And he’s not the only one. In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also called for another investigation, this one by the Department of Justice.

“Given the inadequacy of the FCC’s investigation and the law enforcement responsibilities of the attorney general, EPIC urges the Department of Justice to investigate Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data from residential Wi-Fi networks,” EPIC Executive Director Mark Rotenberg wrote. “By the [FCC’s] own admission, the investigation conducted was inadequate and did not address the applicability of federal wiretap law to Google’s interception of emails, usernames, passwords, browsing histories and other personal information.”

Pointed criticism of the FCC’s investigation into Google’s Street View street-mapping service, both. But some would argue well deserved. One would think that a serious inquiry into the issue would have at least included interviews with the employees involved in the data collection. But according to the FCC, Google decided that making those employees available for questioning “would ‘serve no useful purpose.’”

Perhaps the DOJ could persuade Google to be a bit more cooperative.

PREVIOUSLY

• France to Google: Your CEO Is a Hamster and Your “Rogue Street View Engineer” Smells of Elderberries
• Lawmakers Would Like a Word With Google’s “Rogue” WiSpy Engineer
• Connecticut Won’t Press for Google WiSpy Data, Looks to Settle
• Well, Hell, If I Knew All I Had to Do Was Seize the Hard Drives…
• Look, Sergey, a Christmas Card From the Connecticut AG! Wait…
• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

Today’s blast is similar to last month’s in both form and content.

Hastings is once again accusing Comcast of violating “Net neutrality” principles by favoring its own Web video service over those from Netflix, HBO and Hulu, when it comes to data usage. (Last month Hastings also complained that he couldn’t watch HBO GO on his Xbox, but that’s been resolved.)

Here’s the text (you can also see a screenshot, below):

Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles.
Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.
I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.
When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.
For example, if I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.
The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.
In what way is this neutral?

Reminder: Hastings has all sorts of ways to complain/lobby Comcast and/or regulators (see, for instance, the new Netflix PAC). I continue to find it fascinating that he’s taken to posting on Facebook for this stuff. (Another reminder: Hastings is a Facebook board member).

Last month, I asked Hastings and Netflix PR if they wanted to expand on his comments, but never heard back. I’ll let you know if that changes.

In short: The company, which has been steadily ramping up its lobbying presence in Washington, says the PAC — which allows them to make contributions to individual races — is a logical next step.

But it says it is primarily interested in topics like video privacy laws, which prevent it from integrating with Facebook. And not with hotbutton issues like SOPA/PIPA.

So here you go.

“PACs are commonplace for companies that lead a big, growing market and Netflix is no exception. Our PAC is a way for our employees to support candidates that understand our business and technology.  It was not set up for the purpose of supporting SOPA or PIPA.  Instead, Netflix has engaged on other issues including network neutrality, bandwidth caps, usage based billing and reforming the Video Privacy Protection Act.”

Reminder: Netflix has been particularly vocal about the VPPA since last summer. Last year it boosted its political spending significantly in an effort to change that law.

By the way: I’d like to cite YouTube’s Tim Shey for pointing out Obama’s approach to email headers, because I think I saw him say that on Twitter recently. But, boy, oh boy, is it hard to search on Twitter, so I can’t confirm. Sorry, dude. Update: Confirmed!

Quick as a wink, I got in my tux and hailed a cab for midtown Manhattan. That message from a friend who shall not be named was how I ended up crashing the 2012 Inner Circle Show, an annual New York ritual where members of the city’s press corps put on an impressive musical roast of the local, regional and national political elite since 1922. It’s a big black-tie affair, and an invite is not easy to get.

The highlight of the night is always the Mayor’s Rebuttal. Last year, Mayor Mike Bloomberg flew around the stage as Spider-Man, taking advantage of the infamous buzz that plagued that Broadway show back then.

As you’ve probably figured out, Mayor Mike doesn’t do anything small. Being the 20th-richest person the world — worth some $22 billion via his majority ownership of the financial data and media company that bears his name — has its perks. One of them is the ability to hire the cast of a hit Broadway show to help make you look good on stage. (Full disclosure: I worked for that company for about a year before taking this job.)

