.

A day after teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, Cloudera announced today that it has landed a $40 million series D round of venture capital funding from Ignition Partners, in a round led by its partner, Frank Artale. Previous investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera says it will use the funds to expand its marketing and sales operations. By my count, the round brings Cloudera’s total capital raised so far to $76 million.

Cloudera has been on a roll — it’s the Hadoop outfit that many companies are turning to when they decide to tackle their big-data problems. Among its customers are eBay, AOL, Facebook and Groupon. While Hadoop itself is free for anyone to download and install from the Apache Software Foundation, Cloudera provides support and training, and an enterprise-ready version of Hadoop that has been tweaked for easier deployment in big companies.

And that’s not all the new money sloshing around the world of Hadoop, the open source project with the cute cartoon elephant as its mascot. (Hence the money-origami elephant pictured above.)

Accel Partners, which led Cloudera’s last round, is launching a $100 million “Big Data Fund,” with Cloudera as a partner. The point, Accel partner Ping Li told me, is to fund companies working in what he calls the “big data stack,” whether that’s in infrastructure like storage or security or management, or building applications that run on Hadoop. And the opportunities for that are multiplying, he told me.

“We’re seeing an undercurrent of picks-and-shovels kind of innovation around solving big data problems,” Li told me in an email. The volume of data is exploding at such a rate that it’s breaking traditional data-management technology like relational databases. It’s a problem that touches practically every industry. The fund will be overseen by several Accel partners based in the U.S., Europe, China and India.

EARLIER:

Welcome to the Barnes & Noble at New York’s Union Square, where the bookseller is scheduled to roll out the new Nook, its answer to Amazon’s Kindle Fire (and every other tablet in a market dominated by the iPad).

Thanks to last week’s Web leaks, we know — or we think we know — all the relevant specs and prices, so a lot of my interest in this morning’s event will come from the way Barnes & Noble positions its $249 machine against the competition. And what it says — or doesn’t say — about its lack of an Amazon-style cloud platform.

Onward!

9:52 am: Good morning, all. I’ll be vamping here for a few minutes before the event kicks off at 10 am. So if you need coffee, etc., please take a couple minutes to prep.

9:55 am: Gotta confess I can’t identify the preshow music they’re playing. Basically the male analog of Adele, I guess.

Consulting SoundHound … (McRib is back, btw).

No luck so far. Trying again.

Okay. So … “The Temper Trap”? News to me.

9:59 am: Dimming those lights.

A little more uptempo now, with a backbeat.

10 am: Tragedy of the commons here with the Wi-Fi, so please bear with me if this is a little pokier than it ought to be.

10 am: Here’s B&N CEO William Lynch.

Superlatives for B&N, claims 20 percent of e-book (titles) market.

Reminding us how smart and pioneering B&N is. Remember when we introduced the Nook Color? That was awesome.

Nook Color is “No. 2 selling tablet in the U.S., behind only the iPad.”

Photo courtesy of The Verge

Really. The Nook Tablet will hurt your ears, if this intro is indicative.

(Ugh. AT&T/B&N free Wi-Fi is sluggoslow.)

Photo courtesy of The Verge

10:05 am: Okay, let’s try the intro again.

10:06 am: Running through specs you’ve already read about. “Ripping” 1GHz processor, etc.

10:07 am: “Free Wi-Fi.” But of course every tablet has “free Wi-Fi.”

“Revolutionary” battery life. “Up to nine hours of video … five HD movies on a single charge.” Weighs less than a pound. “Half the battery size of the iPad. Incredible.”

Plays up Netflix connection — recommendations “pushed right to your tablet.”

More content superlatives: Largest, biggest, bestest collection of magazines, comics, etc. “Unrivaled portable content machine.”

10:10 am: “Read and Record” feature — built-in microphone lets you “record favorite reading of any interactive children’s book.” “Winnie the Pooh” demo. Hrm. Flash poll of one dad with two kids finds this sorta interesting.

And there’s a newsstand! Interactive magazine selection includes Time Inc. (not yet available on Kindle Fire).

Photo courtesy of The Verge

10:12 am: Apps: Angry Birds, Fandango, Smurfs, Pandora, Pulse, Epicurious, etc. — supposedly designed for seven-inch screen.

10:13 am: No cloud? “People aren’t always connected to the cloud,” and they want to store stuff on machine — hence 16GB capacity. But! We do have a Nook Cloud service.

But let’s remind you that many Cloud services are unreliable. Except for ours, of course. So: Cloud is not important except we have a Cloud except Clouds are often not great.

10:15 am: Face-off versus unnamed Kindle Fire. Ah. There, he said “Kindle Fire.” Nook has better screen, more memory, etc. “Kindle Fire is deficient” media tablet.

