While he has only been CEO of Yahoo for less than five months, in the next several days Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is facing perhaps the most critical moment of his short tenure.

According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the board of Yahoo is not likely to take long in assessing whether he will stay or if he will be let go, due to a controversy around how a non-existent computer science degree got on his bio and also in Yahoo regulatory filings.

A special committee of independent directors is now investigating the matter, including trying to assess the damage has had on Thompson’s ability to lead the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

How quickly the board moves is likely to be a sign of their intent. If within the next days, it is likely to let the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit go and replace him with a current company exec; if it waits longer and shows some public support of him — which the board has not done since the scandal erupted — Thompson’s chances are better that he will only be given some sort of censure.

One important task is also closely considering the impact of possible legal problems related to Thompson and others signing documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission that were not accurate.

One thing is clear from interviews with multiple sources, many members of the board have not been happy with how Thompson has handled the matter since activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point uncovered the problem a week ago.

While first tossing the borked bio as an “inadvertent error,” Thompson was then largely silent about the issue with staff, despite being in close meetings with them, which caused stress among key execs.

Then, he made a public announcement in which he apologized for only the “distraction” caused by the incident and not the error itself as some had hoped he would.

Yesterday, apparently feeling it was time to try to explain things face-to-face, Thompson made another attempt to explain what happened in two separate meetings with his direct reports and then his senior staff, apparently trying to get through to employees that he did not fake his resume nor did he give an inaccurate bio to Yahoo when he was being hired for the job earlier this year.

Thompson thought it was time — now that the board investigation was underway — to answer questions directly, said a source.

Among other things, Thompson gave a somewhat convoluted explanation that it appeared in his bio due to a misunderstanding during an interview with a headhunting firm. And that he never noticed it once it proliferated And that when an NPR interviewer asked him directly about his CS degree, he did not want to correct her in mid-discussion — although others report he said he did not hear the question fully.

Sources said Thompson — who is on the midst of initiating changes across a large and troubled organization, after laying off 2,000 employees — thought the sessions went well, that he clearly communicated that he was taking blame for the problem and its repercussions. Those sources also noted that he received support for doing so after the talks.

But, more than a dozen others I interviewed who were listening remotely — some of whom I sought out and some who contacted me directly — thought Thompson’s complex explanation was deeply problematic and that he tried to foist the blame on others rather than on himself.

Every one of these people expressed the need for him to step down to allow Yahoo to move forward.

What the board thought about the performance is still not clear, said sources, but things are coming down to two distinct scenarios.

The first is a quick parting of the ways with Thompson, within days, either for cause or via a negotiated settlement. Others at Yahoo involved with perpetuating the mistake in the bio are also at risk.

This option is perhaps the more likely at this moment, unless the scandal dissipates and employees continued rancor over the situation can be assuaged soon.

In this case, sources said, Thompson will be replaced by a current board member or a member of the top staff. When directors fired Carol Bartz last fall, CFO Tim Morse became interim CEO and he is one of the likely candidates for the job again.

The second scenario centers on needing Thompson to complete a number of complex transactions related to the sale of Yahoo’s Chinese assets and its re-negotiations with Microsoft over its troubled search partnership, among other things.

In that case, Thompson will be censured in some manner by the board and will also probably have to endure some punishment for allowing false regulatory documents to be filed by Yahoo. Others at Yahoo will also be subject to the same treatment in such an outcome.

How will it turn out?

Only board member Patti Hart has so far paid for her faulty vetting of Thompson, stepping down from the board earlier this week.

But whether she will be the only shoe to drop in what has turned out to be a bizarre wildfire that as raged across Yahoo’s troubled landscape remains to be seen.

Thus, most definitely watch this space this weekend.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

The bust-a-gut-funny storyteller Mike Birbiglia let his imagination run wild, and got Gross to play along. He made the short film below for the 2012 “This American Life” live show, which was broadcast to some 500 movie theaters full of public radio fans on Thursday night (including the one I visited in lovely and foggy San Bruno, Calif.).

Another segment of the live show — which was themed around performances that wouldn’t work on the radio — was a special audience smartphone participation number by OK Go.

The band, which is famous for its creative music video concepts, created an app that split the audience into different tones of chimes. Then we provided accompaniment by pressing buttons within the app while OK Go played a couple of songs and projected a scrolling color-coded score, like in Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution.

Getting permission to allow people to use their cellphones in theaters was no easy task, and required multiple personal pleas to CEOs, said “This American Life” host Ira Glass, when he introduced the band.

While I had my phone turned on, I snapped the picture below:

Who in their right mind would lie to Ira Glass?

That was my first reaction to the revelation that the theatrical monologuist Mike Daisey had lied or fabricated — or in his words, “taken dramatic license” with — certain parts of his stage play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I met people at parties in recent weeks and told them that I write about technology and that I had devoted more than a decade to covering Apple, the first question I used to get was: “Did you know Steve Jobs?” Since about January of this year, that first question has become, “What do you think of Mike Daisey?”

I haven’t had a real answer. I hadn’t seen his show, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, nor had I heard the episode of the highly respected public radio documentary program “This American Life” titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” that had been adapted from his play.