This year, Bloomberg hired what must have been the majority of the cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” including its current headliner, Nick Jonas, a.k.a. “the cute Jonas Brother,” and also longtime Hollywood actor Beau Bridges.

Naturally, there were a lot of references to local political chatter. In the skit, Bloomberg bans coffee at City Hall — a reference to his administration’s war on nasty food ingredients like trans fats and salt — touching off a drama among city employees. He also quizzes the presidents of Cornell and Stanford University on their knowledge of New York — a quiz Stanford fails, prompting her to walk out. It’s a reference to a real-world competition between the two to develop a technology hub on Roosevelt Island, and yes, Stanford really did walk away. And of course there were plenty of references to Lady Gaga, whom Bloomberg famously kissed on New Year’s Eve.

Below is a six-minute highlight reel of Bloomberg’s production, which ran a good 30 minutes or more. The fun lasted well into the wee hours this morning. Hilton security guards shut down a crowded after-party in a penthouse suite at about 2:30 am. (I crashed that, too, again with the help of the friend who shall not be named.) One wonders if Bloomberg can be coaxed into a reprise when he hits the stage at our D10 conference in May. We can at least hope!

The moves are among the most dramatic censorship efforts undertaken by Beijing since the rise over the past two years of the popular microblogging services, known in China as weibo. They allow the fast dissemination of information, challenging the central government’s traditional control of the media.

They also show the continuing tensions in China following the March sacking of Bo Xilai, a former Chinese Communist Party star whose ouster as Party chief of the megacity of Chongqing showed cracks in Beijing’s veneer of political unity.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In case you’ve missed the sandstorm, Eric Fehrnstrom, a top Romney adviser, said on Wednesday that if Romney wins the GOP nomination, the campaign will “hit a reset button” to take on President Obama in the fall.

Fehrnstrom then added, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

While Romney’s rivals have pounced on the comment — Newt Gingrich’s camp has even created a SketchyRomney app — Etch A Sketch fans have pounced on the venerable toy, buying it in droves on Amazon.com.

Politico reports that sales of the 1950’s relic shot up more than 2,000 percent on the e-commerce site, while Ohio Art Company, the maker of Etch A Sketch, saw its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday, before closing at $9.65, more than double its Wednesday closing price of $4.

Here at AllThingsD, we say: Why go for the plastic version, when you can play with a digital Etch A Sketch on your mobile appendages?

That’s right: Campaign platforms, errant Twitpics, awkward remarks — all erased with the shake of an iPad.

It’s a politician’s best friend.

For iPhone, there’s Etch A Sketch Premium, from Freeze Tag, Inc., a company that makes casual games for mobile devices and personal computers. It costs just 99 cents (or about 0.000001309367724577594 percent of the $75,609,012 Romney has raised to date).

Unlike the physical Etch A Sketch, users of this app can change the color of the toy’s frame, choose from a color palette when drawing, use predrawn shapes or a background (like Hangman), and share their drawings with friends via email, Facebook or a photo album. As with the original Etch A Sketch, you simply shake it to erase it.

But a smartphone screen is just too small for this kind of app, and the knobs of the Etch A Sketch appear to be cut off at the bottom. You can use your finger to draw, but that seems like Etch A Sketch sacrilege.

Fortunately, there’s an iPad app from the same company. This one costs $2.99, and is the real deal.

The Draw Something addicts out there can share their Etch A Sketch iPad drawings with friends over Wi-Fi. Or, users can draw alone, add photos from a photo album, use colorful stamps, share through Facebook and even access an iPod song library to set sketches to a soundtrack … like, maybe a campaign soundtrack?

For Android devices, there’s a free version of Freeze Tag’s Etch A Sketch with ads; and a 99-cent version without. There’s also the 99-cent Etch-a-Doodle app, which replicates the Etch A Sketch experience.

Those who would rather pay a more visible homage to Etch a Sketch can check out these retro red covers for mobile devices.

