Tomorrow is national “Do I even get the Oprah Network?” day for cyclists everywhere.

– Matt Haughey, via Twitter

That’ll buy a lot of digital pushpins.

(UPDATE: Pinterest and Andreessen Horowitz confirmed the new funding, which is $27 million. The firm’s Jeff Jordan will join Pinterest’s board.)

In an interview, Jordan said that the amount of interest in Pinterest — get it? — was a big reason for the deal.

“People love the product, even though it is only in beta so far, with consumers who use it voraciously,” he said. “It’s elegantly social.”

Co-founder Ben Silbermann said the focus at Pinterest — which has only eight employees — was to “provide users with a place to discover and share in an inspirational way … we want to help people get in touch with their interests in real life.”

The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet and is still in invite-only mode, has become the hottest start-up of late in Silicon Valley, given its quick growth and compelling idea that has been called “experiential shopping.”

To me, it is just a really cool way of finding stuff of all kinds — from kids’ toys to inspiring quotes to travel tips — using a very savvy crowd of users via social visual bookmarking.

It’s kind of like Oprah on steroids, with users creating and sharing virtual collages on the handsome and easy-to-use site. Others can than “re-pin” them and great stuff rises in rank.

The site has previously raised $10 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the company at $40 million.

The decision has baffled nearly everyone I’ve talked to about it. While changes were expected at Cisco, especially in light of last week’s letter by CEO John Chambers to employees in which he promised “bold steps” and “tough decisions” and “surgical precision” with regard to what needs fixing at Cisco, it’s hard to see how shutting down the Flip unit, even for its meager size within the giant company that Cisco is, amounts to a good business decision.

If Cisco wanted to be rid of the Flip Digital business, why not try to sell it? I asked a Cisco spokeswoman about this today and the only answer I got back: “We performed a detailed analysis and determined that the best decision was to shut it down.”

It can’t have been much of an analysis judging by the reaction among consumers and other companies who might have been interested in buying it–had they been approached. There are probably several companies in addition to the three who made themselves known to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher who would have been interested in buying the Flip business from Cisco.

Exhibit A: As I noted earlier today, the Flip is the best-selling consumer camcorder in the U.S., according to the market research firm NPD, beating out names like Sony, Kodak and Canon.

And yes, I’ll grant it’s a small business when compared to the rest of Cisco’s large carrier-class and enterprise networking and switching unit business, but look at these numbers from Cisco’s most recent 10-K filing. Cisco reported $40.4 billion in revenue last year. Sales in the Flip business unit were small enough that they got lumped into the “other revenue” category along with sales generated by the newly acquired Tandberg video conferencing business and a batch of others.

This “other revenue” totaled $2.6 billion in Cisco’s fiscal 2010, up from $1.6 billion in fiscal 2009. The biggest single factor for that billion-dollar boost was $317 million in Flip camera sales. You read that right: Cisco just shut down a business that brought in $317 million in sales in its last fiscal year.

And yes, that amounts to less than one percent of Cisco’s overall sales. But it had to be a profitable business. I submit as Exhibit B a teardown analysis of the Flip Mino HD camera conducted by the market research firm IHS iSuppli shortly after Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of Pure Digital in March of 2009.

At that time, a Flip Mino HD cost $54.23 in direct materials to build. The four gigabyte model is still available today and sells for $160 at retail. This suggests that the gross margin on that model was easily in the 60 percent range. Additional costs of distribution and marketing and software can’t have eaten too far into that. Plus? That was two years ago. While flash memory costs are certainly volatile, all the other parts used in the camera have probably come down in cost since then.

On top of that, there’s brand equity that would have added to the potential price a buyer might have paid. Cisco poured considerable resources–though small by Cisco measures–into advertising the Flip camera. As Exhibit C, I submit the long progression of TV ads that Cisco aired to promote the brand. While it’s hard to say they were great ads, they worked, and they showed a lot of potential for the brand. Everyone knows what you mean when you say “a flip,” and as any branding expert will tell you, that kind of recognition doesn’t come easily. It’s also no small thing to get the daughter of the president of the United States to use your product during so momentous an occasion as a presidential inauguration. Oprah Winfrey praised them on her show, and on a day in 2007 gave one to everyone in the studio audience. Make no mistake, the Flip was and is a culturally significant product.

And with broad recognition comes a willingness by finicky retailers to take the risk and put the product on their shelves. Exhibit D: In its relatively short life, Flip cameras wound up in Best Buy, WalMart, Amazon and scores of other stores. A good retail distribution network isn’t easy to build. The Flip camera had it, and in fact most of the heavy lifting had already been done. All Cisco had to do was keep building them.

All this is not to say that the Flip brand didn’t have its challenges, not least of all from the iPhone and numerous other smartphones. But there are lots of products that at least on paper are made obsolete by others encroaching on their territory, yet continue to exist for years. Not everyone has an Apple iPhone, nor even a smartphone, and not everyone has the presence of mind to use their phone to shoot video. Doing one thing well is for some people a virtue.

Take for example the cassette-playing Walkman stereo, which existed alongside the Discman portable CD player for years despite the obvious superiority of the compact disc. Some people without the patience to use or buy a smartphone would have continued to gravitate to the Flip for its simplicity and reliability. With a Flip camera there’s practically nothing to learn: Push the red button to start and stop recording, and plug the camera into your computer when you’re done. Though in the last year the product family had shown a pronounced lack of vision: The Flipshare TV device and the Slide HD camera were not well thought out extensions of the brand. Both were launched on Cisco’s watch, and as an indicator of unannounced products in the pipeline, they don’t say anything good.

Yet it’s hard to imagine that the Flip camera couldn’t improve incrementally over time. One thing its devotees always wanted, but never got? An external microphone port. And given all the professional bloggers and reporters who used Flips to enhance their journalistic efforts–I know at least half a dozen journalism professors who rewrote their lesson plans after their first encounter with a Flip–why wasn’t there ever a Flip Pro?

Cisco paid a big price for Pure Digital: $590 million in stock. Given that it contributed $317 million revenue in fiscal 2010, that valuation may not have been unreasonable. We don’t know what Pure Digital’s revenues were in the prior year. But let’s assume they were, say, $150 million, or less than half in the prior year. That would make the multiple that Cisco paid less than four times trailing revenue. Not a crazy price by any means.

So what price could it command now? That’s harder to say. There is, I admit, a pretty good chance that Cisco might have ended up selling it for less than it paid. Certainly no company wants to do that. On the day the acquisition was announced, Cisco shares were trading at $16.23, a dollar and change lower than they are trading today. I’m no accountant, but I have to wonder if there’s some kind of tax advantage to shutting it down versus selling it. (Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.) But it’s also possible–if not likely–that a sale would bring in more than the $300 million restructuring charge that Cisco is taking to shut it down, re-align other business and fire 550 people. Though for a $40 billion company, it hardly seems worth the effort: $300 million amounts to three-quarters of one percent of revenue, making the potential proceeds mere pocket change.

Which brings me to my final point: Why did Cisco buy the Flip business in the first place? Ostensibly it was about consumer video or something. Cisco floated this utopian vision of consumers flocking to buy ?mi video conferencing systems for their homes and carrying Flip cameras in their purses and pockets and sending videos of school plays and soccer games to Grandma over Cisco-made home networks that were in turn connected to an Internet largely powered by Cisco’s industrial-strength routers and switches.

It wasn’t necessarily the wrong vision (well, maybe ?mi was, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). It may be that Cisco was simply the wrong owner. Cisco’s purchase was puzzling in 2009 and still seems puzzling now. But more puzzling is why Cisco seems to have gone to no effort whatsoever to find the Flip–and the several hundred people responsible for making it–a suitable home.

To compound matters, Groupon is also set to be featured on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” today, though I’m not sure the show has actually aired in any markets yet. Oprah picked Groupon as one of her “Ultimate Favorite Things” for 2010, and as part of the announcement the company will be offering a nationwide deal of a $25 Kiva credit for $15.

Groupon acknowledged the slowness in a Tweet: “Hang in there, everyone: big things are afoot at Groupon.com today and we apologize for the site being so slow. We’re on it. Updates soon…” Tweeters replied that it was more than slowness that they were seeing; the site has actually been mostly down for some time now.