The show — or shows — hit a cultural nerve at a critical moment. Apple is the biggest company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of $546 billion as of Friday, with $100 billion worth of cash and investments on its balance sheet and the most popular stable of consumer electronics products in the world, especially the iPhone and the iPad. All of them are manufactured by workers in China, who labor for wages that are low by Western standards, put in hours that by Western reckoning are long, under conditions that to Western eyes aren’t ideal, doing jobs that by any standard are incredibly tedious.

Daisey’s stage show, which became a sensation among New York’s chattering classes, sought to draw attention to the plight of allegedly oppressed workers at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. As New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood put it, the play “is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone.”

The stage show had been adapted for radio on public radio’s “This American Life,” which is probably the most-respected radio documentary program in the history of broadcasting. And the Daisey episode was presented as documentary, meaning the radio show’s staff of journalists and producers were vouching for it being true.

The problem: Much of it wasn’t.

In the show, Daisey described a trip to China, as well as a visit to Foxconn’s outer gates and other manufacturing companies in Shenzen, where many are located. He delivers a detailed and emotionally riveting account of meeting girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 years old who claimed to work for Foxconn. This would be in violation both of local laws and of Apple policies.

He also told of meeting workers poisoned by a chemical called n-Hexane, used to polish screens.

And, perhaps most movingly, he related a tear-jerking scene in which he showed a working iPad to a man who said he had crippled a hand while making its parts in a Foxconn metal press, yet had never so much as seen one of the devices powered on. Seeing the iPad’s screen in action, he tells Daisey, “is like a kind of magic.”

The word “magic” fits oddly here, because these meetings didn’t happen as Daisey said. “This American Life” yesterday aired a lengthy episode entitled “Retraction,” documenting Daisey’s many liberties with the facts.

To help do so, a reporter for another public radio show — Rob Schmitz of “Marketplace” — did what no one else in the media seemed to be willing to do, which was subject Daisey’s claims to scrutiny. Most damning of all in Schmitz’s report was the testimony of Daisey’s translator, called Cathy. She was found — after Daisey had told TAL he had lost contact with her — and disputed many of the anecdotes taken from the play and used in the radio segment about Foxconn.

Among the fabrications: Daisey didn’t speak to quite as many people nor visit nearly as many plants as he said he did. She disputed finding underage workers. The n-Hexane poisoning incident occurred not at Foxconn in Shenzen where Daisey visited, but at a Wintek facility in Suzchou, more than 900 miles to the north of Shenzen.

The stage show, and therefore the radio show that was derived from it, turned out to be a mixture of facts and fiction. Which might be fine for a production on the New York theatrical stage, where fiction and fact blend readily. And, while it might be okay in entertainment products, you don’t expect it from a prestigious radio documentary program.

And that is where the problems began.

When Daisey’s monologue was adapted for “This American Life,” outrage began to grow among people who wanted to do something about it. It was, Glass says, the most downloaded episode of “TAL” ever, and public radio listeners did what public radio listeners tend to do. For one thing, they started a petition. More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition at Change.org, inspired by the TAL production based on Daisey’s work, demanding that Apple make changes.

That includes crafting a “worker protection strategy” for new products released, as well as publishing data from Fair Labor Association audits.

Feeding the frenzy, Daisey stepped up as the leading voice for worker rights in China’s electronics industry. He was seemingly everywhere in the media. Since the TAL segment aired in January, Daisey has been seen on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in a report that, like the “TAL” episode, is now going to have to be retracted or at the very least walked back.

Another CBS-owned property, CNET, hosted Daisey as part of “Reporters Roundtable,” alongside Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, co-author of a series of front page stories in that newspaper. Duhigg ended his “Roundtable” appearance by urging people who care about the issue to go and see Daisey’s play.

Daisey also appeared on MSNBC repeating the same anecdotes and tarnishing the usually shiny Apple. And on HBO. And PBS. And C-SPAN.

Needless to say, there will have to be many more retractions in the days ahead.

At this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.

The circumstances around Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China aren’t new. As a columnist for Businessweek I wrote about Apple’s first round of “sweatshop” allegations in 2006, well before the age of the iPhone and the iPad, which had at the time first come to light in part because of the reporting by London’s Daily Mail.

I’ve never been to China. Many people know more about the on-the-ground facts concerning Apple’s factories than I do. But there are many reporters who have been there. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour wrote a powerful cover story for that magazine, which aimed to get to the bottom of the string of suicides that occurred among Foxconn employees that year.

ABC’s “Nightline” visited Foxconn earlier this year. Its report was criticized in some circles, because at the time of his death, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs happened to be the largest shareholder of that network’s parent company, Disney. Also, ABC had been invited by Apple and Foxconn. Even so, “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir, seeing conditions very different from what Daisey described in the course of his reporting, wondered if Mike Daisey’s work was questionable.

At the very least, Daisey is a dramatist who now admits he chose to lie, but for reasons known only to himself. The chance to raise his profile and sell more tickets to his monologue are obvious potential motivations. Whatever it was, his dramatic product is meant to be consumed as thought-provoking entertainment, not as fact-based journalism, which many people assumed it was.

This is the crux of Daisey’s defense for lying to Ira Glass and his fact-checker: That he’s not a journalist and took dramatic license with the events, and now regrets doing the “This American Life” segment.

And that’s the real shame here.