And if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can attempt to make a Kinect-a-Sketch, as these guys did, as seen in the video below:

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis)

Instead, this one took me about 90 seconds: From this tweet to this Forbes article to this post from Dartmouth College. That’s where Kim, Dartmouth’s president, performed the rap from the Black Eyed Peas song “The Time (Dirty Bit)” last year. Enjoy, starting at the 2:05 mark:

Bonus video: My colleague Liz Gannes, Dartmouth ’04, notes that this was not Kim’s first “Glee”-tastical performance. Here, he partakes in a 2010 Michael Jackson tribute, starting with the Vincent Price rap from “Thriller,” followed by enthusiastic dancing. Begins around the 1:20 mark:

Is that good for consumers? There’s an obvious fear that when two big utilities agree to work together, the end result will be higher prices and fewer choices for their customers. So today the two companies are testifying in front of a Senate subcommittee, trying to explain why that’s not the case.

The hearing kicks off at 2 pm ET, and you can watch a Webcast here. But the people who present at these things give out their testimony in advance, and while that reduces any chance for drama, it is helpful for reporters on deadline.

For instance, here’s an interesting argument from David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president: If you let us little guys work together, he says, we can take on the really big guys:

“By enhancing the Cable Companies’ and Verizon Wireless’s own products and services, the Joint Venture will compete with similar solutions that AT&T, Dish Network, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others already have introduced into the marketplace. This, in turn, will spur other companies to respond, perpetuating a cycle of competitive investment and innovation.”

Wait a minute. AT&T and Dish are direct competitors with Verizon and Comcast. And it’s possible that those other guys might be one day, particularly as Google gets ready to start selling broadband and cable in Kansas City. But what exactly is Cohen talking about there?

The footnotes in Cohen’s remarks here are interesting. To back up his argument, he cites the following news items: Google’s Android launch; a Google/Sprint deal that put the search giant’s tools on Sprint handsets; Apple’s iPad launch; the fact that many tech companies have been buying wireless patents; and Google’s pending deal for Motorola Mobility.

In other words: In the future, our competition won’t just be other pipe companies, but other device makers, too. If you take him at his word, things are going to get very interesting.

While the BlackBerry remains the dominant smartphone in Washington, its lead is fast deteriorating. The National Journal recently polled 1,225 Capitol Hill staffers, private-sector employees and federal executives, and found their allegiance to the device wavering.

Among Capitol Hill staffers, 77 percent said they own BlackBerrys, down from 93 percent in 2009 — an ugly 16 percent drop. Among private-sector employees, the decline over the same time period was even more pronounced — to 50 percent from 76 percent. There was a similarly precipitous drop among federal executives. In 2009, 76 percent said they owned a BlackBerry; today, just 57 percent say they do.

The most alarming metric of all: No more than 1 percent of any of those groups said they were interested in purchasing a new BlackBerry.

So what are they looking to buy?

iPhones.

The National Journal’s survey (which evidently allowed for respondents to have multiple devices) found 41 percent of Capitol Hill staffers to have an iPhone, as well as 42 percent of private-sector workers and 27 percent of federal executives. In 2009, those percentages were quite a bit lower: 13 percent, 15 percent and 9 percent. Clearly, the market is beginning to move on.

Reached for comment, a RIM spokesperson said the company’s foothold in Washington remains strong.

“The mobile sector is very competitive with many new consumer offerings,” the spokesperson said. “However in an era of real cyber security threats and attacks, BlackBerry continues to offer unmatched security, reliability and value for government agencies concerned about securing and protecting sensitive government information. Today, that includes over one million government customers in North America alone. In many instances government workers are using BlackBerry handsets that are years old and we are working with agencies to upgrade their devices in order to provide significantly greater functionality and speed. We have also introduced BlackBerry Balance that enables government IT departments and government workers the ability to safely manage the balance between sensitive government data and personal data. In addition, while we believe a pure BlackBerry deployment is the most secure and reliable solution, we are also giving government IT departments and government workers the ability to manage a mixture of devices in a secure and manageable fashion through BlackBerry Mobile Fusion.”