Kara Swisher reported this morning that Google is eyeing Groupon and would potentially offer more than $3 billion for it.

A nationwide deal with Gap in August had also compromised Chicago-based Groupon’s servers.

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate–just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more. The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything we actually get sicker–and perhaps eczema.

And yet, with that being said, I feel good–strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin and one eyeball.

So, why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is–on the brink of catastrophe–torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done. Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do–often something they do not want to do–but they do it–impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. [points to the Jumbotron screen which shows traffic merging into a tunnel]. These cars–that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it–the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car–an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear–often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay–you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and want I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.

Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.”

*Note that this isn’t coming from the most obvious sources: Viacom’s own Daily Show site, which carried a live stream of the event but doesn’t have any record of it anymore, or C-SPAN, which is running a loop of the rally, but doesn’t have a handy way to excerpt the three-hour event. Too bad Hulu can’t help here….

[Image credit: Cliff1066]

BoomTown had to park a badillion miles away from Facebook’s suburban HQ in Palo Alto, Calif. and hoofed it there for a press event that unveiled the sFund.

What’s that? A $250 million fund for social start-ups.

10:40 am PT: The excitement was building–well, not really…well, not at all, in fact–at the Facebook cafeteria, as the Silicon Valley press got to see the name of the sFund on screens throughout the room.

Kleiner Perkins power VC John Doerr started off the proceedings with some microphone snafus, when he tried to get out from behind the podium.

“John, sometimes you have to stay in the box,” joked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who was sitting onstage in what appears to be an Internet Hall of Fame group.

The others would be Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Zynga CEO and Founder Mark Pincus, and giant-man-about-Web Bing Gordon.

Doerr talked on about the importance of social, related to the Internet.

Then, he introed Zuckerberg, hoodie-less, who agreed with him, talking about photos and how social made them hot on Facebook.

Apparently, everything is going social. Personally, I am now contemplating becoming a hermit.

Doerr went full Oprah on him, asking what would inspire him to innovate, if he were starting out today (and presumably there were no Winklevii around to “borrow” an idea from).

“If you take any passion and map it to an industry,” said Zuckerberg, it will result in disruption.

Then Doerr channeled Barbara Walters at Pincus, tossing him a softball query about the fabulousness of it all.

For example: “What’s inspired you to be a CEO at this amazing company?” (Note to Walt Mossberg: Let’s file that tough one away for D9!)

11:01 am:Thank goodness then for Bezos, who simply said he hoped these new companies will take some of that $250 million and use Amazon Web Services.

He talked about how these trends grow virally and “sometimes violently.”

Ouch!

Speaking of pinchy, Bezos moved on to some chemical explosion metaphor, and I am now certain I want to be a hermit crab.

Then, after a question about what he would do now, he veered to bioengineering! Doerr wanted a social answer, but Bezos was talking test tubes and “engineered and synthetic life.”

But Gordon behaved for John “Diane Sawyer” Doerr and talked about how social is the only place to be for the cool kids.

He reeled off the other partners, including Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Co.

One more question from Doerr: Five years from now, what is going to make you “delighted” about and for the customers you service.

Gordon: He could see the family.

Pincus: He has 12-week twins, not the Winklevii, who are still too young to use Facebook. He was excited it is all getting wired.

“When everyone is always connected to one another, rather than connected to the Web,” he said, that’s the bomb.

He called the big social companies “dial tones,” as in Zynga was the gaming dial tone, Amazon was the shopping dial tone and Facebook was the dial tone.

Zuckerberg: I was not sure he was actually answering the question. But I believed his wish was about these social networks getting to scale.

He went on though, talking about how some companies were building a “light” social layer versus companies where social was “built fundamentally into the product.”

These, of course, have an advantage, according to the gospel of Zuckerberg.

Bezos: He talked about Amazon’s Web services some more–this dude is a retailer, so he was sure good at selling.

Gordon, who is apparently like Ed McMahon to Doerr’s Johnny Carson, rounded up the feel-good session.

11:17 am: Q&A.

Go Miguel Helft, from the New York Times, who asked a good question, about what took so long for Doerr to do this fund, since social–i.e., Facebook–has been around for seven years or more.

Doerr joked, “Next question.” Ha.

But really. Doerr did not answer except to say that Zynga only exploded a year ago, so back off, Miguel.

There were two other dullish questions, about new partners.

“It’s a quarter-billion-dollar party,” said Gordon, which I was not quite wanting to attend. Which made me a social party pooper.

Larry Magid from CBS asked about social responsibility around privacy, especially after the recent controversy around the leaking of Facebook user info to advertisers, via third-party apps companies such as Zynga.

Then, there ws a question about whether this is not simply the “fbFund,” as in Facebook, since the social networking site was going to benefit the most from all this.

No, it was not, declares Doerr.

More questions–about monetization, advertising, free versus paid and an off-topic one about rumors of Amazon launching an app store (of course it is!).

Zuckerberg took the monetization one. All of the above, it’s great, money for all.

The event finished with a very odd poem by Gordon, which ended with a decent joke about the possibility that entrepreneurs, if they are lucky, get a movie “made about you.”

He was referring to “The Social Network,” which trashed Zuckerberg.

In any case, quarter-billion-dollar party on, Mark.

That’s because the magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps–much to Time Inc.’s surprise.

Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes but would pay Time Inc. directly. But Apple rejected the app at the last minute, forcing the Time Warner (TWX) unit to sell single copies, using iTunes as a middleman, multiple sources tell me.

Since then, Time Inc. executives “have been going nuts,” trying to figure out how to get Apple (AAPL) to approve a subscription plan. One of the more desperate suggestions, which apparently didn’t get traction: Pulling the publisher’s apps out of the iTunes store altogether.

Subscriptions, whether they’re for ink-and-paper magazines or their digital editions, are a big deal for Time Inc. and every other magazine publisher. They value them in part because they provide recurring revenue, but primarily because they provide a treasure trove of data.

The ability to control digital subscriptions also gives publishers the ability to make their existing print subscriptions more valuable, by bundling the two together. Imagine a scenario where existing Time or Sports Illustrated subs get the digital version free, or at a very steep discount.

No other magazine publisher has approval sell their own iTunes app subscriptions, either. But Apple and Steve Jobs had made a point of reaching out to Time Inc. executives and editors before the iPad’s launch, and encouraged them to build digital editions for the platform.

And Time Inc. executives tell me they had been communicating with Apple throughout the spring as they developed their subscription plans, and had been told that Apple approved.

So what happened? The Time Inc. insiders I talked to don’t have a clear answer, presumably because they can’t get one from Apple itself. One theory: Apple is concerned about the publisher’s plans for the consumer data it would collect with each subscription. A darker one: Steve Jobs loves the idea of digital magazines and wants to control the market for himself.

Time Inc.’s official comment on the topic is oblique: “We are working with a number of partners and potential partners and hope to offer in-app subscriptions some time later this year.” And so is Apple’s: “We have two platforms that we support for apps of all types, including magazines: HTML5 provides an open platform for developers to create and distribute whatever they want, and the App Store which is a curated platform offering customers the largest offering of apps for any mobile device with over 225,000 apps and 5 billion downloads.”

Confusing the issue even more is that Apple already allows a handful of app makers–like Amazon (AMZN) and the Wall Street Journal, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp. (NWS)–to bill customers directly. Amazon itself, meanwhile, has been sparring with publishers over subscriptions for its Kindle platform. Jeff Bezos keeps most of the data and money that those transactions generate, too.

Industry trade magazine Folio: first reported on the Sports Illustrated app’s rejection.

As far as I can tell, Time Inc.’s competitors have yet to even submit subscription apps to Apple. Hearst says it plans to sell iPad subscriptions to its Esquire and Oprah magazine apps when they debut later this year, but they’re not really subscriptions in a conventional sense. Instead, the publisher will sell a bundle of magazines as a one-time purchase, and iTunes will keep 30 percent of the purchase price and all of the billing data.