Clearly, people care about how workers who make our electronics are treated, or there wouldn’t have been a market for Daisey’s show, or for an hour-long radio documentary adapting it. And the subject is one we need to discuss at length as a society. The net result of Mike Daisey’s efforts to put self-promotion ahead of the facts has badly muddied the waters, and has probably done more harm to the people he sought to help.

So, instead of illumination on a serious topic, we are left with little. Mike Daisey is an opportunistic fabulist and should be ashamed of himself for lying. Ira Glass and his team are ashamed for giving him wider attention, and have said so. But there are many more people who should be even more ashamed for taking Daisey’s lies at face value. There should be many more retractions and apologies in the days ahead.

But now we have to start the conversation about Apple and Foxconn and workers’ rights all over again, this time with real, verifiable facts at our command. Is that so much to ask?

(Image courtesy of Mike Daisey’s Web site.)

As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

– Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

Knell, who starts Dec. 1, fills a post formerly held by Vivian Schiller, who resigned in March.

People familiar with the company say Schiller, who once ran the New York Times’ Web site, will report to NBC News chief Steve Capus. Both Schiller and NBC declined to comment.

[UPDATE: Now NBC has announced the hire: Schiller will be chief digital officer, a new position.]

Schiller resigned from NPR in March, following a series of political flare-ups: The final straw was the release of a gotcha video that showed one of her lieutenants criticizing Republicans and the Tea Party.

If she shows up at NBC, I wouldn’t be shocked to see yelps from partisans who will argue that her hiring proves that the network is biased toward the left, etc.

Then again, NBC’s new owner, Comcast, is getting used to political controversy. Most recently, it has been asked to explain why it hired an FCC commissioner that had just voted on the company’s recent merger.

Today, as the left and right continue their epically exhausting battle for hegemony, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned after a series of borks–including a sting video in the public radio’s top fundraiser insulted the Tea Party activists and the fumbled firing of commentator Juan Williams.

Oh dear.

Well, the former New York Times exec was pretty good at moving NPR into the digital age, at least.

In fact, BoomTown interviewed Schiller at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference about the digital future of NPR, which is pretty bright actually.

She talked about prospects for high-quality journalism and the ways the public radio unit could help create a more powerful network of many stations.

Here’s the full D8 video of the Schiller session, as well as a very funny spoof video she brought about some of the more way-out digital initiatives for NPR below it:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/nprs-vivian-schiller-in-better-digital-days-the-full-d8-video/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20110304/qotd-make-music-for-fun-not-profit/ http://allthingsd.com/20110304/qotd-make-music-for-fun-not-profit/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:04:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30422

“Can you put food on the table with music? Probably not. I see music as a really great hobby for most people in five or 10 years. I see everybody I know, some of them really important artists, studying how to do other jobs.”

– Cake lead singer John McCrea talking to NPR, via Digital Music News. Showroom of Compassion, Cake’s most recent release, is the lowest-selling number-one album of all time.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110304/qotd-make-music-for-fun-not-profit/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:23:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40466

Here is my appearance yesterday on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where I pontificate about AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Whatever you think of the purchase–and there are a lot of differing opinions–I noted: “What [the deal] does say is that news is an exciting area and it always will be. It just depends on how it’s going to be distributed.”

Very sensible!

Listen in:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/viral-audio-boomtown-on-npr-on-huffpaol-news-is-an-exciting-area-and-it-always-will-be/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/networkeffect-on-science-friday-social-networking-identities/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/networkeffect-on-science-friday-social-networking-identities/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:03:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2419 On Friday I had the pleasure of being a guest on “Science Friday,” the weekly “Talk of the Nation” segment on National Public Radio. While the show’s normal guests are often actual scientists–unlike me!–I was asked to discuss my direct experience with and observations about online social networking options, and the various identities people create to participate in them.

Among the topics we discussed were the rise and fall of social networking sites and whether that makes them fads, the implications of oversharing from a young age and the potential for social networks to become more productive and engaging.

It was a fun chat, and you can now listen to it and read the transcript online.

You can also read my recent trend story about multiple online identities that helped spark the conversation.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/networkeffect-on-science-friday-social-networking-identities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101029/heres-aol-now-live-new-homepage-and-welcome-back-lindsay-campbell/ http://allthingsd.com/20101029/heres-aol-now-live-new-homepage-and-welcome-back-lindsay-campbell/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:44:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36513

Today, BoomTown interviewed AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, along with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, at the Online News Association Conference in Washington, D.C., about the future of journalism on the Web.

Afterward, I talked to him about the future of content on AOL, most particularly its new homepage revamp that focuses intently on editorial “curation,” rather than a more social direction being taken by rival Yahoo.

I also got a short demo of the new homepage, which is rolling out right now, instead of Monday as has been reported.

The new version–with a clean and spare design and a rotating logo–prominently features local news, video and content from AOL’s network of sites, such as Engadget.

It also launches three original video shows: A morning promotional feature called “You’ve Got”; a two-minute news program called “Daybreak,” with former “Wallstrip” host Lindsay Campbell–yay!–and produced by Ben Silverman’s Electus; and “The One,” an expert/opinion segment, done by Next New Networks.

The redo is yet another splashy move by AOL and Armstrong to push the company into a new direction of growth as its core access business declines.

It’s one wrapped almost completely around content, in hopes that creating premium branded content will attract lucrative advertising.

So far, not so good, as AOL’s ad revenues continue to lag in the midst of a difficult turnaround effort.