(See: the SOPA and PIPA online protests, the Planned Parenthood-Susan G. Komen dustup, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Investors, including Internet impresario Sean Parker, think that sounds like an opportunity for disruption. “Politics is one of the few remaining large-scale consumer-facing opportunities on the Internet,” he said in an interview with AllThingsD. “It’s a very interesting moment, where politics is a bit behind the rest of the economy in embracing these new technologies.”

Sean Parker

Parker — who played crucial roles at Facebook, Spotify and Napster, and also co-founded the lesser-known nonprofit fundraising app, Causes — is now hoping to make an impact on politics with an investment in Votizen, a company founded by tech geeks with political stripes.

Votizen spent much of the last two years digitizing 200 million U.S. voting records from magnetic tape, computer databases and spreadsheets. Though it only has tens of thousand of members who have registered and connected to their voter profiles, it is trying to push out products and attract users in time to get involved with this year’s general election.

Parker first invested in Votizen with his venture capital firm Founders Fund in 2010, and also just personally took part in a new $750,000 convertible round with a set of celebrity investors who can raise Votizen’s profile with the push of a tweet button.

They are Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle’s A-Grade Investments, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter.

Votizen co-founders David Binetti and Jason Putorti

The latest round, which also included venture debt investor Hercules Technology Growth Capital, just closed last week. It brings Votizen to $2.25 million in total funding.

Votizen CEO David Binetti, who formerly founded USA.gov, says he’s aiming to capitalize on peer pressure — in a good way. Instead of money buying votes, Votizen will help friends persuade friends.

People who join Votizen can see voters from their own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks. Then, Votizen will do things like highlight which friends are in swing states or certain political parties, and help users contact them to plead their case.

“Today, people feel rich people and lobbyists get in the way of their interests,” Binetti said. “We’re disrupting the currency of politics with ‘friendraising’ over fundraising. The goal is to make it harder for money to have an effect.”

According to various estimates, online spending in the 2012 election will be somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion, up from $177 million in 2008.

While voter registration is a matter of public record, personal politics might not necessarily be something everyone will feel comfortable discussing online.

Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti — who was formerly lead designer at the personal finance site Mint.com — said he thinks that people will become more transparent about politics over time. “The new generation knows sharing leads to benefits,” he said.

Outside of election cycles, Votizen intends to help users get involved in ongoing public policy by writing officials and mobilizing groups around issues. Users can also create personal “cabinets” of advisors built from politically savvy people in their friend networks.

Eventually, Votizen hopes politicians and activists will pay to reach people in certain regions or interest groups, similar to the way LinkedIn makes money by charging users to contact people they don’t know.

The lawmakers — Edward J. Markey (D., Mass.), Joe Barton (R., Texas) and Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) 00 want to know if Google’s behavior “constitutes a violation” of a privacy settlement Google and the Federal Trade Commission signed last year. Breaches of the settlement could bring fines of as much as $16,000 per violation per day.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The agreement represents an effort to resolve a standoff that dates to 2009, when the World Trade Organization ruled that China’s policy of allowing 20 foreign films a year to be shown there violated international trade rules.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

You could try answering this question yourself by combing through Twitter and looking at what Newt says there, and what people are saying about Newt there. But that would take time and effort.

Much easier to have a computer track this down for you — and then ask the computer to write up a story about it, too.

That’s what Narrative Science, the start-up that specializes in robot-written stories, did earlier this week. The result isn’t elegant, but it gets the job done, in a brute force sort of way.

NEWT GINGRICH GAINS ATTENTION WITH HOT-BUTTON TOPICS TAXES, CHARACTER ISSUES

Newt Gingrich received the largest increase in Tweets about him today. Twitter activity associated with the candidate has shot up since yesterday, with most users tweeting about taxes and character issues. Newt Gingrich has been consistently popular on Twitter, as he has been the top riser on the site for the last four days. Conversely, the number of tweets about Ron Paul has dropped in the past 24 hours. Another traffic loser was Rick Santorum, who has also seen tweets about him fall off a bit.