Hearst Magazines Executive Vice President John Loughlin says he’s not happy about the arrangement, but says it will have to do for now. He hopes that competition from the likes of Google (GOOG), which has announced plans to sell its own magazine apps, will force Apple to relent.

Condé Nast, meanwhile, hasn’t talked about subscription plans except to acknowledge that it has some. Newly appointed President Bob Sauerberg says the company may have more to say about the matter within a month. But others at the company say the problem is a vexing one. One executive at the publisher offers this summary: “Don’t get me started.”

Well-known modeling icon Tyra Banks has struck a partnership with Demand Media to create a new digital brand focused on fashion and beauty.

The deal between the Santa Monica, Calif.-based online content maker and Banks’s New York beauty and entertainment company, Bankable, will include the development of a Web site, online video offerings and mobile applications.

“Their strategy, team and technology are outstanding, and the company has developed a unique method for quickly creating popular online platforms by providing visitors with exactly the kinds of content they’re looking for,” wrote Banks in an email to BoomTown tonight. “It became clear to us that Demand Media has developed something truly innovative and that they would be the perfect partner as we work to grow Bankable Digital into a significant part of our business.”

The deal with Banks is a high-profile one for Demand, which is seeking to expand its content to more premium offerings.

“This is where media is going,” said Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt. “We’re going to link our huge amount of content and writers to her ethos around beauty inside and out.”

As part of the deal–which is not unlike the Livestrong health and fitness site created by Demand and cyclist Lance Armstrong–Banks is receiving shares in Demand, which is widely expected to file for an initial public offering in the near future.

“What Oprah did for television, we think Tyra can do for digital content in the fashion, health and beauty space,” said Joanne Bradford, who was recently hired by Demand from her job as the top advertising sales exec at Yahoo (YHOO) to turbocharge its premium advertising efforts.

This is exactly in that wheelhouse, mashing up a well-known celebrity with the vast stores of content Demand produces from its army of search-fueled freelancers.

Banks has certainly become an entertainment powerhouse since she retired from her supermodel days.

But while she is developing books too, Banks has been focused mostly on television, with her own talk show, “The Tyra Banks Show,” which just wrapped up after five years, as well as the megahit, “America’s Next Top Model.”

The most recent show she is producing is called “True Beauty” on ABC, in which good-looking contestants think they are being judged for beauty on the outside, but are actually being scored based on their kindness and other inner attributes.

Currently, Banks’s Web site is mostly promotional, although she also has a potentially large online fan base, with 1.6 million Twitter followers and an inspirational self-help image that is likely to translate well in a more interactive setting.

Whether that will bring big bucks or not is uncertain, of course. So far, Bradford said Demand has not signed up advertisers, but added that this is just the kind of site they will welcome and have been asking for.

“Advertisers are looking for new kinds of content online to be associated with,” she said. “We think Tyra has the kind of message that will attract a really engaged audience online.”

In fact, Banks said she plans to be very engaged in the creation and operation of the online destination.

“Anyone who knows me knows that, once I commit, I’m in 100 percent,” she said. “I plan to be very involved from the early design stage to the choice of videos, articles and special features, to the launch and marketing of the site.”

Here’s the official press release, and below it, the full video of Rosenblatt talking about Demand’s strategies around content, in an interview at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference earlier this month:

DM Bankable Release FINAL2

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100628/exclusive-tyra-banks-picks-demand-as-americas-next-top-digital-business-model/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100212/blackberry-figures-that-maybe-theres-something-to-this-twitter-thing-after-all/ http://allthingsd.com/20100212/blackberry-figures-that-maybe-theres-something-to-this-twitter-thing-after-all/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:15:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16274 Good news, BlackBerry users! Someday, sometime, sort of soonish, the good people at Research in Motion are going to support Twitter, via their own app.

What’s that, you say? It’s 2010, Twitter is Oprah-endorsed mainstream, and there’s no shortage of Twitter apps that work with BlackBerry?

Well, you’re right, of course. One of Twitter’s core strengths is its open platform, which allows developers to build any Twitter app they want. And there are indeed a whole lot of Berry-compatible apps.

So the fact that RIM (RIMM) is just now–actually, not even now, since the thing is still in invite-only beta–rolling out an officially endorsed client is telling, I think.

And yes, Apple (AAPL), among other mobile platforms, has done just fine without an official Twitter app of its own. But I use both, and I can say with confidence that apps on the BlackBerry are an entirely different experience from those on the iPhone/iPod platform.

Load up an app via iTunes and you can be reasonably sure that it’s not going to crash your phone or chew up your memory. You can’t say that about a Twitter client on a BlackBerry, unfortunately.

So. The good news is that the RIM-endorsed client should resolve that problem. (Right?) The bad news is that this is still a future-tense proposition.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100212/blackberry-figures-that-maybe-theres-something-to-this-twitter-thing-after-all/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091121/weekend-update-11-21-09-the-house-of-cards-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20091121/weekend-update-11-21-09-the-house-of-cards-edition/#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:30:55 +0000 Drake Martinet http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=29578 In tough economic times like these, even the biggest businesses get the urge to restructure, reorg and reshuffle.

Kara began Monday with some of the hard facts from the pending AOL-TimeWarner (TWX) split. Stock issued for the post-spinoff AOL places the company’s total implied value at around $3 billion. Also on the list of stuff from 1994 being jettisoned from tech companies is the original instant messenger, ICQ. Kara reported that AOL seeks to shed the brand in an effort to keep the larger ship afloat. Over at Yahoo (YHOO), Kara opened the lid on CEO Carol Bartz’s shifting of top execs. In Silicon Valley’s house of cards, everyone watches out for a shuffle.

Over at Digital Daily, John brought some hard numbers to the stresses being felt by AT&T’s (T) 3G network thanks to a certain fruit-flavored smartphone. It seems that the iPhone is largely responsible for the 2,000 percent increase in data traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area compared with a year ago. (Weekend Update doesn’t claim sole responsibility.) Keeping up with layoff news these days is almost a full-time job. It’s a good thing Paczkowski is on the case. This week, Sony-Ericsson let roughly 2,000 employees go. The firm plans to shutter whole offices in both the United States and abroad. John finished strong with a whole slew of posts about the forthcoming Google (GOOG) Chrome OS, which was released in a developer’s beta this week. Next year, the good kids may be getting their stockings filled with Chrome rather than Apples.

You can never tell what MediaMemo will have up its sleeve in a given week, and this one was no exception. Peter came in early with reports that Wired magazine is another publication betting on a certain tablet. Wired may pave the way for other Condé Nast publication e-editions. From the department of “Hey, it looks like it worked for them,” a couple of music giants will release a Hulu-like service for music videos. No word yet on whether the Internet killed the video star. Peter closed it out this week with the fizzle that will be Oprah’s broadcast career. The talk-show-host-turned-deity will end her broadcast career in 2011, but may not be sorely missed by CBS, according to MediaMemo. Everyone is pretty torn up about Gail leaving though.

Personal Technology went a little off the reservation this week and covered an intriguing specialty gadget with a very specific target audience. The reading aid for the visually impaired is unusual for many reasons, not the least of which is that its branded Intel (INTC) both on the inside and outside. The reader uses a downward-facing camera to read text and translate it directly to speech. Walt was pleased with the device on the whole, though he encountered some bugs and a somewhat steep learning curve that may be a function of the novel nature of the product. Over at Mossberg’s Mailbox, the lead question this week was about data loss. Once the geek shudders stopped, Walt let the reader know that there are many alternatives to Apple’s (AAPL) Time Capsule drives, and the integrated Time Machine option is one useful alternative. At Mossberg Solution, Katie won a fight with a Pixi and brought us the blow-by-blow account. The cheap-and-cheerful version of the Palm (PALM) Pre features a stripped-down price. That savings came at too high a performance cost, said Katie. She praised Palms webOS, but came down on the side of spending a little more to get the Pre.