Presumably, Armstrong hopes a new look will help goose results in a better direction.

Here is a screenshot of the page, which is now available to users (click here to see the full image):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101029/heres-aol-now-live-new-homepage-and-welcome-back-lindsay-campbell/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/viral-radio-facebook-flap/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/viral-radio-facebook-flap/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:18:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35957

Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny.

The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.

Privacy advocates cried foul, while others thought it was more a tempest in a teapot– which I, NPR reporter Laura Sydell and Marc Rotenberg, executive director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, discussed.

One conclusion, which you will understand after listening: Facebook definitely does not cause cancer.

Here’s the audio:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101021/viral-radio-facebook-flap/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101015/three-cool-ipad-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20101015/three-cool-ipad-ads/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:30:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24576 Earlier this week we got Condé Nast’s instructions on how to make a killer iPad ad. Now, three examples of some good ones.

These come from mobile ad start-up Medialets, which put together a highlight reel at my request. The video doesn’t quite do these things justice, because you really have to see them on Apple’s tablet to appreciate them. But take a look, anyway–it’s probably best if you view these in full-screen mode–and I’ll try to tease them out for you afterward:

Here’s what you just saw:

• FedEx ad, designed for Newsweek app.
• Visa ad, designed for NPR app with help from AKQA, Visa’s regular digital agency. Features e-commerce possibilities, without leaving the app, via Fandango.com and Broadway.com
• Toyota Prius ad, designed for Weather Channel Max app; allows users to “draw” images incorporated into video.

Again, the market for this stuff is so new that shops like Medialets are essentially starting from scratch each time they put together a tablet ad. And that means there’s no reason for these things not to be interesting–you’ve never seen them before.

But eventually some of this stuff will become more standardized, just as most Web ads are. And that will make it harder to stand out.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101015/three-cool-ipad-ads/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20100618/youtubes-secret-news-experiment-explained-warning-not-really-that-secret/ http://allthingsd.com/20100618/youtubes-secret-news-experiment-explained-warning-not-really-that-secret/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:00:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20717 Is YouTube getting into the local news business? No, not really.

But! SF Weekly has a weird, confusing tale about YouTube’s sort of secretive effort to launch a “local news experiment” in San Francisco. You can read the whole thing here, but the gist is that staffers at the Google (GOOG) site have tapped local bloggers, reporters, etc., to gauge their interest in a project whereby “citizen videographers–anyone with a video-capable phone or camera, really”–help cover local news.

Since the YouTube folks have been vague about what they’re up to and have told potential participants to “be discreet about who you speak with about it,” the whole thing sounds vaguely ominous/exciting.

The reality, alas, is fairly dull.

It’s this: YouTube is working with a San Francisco TV station to a launch a new iteration of its YouTube Direct platform, a person familiar with the plans tells me.

YouTube Direct is supposed to help publishers gather and distribute video from amateur contributors, essentially by plugging YouTube into their sites. The program has had a bit of a success when big media organizations like NPR or ABC’s “Good Morning America” have used it.

But local news outlets, which could theoretically really use help from both YouTube and their own readers/watchers, haven’t done much with it. So the idea is to use the San Francisco version as a showcase, and YouTube staffers are trying to pre-seed the effort by rounding up local contributors.

All pretty straightforward stuff. So why the sort-of cloak-and-dagger routine? Got me. I’m told that Google and the local station are planning on making an announcement about the launch next week. But really, this seems like something you just announce and then do. Simple, right?

Here, for the record, is YouTube’s official comment on the matter:

We launched YouTube Direct in November, and it’s been a great way for news organizations to easily leverage citizen reporting on YouTube. We’re currently experimenting with new ways to make the platform more useful, and we’ll have more to announce on that front soon.

All righty! I’ve already run the best “Mr. Show” local news clip. But here’s a worthy contender:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100618/youtubes-secret-news-experiment-explained-warning-not-really-that-secret/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100617/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-full-interview/ http://allthingsd.com/20100617/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-full-interview/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:04:20 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://d8.allthingsd.com/?p=2404 At D8, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, a former New York Times (NYT) digital exec, talked with Kara Swisher about the future of radio, the prospects for high-quality journalism and the ways the public radio unit could help create a more powerful network of many stations.

Here’s the full video:

Want to see it larger? Click here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100617/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-full-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100617/full-d8-video-nprs-vivian-schiller/ http://allthingsd.com/20100617/full-d8-video-nprs-vivian-schiller/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:00:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29491

As promised, All Things Digital is posting the full videos from our eighth D: All Things Digital conference, held earlier this month.

Doo…doo…doo…doo–Yes, that’s the sound that makes us think of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (pictured here).

At D8, the former New York Times (NYT) digital exec delivered a riveting interview, talking about the future of radio, the prospects for high-quality journalism and the ways the public radio unit could help create a more powerful network of many stations.

Here’s the full video of the session with me, as well as a very funny spoof video Schiller brought about some of the more way-out digital initiatives for NPR below it:

Want to see it bigger? Click here.

Note: We’ll be posting full D8 videos on Mondays and Thursdays. Next up: Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100617/full-d8-video-nprs-vivian-schiller/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100607/wsjs-d8-special-tab-jobs-zuckerberg-ballmer-cameron-and-more-in-their-own-words/ http://allthingsd.com/20100607/wsjs-d8-special-tab-jobs-zuckerberg-ballmer-cameron-and-more-in-their-own-words/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:15:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29095

Today, The Wall Street Journal published its special tab, both online and offline, featuring edited transcripts of some of the interviews Walt Mossberg and I did at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference last week.