While the overall tone of the Gingrich tweets is positive, public opinion regarding the candidate and character issues is trending negatively. In particular, @MommaVickers says, “Someone needs to put The Blood Arm’s ‘Suspicious Character’ to a photo montage of Newt Gingrich. #pimp”.

On the other hand, tweeters with a long reach are on the upside with regard to Newt Gingrich’s take on taxes. Tweeting about this issue, @elvisroy000 says, “Newt Gingrich Cut Taxes Balanced Budget, 1n 80s and 90s, Newt experienced Conservative with values”.

Maine recently held its primary, but it isn’t talking about Gingrich. Instead the focus is on Ron Paul and religious issues.

No Pulitzer for that one, but that’s not the point. This is a work in progress that’s meant to illustrate an interesting project Narrative Science is working on: The Chicago-based company got its start by creating stories out of “structured” data sets, like baseball box scores. Now it is looking at “unstructured” data — like the thousands of messages that Twitter puts out each second — as story fodder, too.

Stories about things people say on Twitter aren’t super compelling (though if you check Techmeme, you’ll see that my fellow typers and I sure make a lot of them). But if Narrative Science gets good at this, it could end up somewhere interesting.

“This is a really basic story, but it’s fully automated,” says CEO Stuart Frankel. “No human touched it at all. You can see where this thing is going.”

Meanwhile, Frankel says, Narrative Science’s core business is taking off. The company, which raised $6 million last year, now has 30 clients, many of whom use the company to produce stories and reports they use internally. But you can see public examples of it via publishers like Forbes, which is using the service to crank out automated earnings previews.

Again, those previews aren’t made up of sterling prose, but they are very serviceable. Which means Forbes can either save the money it would have spent paying someone to mash that stuff out — or it can free up a writer to do the interesting kind of stories that only humans can do.

And now I’ll save myself a few minutes of work by citing myself from last year, where I tried to assure myself that Narrative Science wasn’t going to put me out of business: “The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do — work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can’t do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway.”

Provided you’re willing to get your head around a couple of ideas:

• If you want to buy old shows that now have limited value to the cable programmer, it’s happy to part with them for the right price. Ask Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, among others.
• And if you want the new stuff that cable subscribers get, Viacom will sell you those, too. As long you’re willing to pay for the entire bundle of Viacom’s channels, just like cable subscribers do.

From Dauman’s perspective, Viacom — and by extension, most of the big cable programmers — are in pretty good shape right now. Even though people like me like to write about cord-cutting, he says he’s not seeing any real evidence of it. Meanwhile, new digital players are giving him what amounts to found money — checks for shows he wasn’t really selling, anyway.

Exceptions? Sure. Disney’s ESPN charges a whole lot for its programs, and Dauman (and other cable guys who don’t sell sports) think that’s a problem.

Then there’s the whole SOPA/PIPA thing, which Dauman says was well-intentioned and misunderstood. And it will stay that way for a while — he says there’s no chance that the entertainment guys get new legislation through in 2012.

Dauman laid all of this out during his interview with me — preceded by a spirited, R-rated introduction by Viacom employee Snooki — at Dive Into Media last month. You can watch the entire video here:

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120214/viacoms-philippe-dauman-has-a-bundle-will-travel-the-full-dive-into-media-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120210/googles-political-action-committee-getting-lots-of-action-these-days/ http://allthingsd.com/20120210/googles-political-action-committee-getting-lots-of-action-these-days/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:40:18 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=173403

The 2012 election cycle is proving a big one for Google NetPAC, the company’s political action committee.

According to a year-end report filed with the Federal Election Commission, Google NetPAC raised $836,305 between July 1, 2011 and Dec. 31, 2011 — the first half of the 2012 election cycle. And so far it has donated $221,250 of it.

That’s more than a 50 percent increase over what Google NetPAC spent at the same point in the 2010 election cycle. Which is significant. Keep in mind, we’re a little over halfway through the current cycle, and the committee still has some $740,960 cash on hand to spend.

Among the donations made: $5,000 to Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who concocted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that Google so vehemently opposes.