Stay tuned and check back often. Weekend Update will be back next week as long as we can make it out for the Black Friday sales with all our fingers and toes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091121/weekend-update-11-21-09-the-house-of-cards-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091031/weekend-update-10-31-09%e2%80%94heartbreaks-heart-trobs-and-heart-attacks/ http://allthingsd.com/20091031/weekend-update-10-31-09%e2%80%94heartbreaks-heart-trobs-and-heart-attacks/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:10:44 +0000 Drake Martinet http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=27914

BoomTown’s week began onstage in front of thousands of chanting women. No, Kara wasn’t filling in for Oprah; she was doing something much cooler. She got snagged to moderate a panel entitled “Changing the World Through the Web” at Maria Shriver’s six-year-strong Women’s Conference. Kara’s panel included a group of VIPs from Facebook, Kiva, Blue State Digital–and the Twitterific Ashton Kutcher. With “Mission: Kutcher” accomplished, Kara followed up with the complicated world of MicroHoo and offered analysis on the still-pending search deal. Moral of the story: Commentators should give it time, and Carol Bartz should quit with the Jerry Yang jabs. BoomTown rounded out the week at TEDMED. The conference covered the scalpel’s edge of med tech. And yes, in case you were wondering, synthetic skin feels gross.

Digital Daily covered the real-time search war early in the week when Microsoft’s Bing search folks announced a nonexclusive deal with Twitter to feed on its data stream. The deal did put Bing out front for once, but no one knows if the new info source will turn into profits for either search group. In a post foreshadowing a grisly murder, John reported results from a ChangeWave research study that placed the iPhone within striking distance of overtaking the Blackberry from Research in Motion (RIMM) in the smart-phone market. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that grisly, but it’s Halloween. Digital Daily rounded out the week by adding the iPhone to the pantheon of cat, dragon, rat and rooster that occupies the rim of your Chinese restaurant placemat. Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone officially made it to China this week, though without its signature Wi-Fi, and at a much heftier price point.

Peter Kafka lives at the crossroads of media and tech, and that’s exactly where he was almost run down by the Windows 7 “Family Guy” episode. Microsoft (MSFT) apparently bailed out of the deal when it took a closer look at what was actually inside. From the “not so fast” files, Peter covered a report from Interpublic Group (IPG) noting that ad revenue isn’t quite as sunny as some have suggested. Grim economic times caught up to AllThingsD’s big brother late in the week when The Wall Street Journal closed its Boston bureau. The move resulted in nine job losses, despite significant resources being poured into the paper by parent News Corp. (NWS).

The leaves are changing color over at Personal Technology, and Walt sensed that chill in the air meant it was time for his annual fall computer-buying guide. Operating-system choice was a big discussion; but he also touched on the latest must-haves in the memory, graphics, processor and form-factor categories. With a cup of Earl Grey tea to fend off the autumn chill, Walt trudged out to Mossberg’s Mailbox this week and came back with a fistful of letters. He dutifully replied to a question about migrating Microsoft files to a Mac running windows, offered clarification on the Windows 7 upgrade process, and weighed in on the rumor of a pending Apple device below a laptop but above an iPhone.

Katie finished it all off with a deep dive on the two latest netbooks. The HP (HP) Mini 31 and the Nokia (NOK) Booklet 3G both offer high style compared with their competitors, and each boast much higher screen resolutions than previous models. Though she came down on the side of the Nokia, Katie remarked that neither option would disappoint.

Bundle up as you head out for tricking and treating, and learn from Weekend Update’s mistakes. Remember to check and make sure that scary face is actually a mask before you bring that new friend home.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091031/weekend-update-10-31-09%e2%80%94heartbreaks-heart-trobs-and-heart-attacks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091002/gandhis-head-starring-as-the-g-in-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20091002/gandhis-head-starring-as-the-g-in-google/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:14:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19062

For the last month or so, the Google homepage has played with the famous colored-letter logo by morphing it into a sci-fi in-joke and later adding another “l” to indicate the company’s 11th birthday.

The former–which included logos with alien spaceships and crop circles–was to honor writer H.G. Wells, author of “War of the Worlds” and other science fiction.

Now, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi–the Indian leader whose 140th birthday anniversary is today–has become the “G” in the logo. (If you click on the image, it links to a search for his last name.)

While the impulse to do so seems hard to resist, I am not quite sure I much like Google (GOOG)–even with good intentions to educate and honor–using the image of one of the world’s great political leaders and peace advocates as a letter on a search service homepage, even if it will be seen worldwide.

(The poor Gosselin kids as a “G”? Oprah as an “O”? Liza Minelli as an “L”? I am totally down with that!)

Then again, I might be a tad grumpy on this issue since I also didn’t like Gandhi’s photo being used in that “Think Different” Apple (AAPL) marketing campaign more than a decade ago, which made him seem like some sort of advertising pitchman.

In any case, here’s the real thing to truly appreciate his impact on this world–Gandhi’s actual voice in his famous “One World” speech in 1931:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091002/gandhis-head-starring-as-the-g-in-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090730/live-from-redmond-kiwi-cute-microsoft-cfo-chris-liddell-plus-ray-ozzie-apperates/ http://allthingsd.com/20090730/live-from-redmond-kiwi-cute-microsoft-cfo-chris-liddell-plus-ray-ozzie-apperates/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:42:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=16856

As the wind-up act for the Financial Analyst Day at Microsoft today, its CFO, Chris Liddell, took the stage to try to put a shine on weak financial results that the software giant recently reported.

“So, what genetic disposition do you need to be a CFO? Essentially, you need to be miserable, you need to be the sort of person who takes drinks away from people at the end of a party,” said Liddell. “So, you know, my colleagues who have been giving you drinks all day, have told me to come out here and take most of them away from you.”

This was an unusually charming opening for typically dull CFOs, made even more so since it was delivered in Liddell’s jaunty New Zealand-Hobbit accent, which turns words like “share” into “sheeaar” and “schedule” into “shed-you-all.”

But no matter how cute the delivery, Liddell could not make the recent financial performance at Microsoft (MSFT) look adorable. The company missed revenue estimates by $1 billion in its most recent quarter.

Said Liddell: “And, not surprisingly, from a revenue point of view, it turned out to be a fundamentally different year than we thought it would. So, when I stood up here last year and said we thought our revenue would grow, it actually shrunk by three percent.”

Liddell dubbed the new economic situation the “new normal,” which sounds like it could be the topic on an “Oprah” show.

Still, Liddell, who has been a grumpier CFO than most during this econalypse–I once dubbed him “Glum Chris at the Recessiondome”–was more positive going forward.

“I can’t say this is good that we’re still down relative to where we were a year ago,” he said. “But, on a relative basis, it was a reasonable year from a shareholder value point of view, given the context of the environment that we had.”

Liddell said Microsoft was now operating in a “reset” mode, a term often used by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

“The economic path that we are all going to face, regardless of any industry, is going to be relatively subdued compared to what we’ve been through,” he said. “So, those companies that are going to drive superior shareholder value in the new environment are not only going to be the ones that mapping the reset in a very good way, but are going to manage the new normal in a particular way as well.”

That means having cash, controlling costs, pushing for innovation and market share, said Liddell.

He forgot to add judicious coupon-clipping!

After he was done, Liddell was joined onstage for an executive Q&A by Ballmer, COO Kevin Turner, Online Services President Qi Lu and, finally, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who was apparently in the special guest star role for this year’s meeting.

It was emceed by investor relations guy Bill Koefoed, who I must admit, is not even close to as dull as he is when reading all that legal mumbo-jumbo at quarterly earnings call.

(Even to my assistant Ed–to whom Koefoed’s voice is like Valium, since I listen to those calls on a speakerphone at All Things Digital HQ, and it puts him into a deep stupor.)

There were various questions for the execs–all men, by the way, although who’s counting? Well, okay, me!–including:

* Whether Microsoft might make more acquisitions.

“We don’t acquire as a strategy,” said Ballmer flatly.

* Its relationship with Yahoo (YHOO) going forward and if it might lead to even closer ties.

“If there was an implicit question are we interested in a full acquisition, the answer is no. Yahoo is happy to be independent, we’re happy to be independent, we’re delighted with search partnership,” said Ballmer even more flatly.

There were also a whole bunch of financial questions, most on the far side of wonky. Ozzie spoke only briefly about big computing ideas, which is his job at the software giant.

And then it was over and he and the other big execs headed for cocktails with those gathered.