The excerpts come from interviews we did with Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, Hollywood megadirector James Cameron, Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller and Ford (F) CEO Alan Mulally.

Also: A look back at quotes from past D conferences, which just makes BoomTown feel old.

Check it all out here.

And you can also see the full video of the interview with Jobs here. All Things Digital will be posting all the videos from D8, with a new one going up each Monday and Thursday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100607/wsjs-d8-special-tab-jobs-zuckerberg-ballmer-cameron-and-more-in-their-own-words/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100606/d8-video-vivian-schiller-intro-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20100606/d8-video-vivian-schiller-intro-video/#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:22:19 +0000 Adam Tow http://d8.allthingsd.com/?p=2166 Prior to her D8 conference interview with Kara Swisher, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller provided a humorous glimpse of our favorite NPR personalities trying out new digital technologies.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100606/d8-video-vivian-schiller-intro-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100602/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-explains-on-the-upside-of-the-media-meltdown/ http://allthingsd.com/20100602/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-explains-on-the-upside-of-the-media-meltdown/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:18:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://d8.allthingsd.com/?p=1391 What happens to laid-off journalists? Some of them wise up and get other work, but others doggedly insist on staying in the industry. Those are the ones NPR CEO Vivian Schiller wants to work with, via a network of new media sites, she explained at the D8 conference on Wednesday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100602/d8-video-npr-ceo-vivian-schiller-explains-on-the-upside-of-the-media-meltdown/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100602/vivian-schiller-session/ http://allthingsd.com/20100602/vivian-schiller-session/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:32:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://d8.allthingsd.com/?p=489

Radio was supposed to be gone by now–wiped out by iPods, on-demand streaming and an endless buffet of personalization options. But the digital wave doesn’t always break the way people predict, and it turns out that National Public Radio’s audience has grown through the Web era: It now attracts a record 28 million listeners a week.

There’s still plenty for CEO Vivian Schiller to worry about, though. Like how to hoover up the donations that power her nonprofit in a recession. Or how to cover international news when it’s increasingly risky to do so.

But this isn’t Schiller’s first time at a media company facing big challenges. Her last gig was at the New York Times, where she ran the publisher’s flagship Web site.

Liveblog

Prior to Schiller’s appearance, we’re treated to a gag reel: Your favorite NPR personalities trying out inappropriate digital memes: A Karl Cassell iPhone app, Scott Simon in a motion-capture suit, etc. Good stuff.

Kara: Before we get to your current job, tell us about your old gigs.

Schiller: Walks through bio: NYT.com, cable, Russian interpreter, etc.

Kara: Okay, back to radio. Where are you?

Schiller: First of all, note we don’t call ourselves National Public Radio anymore. We’re NPR. That said, we’re still growing our radio audience. We have 34 million listeners a week. But our job is to inform citizens, via universal access. That used to mean radio, but we don’t think we should be limited to that anymore.

Schiller: This wasn’t done in response to declining audience, by the way. We just wanted to reach more people, on more platforms. We want to make it as widely available as possible. So all our RSS feeds are full-text. And we’ve got a very robust API, etc., which allows us to do cool things like the iPad app, which we made very quickly. And an Android app, which a developer built on his own. We just made the code for his app totally public.

We get over a billion requests on our API. Very few media organizations can say that. So we’ll see more cool stuff. Like combining NPR stories with information from local stations and creating “news products” that track trends, like the oil spill or the flu epidemic. “We don’t know what could be created, but we know things will be.”

10:43 am: Kara–How hard is it to change a radio organization into a multimedia organization?

10:44 am: Schiller–Within NPR, they were already starting to do it when I came on board. You don’t want to force people into it. You let early adopters show the way. There were concerns that we were taking resources away from traditional radio to go into digital, which was not the case. We put all 300 journalists into a digital training course, though.

10:46 am: Schiller–Outside of NPR, at the affiliates, it was a different story. Some smaller affiliates weren’t really set up for digital, so we had to provide tools for them so they could be part of the process. Some of this was tools for photos, etc. But fundamentally, helping them deliver audio streams. Radio towers are going away within 10 years, and Internet radio will take its place. This is a huge change and we should embrace it. Mobile will play a big part.

10:47 am: Our biggest shows are “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Those are tent poles. We produce and distribute those. Others we only distribute, like “Fresh Air.”

10:49 am: Kara: So do these shows become Internet shows or radio shows?

10:49 am: Schiller: I think of them as shows. We’re agnostic about the way they listen to it. All of our revenue streams work equally well with each delivery method. And to the listener’s ear, it’s identical. So why should we care? Forty percent of weekday listening is in the car, which makes sense. When cars are Internet-enabled, that should be the same thing.

10:51 am: Kara–Will you ever charge for this stuff?

10:51 am: Schiller–Nope. That’s our mission, to provide this stuff for free. We ask our listeners to contribute, and about 10 percent of them do, pretty consistently. That said, on a B2B level, this could change. Our stations don’t pay for our Web programming right now, but that could change. They get it free with the radio license fees they already pay.

10:52 am: Kara–Do you think commercial radio will be able to charge for their shows on the Web?