An odd disbursement, considering that Google NetPAC’s stated goal is to “support federal officeholders and candidates who share Google’s goal of promoting the Internet as a free and open platform for communication and innovation, to the benefit of our users.”

Hopefully the committee’s contributions to SOPA opponents canceled it out.

Feature image credit: iStockphoto | penfold

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120210/googles-political-action-committee-getting-lots-of-action-these-days/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120209/seven-questions-for-cisco-systems-ceo-john-chambers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120209/seven-questions-for-cisco-systems-ceo-john-chambers/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:50:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=172845 Shortly after he concluded his quarterly earnings conference call Thursday, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers called me up — upbeat and understandably so.

Cisco appears to have continued its recovery following a painful restructuring. Sales are up and setting records, earnings beat the consensus of analysts, and Cisco’s outlook for the coming quarter is positive, too. Cisco’s even reached a point where it’s at least close to fitting into its old skinny jeans. What a difference a year makes. Last year it was all about gloom and doom and some irritable investors were calling for Chambers to lose his job.

Since then the company has undergone a painful but necessary restructuring, shed thousands of jobs, shut down marginal business units and refocused on its core businesses, and as yesterday’s quarterly earnings report proved, the results are not only starting to show, but starting to stick.

So is the work done? Definitely not. Yes, Cisco is showing some return to its strengths, but there’s still a long way to go. We talked about that, the troubles Cisco’s competitors are facing, his long-held view that companies like Cisco should get a tax holiday to repatriate their cash held outside the U.S. and many other things.

Also Chambers, remembering that I dedicated “How Ya Like Me Now” to Cisco last quarter as it turned the corner on its troubles, asked me what song I might use to characterize its results this quarter. Taking inspiration from the headline of my first story and from his cautiously optimistic tone, I settled on “It’s Getting Better All The Time,” the Beatles track, performed by Paul McCartney and embedded after the Q&A. Enjoy.

AllThingsD: John, I don’t know if you saw the headline I wrote earlier, but I said you fit into your skinny jeans again. Is that fair?

John Chambers: [Laughs] I think it’s fair. We were up about four or five inches there so I think we have an inch or two to go, but we’re getting close.

So let me ask about the quarter. It looks like a solid quarter where a lot of the troubles were starting to get behind you. In broad brush strokes, where were Cisco’s strengths? I know some of your competitors were having their own troubles, but where were you strong in particular?

The strengths were that we appear to be executing on the market transitions that are going on, and we appear to be reinventing ourselves, not just in terms of how we control our costs, but in terms of the productivity we’re getting out of our employees. So if you look at the major transitions going on in the industry from an economic point of view, to how customers buy, to where the high tech industry is going, which I would argue is all connected to intelligent networks, that all appears to be playing out as we had hoped. The other transitions that you think about, like data centers and the cloud, we saw 90 percent growth in an industry that is growing at best in the teens. Our ability to move in collaboration, where we grew 10 percent though I think we could do better — it remained solid for us. In video with set-top boxes up 23 percent to new video technologies growing well and seeing improvement in the margins. There are things we need to do to reinvent Cisco. I think I said this at your own conference a decade ago [Chambers spoke at D5 in 2007, but that is not where he made this comment. -Ed.] that voice will be free. It’s almost there. You could see the trend, and what it meant is that once voice would become a smaller part of the network load, that would be given away in order to make way for the video and the entertainment. The same trends are taking place all over again at multiple speeds and multiple gears, which if we’re right, they all play together. Everything from mobility to cloud to the intelligent network, to wireless to security, to video being pervasive, all of those are coming together at tremendous speed. And we’re pulling them all together pretty well for our customers. Now, this is just the beginning if we execute right, and we have plenty of hurdles in front of us, but this may be the voice-will-be-free trend times 10 in terms of the impact of the transitions going on. We appear to have managed them well; we did what we said we would do, turned in record earnings and record revenues, and earnings per share were up 48 percent. We’ve realigned ourselves and reinvented the company, which I think you have to do every five years. Sometimes it takes a crisis to reinvent. … It’s a journey and we’re just getting started.