And, last I saw, Liddell was not wrestling any drinks from the attendees. Not yet, at least.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090730/live-from-redmond-kiwi-cute-microsoft-cfo-chris-liddell-plus-ray-ozzie-apperates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090722/unlike-oprah-letterman-does-not-even-pretend-to-like-or-even-know-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20090722/unlike-oprah-letterman-does-not-even-pretend-to-like-or-even-know-twitter/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:22:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=16272

Here’s a priceless video segment from David Letterman’s “Late Show” last night, as he is taught how to use Twitter by actor Kevin Spacey.

After asking how much it costs and noting that he could get anyone on Manhattan’s 57th Street to say hello just as much as Spacey could get tweets from his 800,000 followers, Letterman officially declares Twitter a “waste of time.”

Perhaps so, but it also makes for great talk-show schtick.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090722/unlike-oprah-letterman-does-not-even-pretend-to-like-or-even-know-twitter/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090618/just-how-much-search-share-does-twitter-really-have/ http://allthingsd.com/20090618/just-how-much-search-share-does-twitter-really-have/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:04:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8344 Twitter notched yet another milestone yesterday when it finally showed up on comScore’s index of Web search milestones. The catch: It barely registered, pulling down a search share of just 0.001 percent.

ComScore says Twitter logged 30.1 million search queries in May, more than Time Warner Cable (TWC), but not even on the same playing field as search also-rans like Ask.com.

But what if comScore is dramatically undercounting Twitter’s search–not just the standard undercounting that Web publishers always complain about, but something more significant?

It’s a given that comScore is undercounting. I know this because the research outfit told me so: The company confirmed today that it only measures searches executed at Twitter.com. But at least half of Twitter’s users are accessing the service without visiting the site, via third-party clients like Tweetdeck. And within that group of users is the power-user set, which is far more likely to be executing searches, many times a day in some cases, than Oprah fans who just joined the service last month.

So it’s easy enough to conclude that the majority of Twitter’s searches are going uncounted by comScore (SCOR). But how big is the gap? I’ve asked Twitter to share its search numbers, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. (UPDATE: See bottom of post)

In the meantime, let’s do some guesstimating.

Start with this year-old post by John Borthwick of Betaworks, who at the time was an investor in Summize, a Twitter search engine at the time (Twitter later bought Summize outright).

Borthwick reports seeing a huge number of search queries on Twitter on the opening day of Apple’s (AAPL) 2008 developer conference, topping out at an average of 190 queries per second. Tease that out over a full day, and you get 16.4 million searches in 24 hours.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that most of those searches occurred in an eight-hour stretch before, during and after Steve Jobs’s pronouncements that day, and knock that total down by two-thirds, to something like 5.5 million queries.

Steve Jobs pronouncements are rare things so it would be wrong to assume that Twitter sees similar usage patterns every day. But then again, Twitter has had an insane growth spurt in the last year: The most recent comScore traffic numbers peg monthly visitors at 32 million world-wide, up from a couple million a year ago.

See where this is going? Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Twitter’s peak traffic a year ago is now close to daily traffic today, and extrapolate that 5.5 million query guesstimate out for a month: You get something closer to 165 million queries.

Want to tweak any of my assumptions above? Be my guest. But no matter how you cut it, I’m sure that Twitter’s real search numbers are going to be several times higher than comScore’s number, at the very least.

Again, this matters in the end because Twitter’s most compelling investment thesis is that it can provide real-time search. And for that to mean something, the company is going to have to start registering as an actual search competitor at some point, not just to Time Warner Cable but to Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) or even Google (GOOG). So how close, or far away, is that from happening?

UPDATE: Twitter cofounder Biz Stone responds, but declines to hand out any numbers. No surprise. I am a bit surprised to see him play down the importance of search at Twitter. I wonder if his investors are also surprised.

We don’t share absolute data such as total requests or queries per day but we do look at the whole ecosystem when we measure these things (not just Twitter.com).

Also, we are focused on the sharing and discovery of tweets so comparing Twitter to web search is interesting but not necessarily how we would measure success.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090618/just-how-much-search-share-does-twitter-really-have/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090617/twitter-search-lands-barely-on-the-map-001-share/ http://allthingsd.com/20090617/twitter-search-lands-barely-on-the-map-001-share/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:02:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8277

I’m pecking this out from the bowels of the New World Stage, where Day Two of the Twitter-centric 140 Character Conference is meandering along. But the most interesting Twitter-related news is coming from outside the conference: Data from comScore (SCOR) showing that Twitter-related search has become both measurable and meaningful.

Well, measurable, at least.

From Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney:

Twitter Becoming Meaningful–Search volume on Twitter in May was 30.1MM, (.001 percent U.S. market share), with 4.2MM searchers, and 39.4MM Result Pages, exceeding the 22.2MM searches conducted on Time Warner Cable.

Normally, we don’t even bother to dismiss companies that have less than one percent of U.S. search market. We never write about them, period. But given that Twitter boosters continually try to position the company as a real-time search engine–one that theoretically can threaten Google’s (GOOG) search monopoly, if you listen to some pitchmen, this may be the single most important metric to watch for the next few years.

It’s certainly more important than the number of Twitter followers of Oprah or even Twitter’s overall growth rate, which is going to spike up and down over the next few months as the media hop on-and-off the story (it’s back on again this week, with the Tehran protests, but we’re entering the dog days of summer, and us media folks have twitchy attention spans).

And it’s probably more important than any revenue Twitter generates over the next couple of years–the Twitter dudes have raised $55 million and have spent little of it, so they have time to create a business.

But if Twitter really is going to become an important player in search–or at least an attractive acquisition candidate for the likes of Google or Microsoft (MSFT)–it’s going to have to show a steady increase in search share.

And the nice thing about owning .001 percent of the market is that it gives you plenty of room to move up.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090617/twitter-search-lands-barely-on-the-map-001-share/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/ http://allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 01:49:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=274

Meet the Internet’s It Boys: Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. A year ago their “micromessaging” platform was unknown outside of a small circle of digerati. Now the service has broken through to the mainstream, or at least to the mainstream media (thanks, Oprah!). But while Twitter has no problem generating attention, it’s still unclear how the company will actually generate revenue. Or maybe it doesn’t need to do that: Last year Facebook offered to buy Twitter for $500 million in cash and stock, and the service could presumably garner a much higher price today–perhaps from Microsoft (MSFT) or Google (GOOG). Or at least that’s what its investors may be hoping for.

Session Highlights

Live Blog

• After Kara Swisher assists Jill Sobule with a song penned for (and about) Rupert Murdoch, Walt Mossberg joins her on the stage and they thank the audience. “We double-mean it this year,” says Walt.
• Walt and Kara explain their “Web 3.0″ thesis, which you can find explained in detail here. They also plug the new All Things Digital iphone app (which is excellent!) and run through a series of less helpful iPhone apps–less helpful because they don’t exist. The Carol Bartz app gets some applause.
• Walt: It’s all about apps. Apple (AAPL) dominates that business but we will show some other great stuff at this conference. Kara: Normally we start out with big-company CEOs, but instead, we’re going to bring out the company that everyone is talking about. Here are Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter.
• Kara shows off a video that depicts her mother’s low opinion of Twitter. Well worth watching.
• Walt: We also have real data about people’s opinions re: digital media, commissioned by an actual polling firm–Penn, Schoen & Berland. For instance, only 51 percent of Twitter users are on the service once a month. What’s the deal with that?

• Evan: That’s fair. We know it’s in its infancy. There are lots of ways to fix the adoption curve that we know how to do.
• Evan explains the history of Twitter. He sold Blogger to Google, hired Biz, started Odeo, a podcasting company. Walt: “Which got crushed by Apple.”
• Biz: I followed Evan to Odeo, and we started working with Jack Dorsey, who had this idea that just involved IM-like status updates that could update via mobile. To Ev’s credit, as CEO of Odeo, he sent us off to work on that.
• Evan: A few months later, at Odeo, we just didn’t see a bright future for that. Generally, if I’m not personally invested in the product, and don’t use it myself…
• Biz: I started playing with Twitter and I started laughing at Evan’s posts and thought that was a good sign.