10:53 am: Schiller–Question of the moment. There’s a disconnect. Do publishers need the money? Yes. Do people want to pay? Not in large numbers.

10:53 am: A memory trip back to NYT.com and its Times Select pay wall experiment.

Schiller–We got up to 200,000 subs, $10 million a year. But that was a pittance compared with ad revenue we were generating. And we had to weigh that against the audience weren’t reaching. We figured the $10 million wasn’t worth it. So we dropped the wall, and within a couple of months, our unique monthly users went from 12 million to 20 million. Did that immediately translate into revenue? No, not right away. But eventually.

10:55 am: Schiller–What they’re doing now, by the way, is not the same thing. It’s not going to cut off Tom Friedman from a kid in a Bangalore Internet cafe. So I think that could work.

10:56 am: Schiller asked to talk about Web news in general. A bow in the direction of “creative destruction”–in this case, laid-off journalists creating interesting stuff on the Web. The problem is that all of these sites, like the one in San Diego, etc., don’t have enough reach. So we should be able to partner with them, and create a “supernetwork”–”not a mega-portal” but partnerships between the smaller regional stations and the mother ship, etc. We already doing that with Pro Publica, etc.

10:58 am: Kara–What devices are most important to you?

10:59 am: Schiller–Of course, I need to praise the “magical device.” It’s “all things to all people.” I do wonder if it’s going to obsolete the iPod touch….We’ve had 300,000 downloads of the NPR iPad app. The trick is to create an app that takes particular advantage of the device.

Q&A:

Is there a way to support NPR without supporting the local station?

Schiller: No, not really. The lifeblood of NPR is the local station. You’ll note we always route the membership drives through the local station. However, we do have a philanthropic support through the NPR Foundation, but that’s not for small individual donations.

But the listener can go directly to NPR in the Web model, and doesn’t need to go to the local affiliate. So what’s the local affiliate’s role in the new paradigm?

Schiller: The fact that so few journalists are covering state and local news is scary. We’re committed to providing that local coverage via the affiliates. “We’ve got to have that local coverage, and NPR can’t do it….To the extent that [local coverage] doesn’t suit your needs, then we have to work together to make it meet your needs.”

Would NPR consider working with for-profit organizations to help solve the local news problem?

Schiller: We’re not constitutionally opposed to working with commercial entities. But I also think that some of the small, local nonprofits we’ve been talking about can make this work, too. Especially if we can leverage our strengths, which is one way to generate more philanthropy.

Are we always going to be counting on philanthropy to fund news coverage going forward?

Schiller: Yes.

How are you working to develop new shows that will become your next “All Things Considered,” “Morning Editions,” etc?

Schiller: We used to have a sort of TV-like development process where we spent a lot of time and money working on new shows. Instead, we’re incubating smaller scale things, like “Planet Money,” which isn’t a full show, and isn’t supposed to be a full show. But it’s a podcast and a touring show, etc. We can help people iterate without committing a lot of money.

You mentioned that both commercial publishers and not-for-profits get about 10 percent of their users to subscribe or donate. Is that 10 percent a universal truth?

Schiller: I hope not. I hope we can increase those numbers. “I don’t know what the answer is, but we’re going to try everything and see what sticks.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100602/vivian-schiller-session/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100406/for-the-ipad-apps-with-their-own-wow-factor/ http://allthingsd.com/20100406/for-the-ipad-apps-with-their-own-wow-factor/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:01:46 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1159 In the days since the launch of Apple’s iPad Saturday, there has been an explosion of apps to run on it—3,000 and counting. They are mostly free and incorporate new ways of navigating one of the largest screens on a mobile device that relies solely on touch technology.

On this large canvas, people work differently and apps can behave differently depending on which way the device is turned. Apps can (and must) incorporate creative ways of navigating—in addition to the usual multi-touch gestures like flicking, two-finger swiping and pinching. Thus, although it runs most of the 150,000 apps already available for the much smaller iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad is spawning a new type of tablet-specific app.

This week, I’ve been testing some of these iPad apps that give users novel ways to interact with the device. These are designed to take advantage of a larger touch screen by using things like fly-out menus, multi-panel layouts, 3-D images intermixed with text and newspapers that can be read almost as easily as their paper counterparts.

Since most of us haven’t used apps like these or a device like this before, many apps install with brief tutorials on how to navigate them. It’s obvious that the makers of these iPad apps are still tinkering with what works best for a large touch surface. And ads appear in several digital newspaper and magazine apps. Unless otherwise noted, the apps listed below are free.

News

Multi-tasking isn’t yet possible on the iPad, but the NPR app allows people to do certain things simultaneously. While browsing news stories, a player in the bottom portion of the screen lets you listen to programs, interviews or songs. I played Jakob Dylan’s “Women and Country” song while reading an article about NCAA basketball. Content can be saved to a playlist for future listening.

The Marvel Comics app

The Wall Street Journal app’s home page displays a horizontal row of newspapers representing the past seven days’ editions and a “Now” edition, with late-breaking news, all of which can be read when the iPad isn’t online. These editions are designed to use the full screen to display easy-to-read newspaper layouts and videos that play right within the articles. A finger swiped from the top down skips to a different section of the paper, while pinching any screen with two fingers returns to the home page. And you can save articles and sections. The WSJ iPad app also can access saved data from a WSJ.com account.