What’s the number one hurdle that you want to get over this year, that’s in front of you right now and keeping you up at night?

I want to build deeply into our capabilities, a continued focus on gross margins and effectiveness, from product design to sales all integrated together. You probably know this, but we’re the only company who’s anywhere near this profitable with $45 billion in sales with open standards. It isn’t a mainframe business where everything is proprietary or like in Apple’s situation where it’s a wonderful company but it has an architecture. We do it entirely with open IP, so we can be challenged by a 10-person start-up or a by the biggest giants like Dell or IBM or Hewlett-Packard to come at us. With this type of margin but so low a barrier to entry, we’re doing relatively well. But we still have to reinvent ourselves at a faster pace. We have to do what I call the basic blocking and tackling to participate in the new capitalism that we’re heading into. That’s the attention to gross margins, getting the market transitions right, tying the products together so you can get the price premium on them. But what really keeps me up at night this last year was the realization that this has to be constant reinvention. Average is over. An average high-tech company is headed down. Those above-average companies are going to head down in 3 to 5 years. If as a company you can’t reinvent yourself every 3 to 5 years, you have a problem coming at you.

Does that then imply that Cisco had become complacent or even average? It was and is the biggest networking player, but did Cisco lose its way and try to do too much?

Well, I could give you a long list of things we have to do better. We’re a healthily paranoid company so we always have things we could do better. I do think we were fat. Four to five inches, not just one or two. We’re not back in our skinny jeans yet, as you put it, but we’re within an inch or so of getting there. We missed market transitions at the speed at which they occurred. We should have seen the drop-off in public spending coming at us sooner. Everyone else has still run off the turn, even though they saw what happened to us two to four quarters ago. We should have seen it sooner and reinvented ourselves before it hit us, and made the turn much more effectively, and I’m committed to doing that, and the leadership team is, too. It would have been easy to just cut a billion dollars in expenses, reorganize sales and how customers buy. We realized that gross margins can deteriorate not just because of what competitors do but what we do to ourselves, like what we did on switching. We should have been smarter there.

On the conference call you mentioned the possibility of getting back into the mergers and acquisitions game. Any hints on where you might go or whom you might buy?

I think it’s a fair question. Part of the reason we said that was to explain why we’re building up cash in the U.S. Part of it was for share buybacks because the price was attractive. A lot of people don’t realize that we use M&A deals to gain leadership. We were a routing company, we acquired three switching companies. We were an enterprise and commercial company, we acquired a service provider company in Stratacom. If you look at where it’s going to be, it’s probably in data center, collaboration and video, and combining those with security, bring your own device and mobility. A large part has to do with our government allowing us to bring money back to our country.

That’s always been a big issue of yours. You made some comments about it on the conference call as well. Care to elaborate?

I think that it’s going to happen in the next presidential administration whether the president is re-elected or someone else is. I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t been able to get our message out about this more effectively. Ironically, I was in Europe, the government leaders there look you right in the eye and ask what they need to do to bring jobs to their country and keep the ones they have. They are partnering with business. I think we’re following Europe in the wrong way and following more of what they did to get them in trouble in the first place.

There’s a bit of a disconnect, however, to anyone who sees on one hand a company that wants to bring cash back in a tax-advantageous manner in the name of creating jobs, while the same company just fired so many people in the restructuring. Can you connect those dots for the person who sees the apparent logical disconnect? If it’s about jobs, then why are you firing people in the first place? If you were having lunch with President Obama or any other political leader, they might be confused, so how do you explain it?