10:16 am: And here again are B&N’s mixed feelings about the cloud: “Cloud is important, but people don’t always want to be connected to Wi-Fi to get their content.”

Lynch reminds us that the Kindle Fire is in many ways the same machine as the BlackBerry Playbook. Nook is “hand-designed.”

More face slaps for the Fire: Don’t try playing golf game and consuming media at the same time! Things will get “choppy.”

By the way, did we mention that Amazon doesn’t have stores? We have stores. Where are you going to get support for the Kindle — “Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle”?

10:26 am: Peter’s having some Wi-Fi connectivity problems at the moment.

Nook Digital Product President Jamie Iannone is on stage talking about the Nook Color and the Nook Simple Touch product updates.

Photo courtesy of The Verge

10:30 am: Sorry, folks, tech problems on my end. What you missed was an extended point-by-point comparison of Nook versus Fire.

Followed by point-by-point comparison of other Nook models versus other Kindles.

Key takeaway: Kindle with ads will cost a premium. Also, very important: We’re going to be able to go play with the Nooks now.

And … we’re done.

Q&A coming up.

10:34 am: B&N now handing out promotional bookbags with endorsements from: Dean Koontz, Danielle Steel, Mike Lupica, Stephen King, and …

Jane Lynch!

Media Q&A now:

10:35 am: Hey, what’s up with downloads versus streaming? Seems like lots of stuff you talked about in promo was streaming.

10:36 am: Hrm. Lynch talking about “sideloading.” That doesn’t seem promising. Then he mentions that apps like Netflix, etc., are streaming. “Netflix integration is really, really cool.”

So, again: Nook isn’t a streaming-dependent device like Kindle Fire, unless you want to watch movies like Netflix, and you’ll want to stream those. (See the problem here?)

10:37 am: Question about HD capacity. Missed it.

10:37 am: Question about extra $50 versus Kindle Fire. “Is it aiming at the same consumer as the Kindle Fire?” Who is target audience?

(BTW, Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff is dying to ask a question here. He’s really quite agitated about not getting his hand on a microphone.)

Lynch: We pioneered a lot of stuff with reading. “All of those things will be better on our device.” When it comes to other media, “the Kindle Fire is a vending machine for Amazon services. They’ve said it themselves.” We’ve chosen to be much more open. “We’re going to partner with the world’s most popular media services,” like Netflix (which will be available on Kindle) and Pandora (ditto, I believe — will double-check).

10:41 am: Okay, sorry about repeated tech problems. Back to liveblog: No Bluetooth in Nook. Lynch getting some mildly aggressive questions from tech press here, about Nook specs versus rivals.

10:42 am: Iannone plays up ability to “watch Flash videos on YouTube.”

(UPDATE: Lance has a mike! He’s coiled, ready to strike. Exciting!)

Okay, here’s Lance: Which version of Android are you running? And do consumers have full access to Android marketplace?

Lynch: It’s Gingerbread, and the “answer is no — we do not provide full access to the marketplace.”

10:45 am: More defense of the $50 price gap. Lynch is prepared to roll this off his tongue. “We feel very comfortable” with comparison. “We’re trying to lead, not follow, here.”

10:47 am: Q: How will you grow market share?

A: “Hopefully you’ve seen some of what we have planned today.” Did I mention that our base e-reader is better than Kindle’s base e-reader?

Q: (Translating a bit) When will all this be profitable for you?

A: Lynch: This is a revolution in paid digital content. “If you look at our model, last year our gross margins at BarnesandNoble.com were low single digits … last quarter, gross margins were 21 percent. We’re exhibiting the scaling model … Nook will be $1.87 billion in revenue” this year. Was a power point two years ago.

10:50 am: Q: You’re outsourcing so much of your digital media business to outsiders. What up with that?

A: [Basically] a $65 billion to $70 billion market for digitized print media. “We’re not going to launch something where we don’t think we can add material value just to get into the game.”

10:52 am: Q: Will Nook tablet support all codecs that Gingerbread supports?

A: Iannone: Yes.

(Meanwhile — just double-checked — Kindle Fire will indeed also feature Pandora, one of the four big media apps they played up at launch.

10:53 am: Q: About opening up access to full app store.

A: Lynch: Not anytime soon. Our top developers were making a ton of money. “We’re scaling that — we’re adding several hundred a month … we’re looking at it.”

Okay folks, that’s it for Q&A.

Thanks for your patience, thanks to The Verge for sharing photos with us, and thanks to Adam Tow for tech support from San Francisco.

I’m off to touch and feel a Nook now; will post more on that later.