The app is free to download but requires a subscription for full access, which costs $4 a week or is free for a limited time to existing online or print subscribers.

The New York Times (NYT) app is called Editors’ Choice and looks like a roomier version of the newspaper’s iPhone app. Five icons at the bottom of the screen instantly jump to different sections of the paper, or you can flick a finger across these screens to page to more articles. It doesn’t require a subscription.

The USA Today app brings the Gannett Co. (GCI) paper’s color-coded blue, green, red and purple sections to the iPad. Its popular charts of information (called “Snapshots”) pop out from the bottom left of the screen and include polls that can be voted on using the device. The USA Today app looks less like the print edition of the paper and more like a list of news points with color photos beside each. This list can be scrolled with a simple finger flick up or down.

Magazines

Digital magazines on the iPad seem to be experimenting with different payment methods. Rodale Inc.’s Men’s Health, for example, is a free app and includes previews of magazine issues, but then it charges $5 to download the actual issue. Bonnier Corp.’s Popular Science app costs $5 up-front and includes an issue that must be downloaded within the app.

Popular Science really uses the iPad’s larger surface in creative ways. Instead of just letting you page ahead with each finger flick as if reading a regular magazine, you can read articles by flicking a finger down or across a screen. In some articles I read, images appeared to be floating in the background behind text. Two fingers flicking up from the bottom of the screen show shortcuts for a table of contents and previous magazine issues.

Music

Pandora’s iPad app makes good use of the device’s screen real estate by showing artist information, now-playing details, album art and a list of personalized radio stations all on the same screen. I found myself more likely to read about artists on the iPad than on my smaller iPod touch. But like many Pandora users, I like playing music in the background as I work on other tasks, and this isn’t possible on the iPad because it doesn’t allow third-party apps like Pandora to multi-task.

Entertainment

Scrabble app

The Marvel Comics app displays stunning, large illustrations and moves you across the screen to see them as if the comic is one continuous strip and there’s no division between one screen and the next. A finger swipe moves you ahead in a guided view that jumps you from one character’s dialog cloud to the next in the correct order. This app is a free download and a handful of free comic books come with it, but each additional book costs around $2.

Scrabble for iPad costs $10 and includes options for playing with friends by passing the iPad back and forth, and an additional free app enables connecting an iPhone or iPod touch to the iPad to use these smaller screens as tile racks. You can play against your Facebook friends or the computer, and things like “Best Word” and an option to shuffle tiles make the game a little easier to play for some. Scrabble will even play your iTunes music in the background while you’re dragging tiles onto the board using your finger.

With Real Racing HD, you see a 3-D view of racetracks and steer a car by leaning the iPad in the direction you need to turn (a built-in accelerometer senses where you’re moving the iPad). I played this $10 game while sitting in the back seat of a moving car and got a bit dizzy since the race is so realistic.

Education

A great example of how the iPad can be used for education can be seen in an app titled “The Elements: A Visual Exploration,” developed by Touch Press. This costs $14 and displays the periodic table of elements stretched across the screen. Selecting one element brings it forward and spins a dazzling image of it so you can see all sides of it. A link to the Web pulls in real-time information about that element.

iPad apps like The Elements: A Visual Exploration, above, make good use of the larger touch screen.

Others

Apple’s (AAPL) iBooks and Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle are two terrific e-reader apps that bring digital books to the iPad. There’s a strong argument for using the Kindle app, since books bought through it can be accessed on a variety of platforms in addition to the iPad, all in sync right where you left off reading, while iBooks are currently limited to the iPad. But the books in iBooks are displayed in an arresting way, with animation that resembles real pages turning.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers are Apple’s versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and they cost $10 each. When installed, these programs can convert documents from Microsoft’s (MSFT) formats and let you work on them. They present rich, PC-like features controlled by touch. Pages, also lets you convert the documents back to the original Microsoft format.

TruPhone and Skype will make calls over the Internet using the iPad when you’re online, and in one test, this worked relatively well.

The Houzz Inc. app is a digital look book for interior-decorating ideas that’s updated with current images of decorated houses. It displays large images of decorated rooms across the iPad’s screen, allowing you to search and save certain looks for offline access or sharing with others.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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More iPad Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100406/for-the-ipad-apps-with-their-own-wow-factor/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100406/what-do-rush-and-npr-have-in-common-internet-talk-radio-hub-stitcher-nabs-6-million-from-benchmark/ http://allthingsd.com/20100406/what-do-rush-and-npr-have-in-common-internet-talk-radio-hub-stitcher-nabs-6-million-from-benchmark/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:30:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26216

Online talk radio aggregator Stitcher nabbed $6 million from Benchmark Capital and will use the money to give radio blabbermouth Rush Limbaugh, as well as the endlessly talking heads of National Public Radio, even more digital distribution.

The San Francisco-based start-up often describes itself as the the Pandora of online talk radio. And like the digital music site, Stitcher lets its users create and customize their own free personalized talk/information/news radio stations.

The site focuses mostly on its apps for a variety of mobile devices, especially increasingly popular smartphones. It offers programs from about a thousand different sources, such as NPR, E! and The Onion.

Stitcher also recommends new programs to users based on their selections.

The infusion of funding in a Series B round led by Benchmark–whose partner, Bob Kagle, will have a seat Stitcher’s board–will allow it to expand its advertising sales force and improve its offerings, said CEO Noah Shanok in an interview with BoomTown last night.