They’re related. The first thing you’ve got to do when you hit bumps in the market is find out how much of the damage was self-inflicted and how much was the result of the conditions of the market. It would be a cop-out to say it was all the general market. We had to look at what we were doing internally. Every government leader in the world who’s adding to government payrolls and adding government debt is going in the wrong direction. We have to use technology to deliver services better. You do see most government leaders saying they want to get their own houses in order. The second thing they do is look at ways to generate private sector jobs. I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park. He partnered with business, he was critical where appropriate, but in six years he generated 22 million jobs, grew GDP on average by 4 percent per year, and he was America’s champion on the Internet. I think that’s a more practical example. He grew private sector employment versus government employment by a ratio of 9 to 1, and created a positive climate for business, and when business got out of line he’d whack ’em. I think it would be a major mistake not to let companies repatriate their cash because whoever is in the Oval Office next year is going to want to get private sector jobs growing again, and there really aren’t very many levers left to pull. We’ve never had this slow a recovery after this deep a recession.
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Getting Better – Paul McCartney

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120209/seven-questions-for-cisco-systems-ceo-john-chambers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120131/pulse-creates-a-one-stop-shop-for-election-news/ http://allthingsd.com/20120131/pulse-creates-a-one-stop-shop-for-election-news/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=169166 Want to pull yourself out of the “filter bubble” and read political news from a wide variety of sources? You might try Pulse’s new election section. The mobile news-reading app has compiled some 25 political news outlets, including some significant ones it didn’t previously offer, like Fox News and the New Republic.

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120131/pulse-creates-a-one-stop-shop-for-election-news/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120130/dick-costolo-2012-is-going-to-be-the-twitter-election/ http://allthingsd.com/20120130/dick-costolo-2012-is-going-to-be-the-twitter-election/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:09:34 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=169078 Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that Twitter has already changed the nature of political discussion in the U.S.

The news cycle, already pretty fast, has sped up another notch.

“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter election,” Costolo said, during his talk at D: Dive Into Media.

In last week’s State of the Union speech, for example, “When Obama made that spilled-milk joke, there was this collective groan that went up,” Costolo said.

More importantly, Republicans took to the service to live-tweet their rebuttals, rather than waiting for the speech to end.

“Tomorrow morning it will be too late to react to what was said the day before,” Costolo said. “Washington is really starting to realize that.”

Politicians, he said, have taken note. Nearly all the Republican candidates have used promoted tweets to amplify their message.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120130/dick-costolo-2012-is-going-to-be-the-twitter-election/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120123/digital-music-sales-grow-worldwide-but-big-music-still-frets-about-pirates/ http://allthingsd.com/20120123/digital-music-sales-grow-worldwide-but-big-music-still-frets-about-pirates/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:42:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=166371 Give people a choice, and they might pay for digital music, after all.

Also, it helps if they can’t steal it.

That’s the takeaway from a new survey from the IFPI, the music industry’s global trade group. It says global digital music sales grew 8 percent last year; that’s the first time that growth rate has increased since 2004, when the IFPI started tracking the statistic.

A good chunk of that increase may have come from subscription music services like Spotify and Deezer. The IFPI says subscription services have 13 million paying users, up from eight million last year.* There are also smaller increases in sales at more conventional outlets like Apple and Amazon, which generate much more revenue for the industry overall.

And while digital music sales still make up a minority of the music industry’s revenue worldwide, they are increasingly important: They now account for 32 percent of sales, up from 29 percent last year. (In the U.S., digital just edged physical last year, for the first time.)

All of which sounds fairly straightforward. But the IFPI is a trade group; it wants to hammer at one of its key points, which is that piracy is a big problem for the industry, which has seen sales cut in half since the Napster era. It figures more than a quarter of all Web users “access unauthorized services on a monthly basis.”

So, if piracy is a problem, why are sales increasing? In part, the trade group argues, because of anti-piracy legislation and industry moves.

The report highlights France’s “three strikes” rule, which allows the government to fine pirates and take away their Internet access. It cites a study arguing that French iTunes sales have increased more than 20 percent because of the policy, and the suggestion is clear: This would be a good idea worldwide.

The IFPI, which has singled out Google for criticism in the past, once again complains that the search engine makes it too easy to find illegal stuff. It also clearly went to the printer before the weekend, because its report refers to SOPA/PIPA as works in progress that are “set to be debated further in early 2012.”

*That number sounds several million high to me, but perhaps my rough estimate is missing a couple of big players.

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