• Evan: It was so simple. “It didn’t look like a real thing. The simplicity turned off some of our engineers. It wasn’t obvious at all.
• Walt: How many users do you have? Biz and Ev won’t comment.
• Evan: We wound down Odeo, returned the money to investors and made them whole and went off to focus on Twitter.
• Walt points out that most users don’t use the Twitter.com interface. Biz: We have at least twice as much usage via the open API and other clients as we do via Twitter.com.
• Walt: Is that good thing? Evan: Yes. Very much so. We’ve never built an iPhone app, but there are at least a dozen of them. You can’t win by trying to corral everything in. We have all these people adding value. We can’t build all the stuff people want with 45 people.

• Biz: Openness, open platforms are a big deal. We’re seeing lots of this. And people communicating on these open platforms is a big deal. It’s not just with communication. It’s with open-source software, transparency at companies, etc. People are building a ton of value this way.
• Evan: This openness helped create Summize, the search engine we bought a year ago. That couldn’t have happened if we weren’t open with our data. Turns out there’s a huge opportunity with search, and we hadn’t foreseen that.
• Walt: Will future projects and developments happen on Web pages or on clients/apps?
• Evan: We’re interface-agnostic. We’re more concerned about what the data is and that it should flow to all clients. I don’t think we’ll build a desktop app, but we will tweak the Web site a bit.
• Kara: Everyone’s talking about real-time search. But what kind of real business opportunity is available there?
• Evan: Real-time search means different things on different platforms. On Google, it’s Web search. On Twitter, it’s Twitter search. It’s different from what other people are talking about when they’re talking about real-time search. One of Twitter’s properties is that it’s low-latency, and speed is important in information dissemination.
• Kara: So what’s the value in that? What’s the advertising premise for that?
• Biz: When I think about search, I think about a box and a button. When I think about Twitter, I zoom out a bit, and I think of discovery.

• Walt: Is there a way to sell that?
• Biz: Pfft….There’s a way to make introductions to people, to tell them that things and people are available on Twitter, and there’s certainly money in that.
• Walt cites another piece of polling data: 30 percent say they’d be willing to see banner advertising on Twitter. Does that work for you guys?
• Evan: I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we can do.
• Kara: So you’re least interested in doing it?
• Evan: Yeah.
• Walt: 24 percent say they’d pay for power accounts. Do you think that’s a good idea?
• Evan: Yes, I think it’s a good idea. We’ve talked about it for a long time. Here’s how it might work: Lots of commercial users are on Twitter already. That’s not odd, and it’s happening successfully already. But we could give those users tools to make it better. For instance, here’s how P&G (PG) might sell Tide…Wait that’s a bad idea. How about The Wall Street Journal? No, they’re a media company; that won’t work either. How about Dunkin’ Donuts? People like Dunkin’ Donuts. They have an affinity for that, and they’re already following Dunkin’ Donuts. So one thing we can do is tell new users that the Dunkin’ Donuts account on Twitter is actually Dunkin’ Donuts. To verify that.
• Walt: OK, what else could you do with that?

• Evan: There’s a million ways, if you’re doing this in real time, to make this useful, and it won’t be annoying to people because if they don’t want that information, they won’t subscribe to a particular account.
• Biz on hype: We realize that this constant stream of attention will eventually go away. We have to keep concentrating on the company. “We’re one percent into Twitter.”
• Kara: You’ve raised a lot of money. You’ve had a lot of interest from acquirers. Why didn’t you sell to Facebook?
• Evan: I have a big thing about building sustainable companies. And I think that’s what Twitter should be.
• Walt: So in five years you won’t have sold this? You’ll still be running it?
• Evan: Yes. I didn’t expect to be working on this when I spun Twitter out of Odeo. But I came back to it because it was the most interesting thing I could work on.
• Kara: Do you have Zuckerberg-like control of your company, where you have the ability to control your fate and turn down a $1 billion offer from the likes of Microsoft?
• Evan. Yes. And the board feels the same way.
• Walt: You sure your board doesn’t want to sell the company within five years?
• Evan: Sequoia likes to brag about YouTube. But they also aspire to start companies like Apple and other cool companies. I think VCs like to brag about starting big awesome companies.
• Biz: When we met Bijan Sabet at Spark, I remember telling Ev that I liked him a lot. And Ev met him and said “he’s a little too nice.” Then we met the rest of the guys. [Pause]. And then we were in.
• Kara: What’s next big delta for you, the next big innovation?
• Evan. We’re not doing a TV show. We look at that like an iPhone platform that can have apps on it, but we’re not doing a show ourselves.
• Biz: I think the next big thing is scaling this company.
• Evan: Definitely scaling the company. We’re 45 people. We need to make the product better, we need to solve the awareness-to-engagement ramp. We also want to deepen the value proposition. There are lots of head-slapping things we can do to improve the product.
• Walt: I was Twitter skeptic. But I really go into it when my colleague Katie told me that this was an interesting way to keep up with news. Is that something you can build on?
• Evan: That’s the big secret for people like Kara’s mom, and we can do a better job of explaining that. Twitter disseminates information and it builds relationships. You can do one or both of those things.
• Kara: Do you need to raise more money?
• Evan: Well, we need to start building a monetizable business.
• Kara: When does that begin?
• Evan: There will be a moment when we turn something on.

• Time for Q&A: Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners begs the guys not to do midday planned maintenance outages. He also asks them to scale faster and to hire more than 45 people.
• Evan: Go to Twitter.com, and you’ll see that we’re hiring. We’re not planning on staying at 45 people.
• Q: What do you think will be key way you bring in money in a couple of years?
• Biz: You need to leave room for emergence to take place. We’re doing that in the way we structure the company and the way we hire people, etc. I’ve always said that if we described Twitter in three sentences, the first two would be about not putting too much fidelity on it, and the last sentence would be “we don’t know.”
• Q: What about an Apple-like App Store for Twitter, where you guys could sort and authenticate apps?
• Biz: I think exposing apps to people would be a good idea. I don’t know about charging for it. We know that certain apps make Twitter work much better for people, and we should promote them and point people to them. “I would like to do that right now. I don’t know how soon we’ll get to it.”
• Q: Not really a question, but a plea to not abuse the access to personal data that Twitter already has.
• Evan: We know not kill the goose. There are things that we could do that would be really stupid, and that would be dangerous, but those aren’t even the most tempting things to do.
• Q: In traditional media and marketing, we have tools to prove the value of different tools. How to tell marketing clients that they’re reaching the right audience, etc.?
• Biz: Start by typing their name in Twitter search and showing them how many people are talking about their product. They’ll immediately want to respond. That’s the easy answer.
• Q: What about looking at Nielsen-like partners to help refine metrics and tell marketers who’s looking at what?
• Biz: There are lots of interesting things we could do. I think that it will be more compelling when you’re not just following a set list of people. Twitter will be more interesting when it starts telling you things like “You go to Whole Foods a lot…maybe you’d like to know that this is on sale today, etc.”
• Evan: But it will always be recipient-driven.
• Walt: Biz, please tell me about your name.
• Biz: I couldn’t pronounce my name, which was Christopher Isaac Stone, and I said “bzzz” and that was that.

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 we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090507/boomtown-to-chitown-no-posts-today-but-enjoy-these-lovely-chicago-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20090507/boomtown-to-chitown-no-posts-today-but-enjoy-these-lovely-chicago-videos/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 10:16:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13371

BoomTown is winging it across the country for a Dow Jones event in Chicago–we do our part for the mother ship here at All Things Digital!–so there will not likely be posts today.

That is, unless Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) merge, buy Twitter and mount a cavalry attack on the Googleplex (GOOG).

One can dream!

Until Friday then, here are some lovely Chicago-related videos:

Blues Brothers, “Sweet Home Chicago”:

“All That Jazz” from “Chicago”:

What Chicago News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks:

Tom Cruise Attack on Oprah’s Couch:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090507/boomtown-to-chitown-no-posts-today-but-enjoy-these-lovely-chicago-videos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ignore-the-twitter-buyout-rumors-heres-the-facts-in-five-beyonce-madonna-approved-steps/ http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ignore-the-twitter-buyout-rumors-heres-the-facts-in-five-beyonce-madonna-approved-steps/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 11:00:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13194

Was it more than a month ago that Google was rumored to be in “late-stage negotiations to acquire Twitter”?