“The hope for everyone in terrestrial radio is to find new audiences, so as we grow, they will too,” said Shanok, who co-founded Stitcher in 2008. “We want to be a part of everyone’s everyday life.”

Shanok said fast-growing usage and engagement–which he declined to give specifics about–was the reason Benchmark was attracted to the company.

The new funding adds to $3 million Stitcher already raised from New Atlantic Ventures and investors Ed Scott and Ron Conway, who also participated in the new round.

While the mobile app on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is the most popular, Stitcher also offers software for Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry, Palm (PALM) Pre and Google (GOOG) Android devices.

Stitcher is also pushing into other areas, such as being part of Ford’s (F) initiative to make its SYNC-enabled vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots, allowing people to connect to the Internet everywhere much more seamlessly in a moving car. They will be available later this year.

Here’s the press release on the funding:

Stitcher Secures $6 Million in Series B Venture Funding

Benchmark Capital Leads New Round to Help Transform the Way We Listen to Talk Radio

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. (April 6, 2010)–Today, Stitcher, a service that allows users to customize talk radio programming on their mobile devices, announced that it has completed its Series B round of financing. Led by Benchmark Capital, with participation from previous investor New Atlantic Ventures and tech veterans including Ed Scott and Ron Conway, the funding will be used to further Stitcher’s product and platform development. Bob Kagle of Benchmark will join Stitcher’s board of directors.

“We know that people prefer listening to news, talk and information programming when they’re on-the-go. The rise of smartphones has finally created an opportunity to give people exactly what they want to hear–on their commute, at the gym, on a road-trip–wherever and whenever they want it and that’s exactly what Stitcher does,” said Noah Shanok, CEO of Stitcher. “Benchmark’s funding, combined with Bob’s guidance, will help us continue to take advantage of the growing market for mobile content distribution.”

Stitcher’s free service allows users to create a personalized audio programming experience. With Stitcher, users can listen to the news and talk radio shows they enjoy whenever and wherever they like, using their mobile devices. Users choose their favorite programs from more than a thousand different sources, and Stitcher then delivers the audio feeds to their phone as a single, regularly updating radio station. Stitcher also helps users discover new content on a variety of topics–including business, sports, politics, entertainment, and current events–by recommending additional programs based on the shows users have in their feeds. A single radio station can include programming as diverse as Fox Headline News, NPR’s Fresh Air, TechCrunch Headlines, Onion Radio News, and E!’s Hollywood Rap Up.

“Stitcher is transforming the way we all consume news, talk radio, pod casts,” said Bob Kagle, general partner at Benchmark Capital. “Noah and his team are building a platform that will deliver the personalized experience consumers currently enjoy for music to the broader world of audio programming. We’re thrilled to join the Stitcher revolution.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100406/what-do-rush-and-npr-have-in-common-internet-talk-radio-hub-stitcher-nabs-6-million-from-benchmark/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/ http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:40:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18035 Many Web publishers are scrambling to make some or all of their sites “iPad ready,” which basically means stripping their homepages of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash. Some, but not all, are being rewarded with a shout-out from Apple, via a page that identifies “iPad Ready” sites.

Here’s the list of publishers Apple (AAPL) says “deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad”:

CNN
Reuters
New York Times
Vimeo
Time
Major League Baseball
The White House
Virgin America
Sports Illustrated
Flickr
People
TED

Apple acknowledges that this isn’t a complete list of iPad-compatible sites–both NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are overhauling their pages for the gadget–and it’s unclear whether Apple has any criteria for calling out these sites in particular. (For the record, I’m told that All Things Digital should work just fine, too).

But for whatever reason, the list appears to be particularly heavy on sites owned by Time Warner (TWX). CNN makes the cut, as do Time Inc. magazines Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

One other note: Check out the description Apple uses for each of the sites it calls out and you’ll see that “iPad-compatible” doesn’t mean “completely free of Flash.”

In many cases, Apple can’t say that all of the sites’ videos will play on the gadget. Just “most” videos, or “recently published” ones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100317/another-iphone-ad-that-asks-you-shake-it-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20100317/another-iphone-ad-that-asks-you-shake-it-up/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:21:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17487 Mobile advertising is growing fast, but it’s still a small business. Even if you use your smartphone a lot, you may not encounter a whole lot of ads. And even fewer interesting ones.

So here’s one that just started running: A campaign for AMC’s “Breaking Bad” series that’s running on iPhone apps for CNN and NPR.

The video below should give you some clue about how the ad, produced by mobile marketing start-up Medialets, works. But in case you can’t tell, the idea is that you click on a small banner ad, which turns into a mini-app that lets you “mix your own chemicals” and eventually lets you watch a trailer for the series (about a chemistry teacher turned meth dealer) or buy an episode via Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

If you follow mobile marketing, this might seem familiar. Last year, Medialets rolled out a campaign for Dockers that asked users to shake the ads. And earlier this year, the firm rolled out a campaign for Vampire Weekend’s new album that asked users to shake the ads. At some point, the novelty factor for this stuff will wear off.

Meantime, it’s still going to be new for most users. If you’re really into this stuff and you live in New York, stop by Apple’s Soho store Friday, where the show’s creator will be promoting the show and the app ads.

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