Not so much late-stage, I guess, with a gestation period that seems interminable (and BoomTown has been there, so can speak from experience about interminable pregnancies).

In fact, I’m still waiting for the Google (GOOG) takeover news floated inaccurately back then to cross our desk at All Things Digital HQ, although it’s more likely Godot will show up first.

So I guess it should come as no surprise that it was time to fob yet another rumor that yet another moneybags of a company–this time, Apple (AAPL)–is in “late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter.”

You could set your broken-but-right-twice-a-day clock by it, in fact.

But despite very serious interest in Twitter by every company that can afford considering such a thing, getting across that late-stage line would require major investors in the microblogging service to be involved, and they are not as yet.

In fact, both Twitter co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, are in New York today to attend the 2009 “Time 100″ dinner, which fetes this year’s influential people honorees selected by the magazine. Which they are.

So, if they are in serious talks with Apple, they better grab that award and head on home tout de suite.

In point of fact, talks with Facebook last year were actually the only truly deep sale discussions that Twitter has been involved in, and those went south.

Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)

But given that it is too good to be true for now, rather than be on the edge of your seat about all these endless, alleged late-stage high jinks, here is a five-step list to cut out and keep when the rumors of “late-stage negotiations” with Microsoft (MSFT), News Corp. (NWS), Verizon (VZ), Yahoo (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL, Comcast (CMCSA), Cisco (CSCO) and more inevitably show up.

1.) Belle of the Geek Ball

Everyone is indeed actually interested in buying Twitter and each has expressed a proper level of interest to the company’s execs–especially to over-contacted CEO Williams–about said interest.

And, because this is America, a bid for Twitter could come at any time and in any amount.

That’s why Apple has indeed said hello. Why Microsoft’s business development team has been busy formulating a valuation. Why Google’s M&A guy, David Lawee, has called into Twitter’s HQ many times with kind expressions of desire. And why News Corp. execs, including Rupert Murdoch himself, have murmured tweet nothings to the Twitter team.

Please note: This is not the same thing as “late-stage negotiations.” Not at all; so don’t believe such things, as you will see this one coming down the pike for miles (see Step #4 below).

If there ever were an Apple deal to be done, it would not be living in some tidy vacuum.

For example, does one imagine Google CEO Eric Schmidt–who is on the Apple board, much to the FTC’s chagrin, it seems–would decline to enter the fray? Oh, he’d be up to his conflicted eyebrows in it at this point.

(Full disclosure: ATD is also considering making a bid for Twitter, but only if I get to name who is called Chief Twit.)

2.) We Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty

Twitter’s Williams, as well as Stone, do not really want to sell just yet, given the huge traffic over the last year, goosed even further by the whole Oprah-Ashton Kutcher axis of Tweetvil.

Twitter is growing and growing and growing. Does that mean it has peaked or is just crossing over into the mainstream?

I would say the latter and so would its investors and execs.

I have done a lot of reporting and have found that most of them would like a chance to ride this rocket ship and see if they can prevent it from being a shooting star by figuring out some viable, innovative and lucrative business plan.

“Twitter really could make a lot of money,” said one investor. “And we are not just making that up either.”

Well, phew, because I have been a little worried about that.

3.) We’re Living in a Material World, and I Am a Material Girl

That said, as Madonna sings, a pile of cash is a pile of cash and if one of the suitors makes a big move with $600 million or more in cash, it would be hard for Twitter to completely ignore such an offering.

But, in any case, there will be no late-stage negotiations with one player.

Instead, an epic free-for-all wrestling match to the death would break out among all of them, especially Google and Microsoft.

This will be great for me and all the other tech writers as it will be ugly, competitive and tailor-made for breathless reporting.

Google is the likely winner here, although Microsoft is quite intent on the possibilities of integrating Twitter technology with its business offerings.

Someone will, I can predict with certainty, lose an eye.

4.) All the Single Ladies…Cuz if You Liked It, Then You Should Have Put a Ring on It

And, even with that kind of offer–which I would take in a New York minute, as would some Twitter investors–there is a sense when you talk to Twitter’s founders and investors that they truly believe they are onto some very important interactive communications paradigm shift in the Internet arena with their start-up.

I would have to agree given that the real-time and status-update concepts that Twitter has perfectly touched on are a very important one.

Thus, Twitter would prefer to remain independent for now.

Whether Twitter will prevail or not is never assured, but it would be really a shame if it gave up before the story was over.

5.) And They Lived Happily Ever After

Let’s be honest: There is no real downside here for Twitter.

If the service turns out to be be a flash in the pan and it is not sold for big bucks, Twitter still has heralded a very important new era in the digital industry.

And, if it grows like crazy even more, better still.

Also, Stone got to go on “The Colbert Report” and Williams on “Oprah.”

Best of all, in a shameless plug, they will both be captive on stage with Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference exactly three weeks from today, where we can ask them about all this and more.

So, I am thrilled too.

Who says there are no happy endings?

Until that D7 interview, here is my recent video with Williams and Stone at Twitter’s funky San Francisco HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ignore-the-twitter-buyout-rumors-heres-the-facts-in-five-beyonce-madonna-approved-steps/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20090428/is-twittermania-running-facefirst-into-quittermania/ http://allthingsd.com/20090428/is-twittermania-running-facefirst-into-quittermania/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:29:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6777 Remember all the way back, a couple weeks ago, when everyone was talking about Twitter and Oprah and Ashton Kutcher and the millions of people who were joining Twitter every week?

Turns out the majority of those new Twitterers won’t be back in May.

So says Nielsen Online, which estimates that 60 percent of Twitter’s users leave after a month. That makes sense on a gut level to me: Twitter is easy to use, but it often takes a while to make sense, and if you’re not a professional self-promoter–or someone with a lot of friends who are already on Twitter–it may never make sense.

It’s worth noting here that Nielsen is likely overstating the churn because it is only measuring visits to the Twitter.com URL. The majority of Twitter use happens away from the site, on mobile phones and apps like Tweetdeck, and it’s theoretically possible to be an avid Twitterer but never visit Twitter.com after you sign up. I’ve asked the Twitter folks for their take on the stats and will update if they respond.

But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the Nielsen stats are correct, or close to being correct. Is that a problem? Obviously, every Web service attracts new users who never come back after they try it out, so churn in itself isn’t a problem. The question is the rate.

The good news is that Twitter’s 40 percent retention rate is higher than it used to be. Prior to the Oprah madness of this month, Twitter’s rate was closer to 30 percent, Nielsen says.

But the measurement company argues, via a fancy chart and equation, that 40 percent retention makes it mathematically impossible for Twitter to achieve significant penetration with Internet users. The simple version is that if Twitter loses three out of five users a month, its growth will be capped at about 10 percent of the audience. Fancy version below (click chart to enlarge):

And here’s how Twitter’s retention rate compares to that of Facebook and MySpace (again, note that Facebook users and MySpace users more or less have to visit the those sites to use them, so the numbers are likely slightly skewed):

So what if Twitter really is a service that appeals to no more than 10 percent of the Internet audience? Is that such bad thing? Not at all. That’s an awfully big number.

And “retention” may end up being the wrong metric to measure a service like Twitter, anyway. See this perceptive post by Andrew Chen (thanks to OMGPOP’s Dan Porter for the link).

But a lot of the Twitter sales pitch–to investors and would-be partners like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT)–is contingent on the service’s eventual ubiquity. The appeal of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities, for instance, is less seductive if you’re only searching what a sliver of Internet users are Tweeting about. And knowing that growth is capped could make that impressive hockey stick chart a little less so.

[Image credit: Weegee via the International Center of Photography]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090428/is-twittermania-running-facefirst-into-quittermania/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:54:15 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=14924 In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline of “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.

For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it. Well, that, and conversations with Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, and several Italian business leaders. Mark Zuckerberg, though, is most definitely plugged into the white-hot microblogging service. This week, he used his Twitter account, plus an appearance on “Oprah,” as a platform to herald the launch of Facebook’s own Twitteresque homepage redesign. In other news, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid off AOL President and COO Ron Grant and Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. BoomTown interviewed Falco’s replacement, Google (GOOG) ad sales exec Tim Armstrong, who’ll start at AOL as Chairman and CEO on April 7.

MediaMemo had the full memo from Time Warner on the Falco/Grant-Armstrong transition and also spoke with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week. Boxee is the start-up that lets you watch Web video on your TV, basically bypassing your cable box. Which is probably why it’s caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox that would much rather have you watch TV on the Internet instead. Guess who’s the mouse? Still, Hulu is down two networks, ABC and CBS (CBS)–though presumably, the aim is to offer all three. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.) MediaMemo also noted that Google rolled out its behavioral targeting functionality this week and points out that we all might be hearing a lot more from a man named Rick Boucher in the near future as a result.

Behavioral targeting wasn’t the only thing that Google rolled out this week–it also launched Google Voice, the initiative based on the company’s acquisition of voice communications start-up GrandCentral. Digital Daily covered the story. Elsewhere in the telecom world, major Palm (PALM) investor Roger McNamee made some bold (read: crazy) assertions about iPhone users switching en masse to the Pre, which later needed to be clarified (read: backed away from) by Palm itself. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is also bullish on the Pre and its WebOS, but in a less crazy way. He gave it a glowing write-up on Friday. For a product that hasn’t yet been given a price or a launch date, it’s certainly building itself some high expectations. Of course, it’ll need to fulfill them to compete with the ever-evolving iPhone, which for which Apple (AAPL) is having a press event Tuesday to announce version 3.0 of the device’s OS.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the new version of Apple’s ever-evolving iPod Shuffle this week, which has the distinction of being the first mp3 player to “speak.” His verdict was in Wednesday’s Personal Technology column. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using a stylus with the iPhone and offered an explanation on how to change Apple’s Safari 4 beta so that it looks and works more like the previous version. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at iSkoot’s Notifier, an app designed to endow basic cellphones with smartphone-like capabilities.

More next week. And beware the Ides of March. Or not.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition-2/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:54:15 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=14924 In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline of “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.

For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it. Well, that, and conversations with Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, and several Italian business leaders. Mark Zuckerberg, though, is most definitely plugged into the white-hot microblogging service. This week, he used his Twitter account, plus an appearance on “Oprah,” as a platform to herald the launch of Facebook’s own Twitteresque homepage redesign. In other news, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid off AOL President and COO Ron Grant and Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. BoomTown interviewed Falco’s replacement, Google (GOOG) ad sales exec Tim Armstrong, who’ll start at AOL as Chairman and CEO on April 7.

MediaMemo had the full memo from Time Warner on the Falco/Grant-Armstrong transition and also spoke with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week. Boxee is the start-up that lets you watch Web video on your TV, basically bypassing your cable box. Which is probably why it’s caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox that would much rather have you watch TV on the Internet instead. Guess who’s the mouse? Still, Hulu is down two networks, ABC and CBS (CBS)–though presumably, the aim is to offer all three. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.) MediaMemo also noted that Google rolled out its behavioral targeting functionality this week and points out that we all might be hearing a lot more from a man named Rick Boucher in the near future as a result.

Behavioral targeting wasn’t the only thing that Google rolled out this week–it also launched Google Voice, the initiative based on the company’s acquisition of voice communications start-up GrandCentral. Digital Daily covered the story. Elsewhere in the telecom world, major Palm (PALM) investor Roger McNamee made some bold (read: crazy) assertions about iPhone users switching en masse to the Pre, which later needed to be clarified (read: backed away from) by Palm itself. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is also bullish on the Pre and its WebOS, but in a less crazy way. He gave it a glowing write-up on Friday. For a product that hasn’t yet been given a price or a launch date, it’s certainly building itself some high expectations. Of course, it’ll need to fulfill them to compete with the ever-evolving iPhone, which for which Apple (AAPL) is having a press event Tuesday to announce version 3.0 of the device’s OS.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the new version of Apple’s ever-evolving iPod Shuffle this week, which has the distinction of being the first mp3 player to “speak.” His verdict was in Wednesday’s Personal Technology column. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using a stylus with the iPhone and offered an explanation on how to change Apple’s Safari 4 beta so that it looks and works more like the previous version. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at iSkoot’s Notifier, an app designed to endow basic cellphones with smartphone-like capabilities.

More next week. And beware the Ides of March. Or not.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090314/weekend-update-31409-special-roman-ides-of-march-edition-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090305/twitter-business-plan-count-up-day-1/ http://allthingsd.com/20090305/twitter-business-plan-count-up-day-1/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:08:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=10694

Today, Twitter’s investors are in rainy San Francisco for a board meeting of the hyped microblogging service, where they will presumably discuss revenue options that the start-up keeps promising are coming soon.

In fact, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said about a month ago in a blog post that “we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.”

Right now, Twitter has no revenues.

No-Biz-like-No-Biz Stone added: “We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation. When we do, we’ll be sure to let you know.”

Well, why wait? As with BoomTown’s 100-Day Yahoo (YHOO) Countdown, which was initiated here after former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he was taking that many days to rethink Yahoo from top to bottom, it’s just about time for a Twitter Count-Up!

Here’s the idea: Because Twitter’s execs have been so poky about coming down from the mountain and delivering this alleged business plan to the waiting masses–I suppose all those investment dollars in the kitty can make one softer in the head–why not come up with some suggestions to get the ball rolling?

Thus, my first idea is simple, taking advantage of the excessive hype around Twitter in the media, which are acting as if being able to tweet 140 characters is the second coming.

The plan would be to charge pundits, television anchors, bloggers, Barbara Walters and anyone else, a small microfee every time they mention Twitter in the vain hope of seeming hip, happening and relevant.

Just imagine the bucks that will roll in once Oprah figures this Twitter thing out and starts to give it the same treatment she has given Skype!

And in case you need reminding about just how obsessed the media are with Twitter, which is still relatively small in comparison to other services in relation to its coverage, let’s roll the hysterical Jon Stewart video on it from earlier this week on “The Daily Show,” below.

Explaining the Twitter phenomenon to Stewart, Samantha Bee tried to put her finger on why the media (and Congress too) were so fixated on it.

Her take: “Because we’re rotting corpses grabbing for any glimmer of relevance, Jon, hoping at some point one of these retarded things will be the vine that can rescue us from this quicksand.”

Monetization of desperation? Ka-ching!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090305/twitter-business-plan-count-up-day-1/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20090224/jeff-bezos-sells-the-kindle-to-jon-stewart-wed-make-it-cheaper-if-we-could/ http://allthingsd.com/20090224/jeff-bezos-sells-the-kindle-to-jon-stewart-wed-make-it-cheaper-if-we-could/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:50:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=4559

Oprah is already on record as a Kindle fan. Jon Stewart–not so much.

“The Daily Show” host let Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on his show last night to pitch the Kindle 2.0, which started shipping yesterday. And while Bezos is an enthusiastic salesman, I think the clip below is pretty indicative of the Kindle’s strengths and weaknesses as a mass-market device.

That is: For some folks, the ability to download books over the air, store a gazillion titles on a single device and have a “freaky” voice read them aloud to you are compelling reasons to shell out $359 for the gadget. For skeptics like Stewart, it’s hard to see how Amazon (AMZN) has improved upon the ink-and-paper book, which uses technology that has worked pretty well for several hundred years.

But if you’ve got five minutes, this is a pretty entertaining back-and-forth.

One aside: I particularly enjoyed Stewart’s befuddled reaction when Bezos mentions “DRM,” the digital lock-and-key system that supposedly enrages consumers.

And since we’re talking about Seattle-based tech CEOs visiting “The Daily Show,” let’s take a couple seconds to recall Bill Gates’s 2007 interview, when he was pitching Vista. Best way to describe that one: Buggy.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Bill Gates Crashes

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090224/jeff-bezos-sells-the-kindle-to-jon-stewart-wed-make-it-cheaper-if-we-could/feed/ 0