Image copyright Norm Hall | Getty Images Sport

It’s a stark contrast from the glory days, where distribution was fixed and scarce, and all we had to do was put a great product out there. At the time, all content had found its own native distribution outlet — a channel on the dial, a spot on the newsstand, a movie theater, video store — that delivered it to the bulk of its audience. That distribution was beautifully limited — there’s only room for 12 channels on the old VHF dial, 16 movies at a multiplex and maybe several thousand titles at video rental stores.

But today, distribution and consumption are in constant flux. Look at TV. To be truly “Everywhere” these days, a TV show has to be on network, cable, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Facebook and Amazon, have its own native app in Apple and Android stores — at a minimum — and a presence in Google’s mighty search index.

To succeed today, digital media companies need to get control of their distribution. The opportunity for savvy media companies is to abandon the outdated if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality, and master the craft and science of programming.

Programming is the skill of matching content to audience. Programming is what built the global TV and film industry from $200 billion to $300 billion in the last decade. If you want to succeed in digital media going forward, programming is everything.

I spent time recently with a friend from CBS and told him about what my company Wetpaint does to program social as a channel: In short, we deterministically deliver the right content to each audience at the right time. That might mean, for example, a recap of yesterday’s news timed for the morning bus ride, a short-form video clip posted to coincide with a mid-morning coffee break, a gossipy tidbit just as lunch begins. “That may work in entertainment,” he said. “But it would never work in breaking news. In news, everything needs to go out immediately.”

So I did some research, and it turns out he’s wrong. When you look at what our editors consider breaking news within the entertainment category, the vast majority of stories — more than 75 percent — perform better when they’re packaged and presented at another time of day, and not when they first break.

While immediacy became the mandate in the ages of CNN and Google, smart programming is far superior in an age of multiple distribution outlets.

The expertise of digital programming is in its infancy, but some of the secrets for success have emerged. Here are a few:

• You don’t have one big audience.
  Digital media companies need to know who their audience is and what they like, and then customize their product and pitch accordingly. But convention on the Web has been to serve everyone the same thing — and the folly of that is a massive missed opportunity. Instead, understand your value to all your major audience segments. After all, each person you reach thinks of herself as an audience of one. Meet her where she’s at, and you’ll find your resonance — and performance — will be much greater.

  For decades, the National Football League operated on the basic assumption that football is for guys. That conventional wisdom was upended in 2010 when research by the NFL and Nielsen found that more than 40 percent of the league’s fans were women. (It’s upward of 44 percent now.) Of course, football fans (both male and female), segment along many lines — and NFL marketers will have to find ways to speak to, sell to and grow all those demographics. But acknowledging women was a huge and lucrative step to grow the league’s opportunity massively.

• Learn what will resonate. (Hint: In the battle for consumer hearts and minds, heart wins every time.)
  Once you know who your customers really are and can group them by their common interests, the world opens up. You have the freedom to design new content and experiences to delight them. It doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all any longer; your brand doesn’t have to be watered down to its most basic and neutral. Many brands and publishers struggle for relevance — but once you articulate who your audiences are and understand what they’re interested in, the door is open to all kinds of new conversations. Research, feedback and analytics can all help you become expert in each of your audience segments. Then use those insights to grow your brand.

  Sticking with the NFL as an example, when the league learned about its popularity with women, it took that finding and ran with it, introducing a new website, ad campaign and product lines — all aimed at the now 80 million women who tune into NFL games each weekend. Female fans rewarded the new attention by dropping millions on NFL apparel, jewelry, nail polish, yoga mats, etc. The league went further and partnered with the American Cancer Society to raise awareness about breast cancer, which explains all the pink flourishes (gloves, socks, wristbands, etc.) on the field and the sidelines these days. This overdue — and heartfelt — outreach strengthened the bond between the NFL and its huge female fan base. The league’s bottom line smiled. In 2012, NFL fans spent $3.2 billion on consumer products.

• Timing is everything.
  Of course, the most basic element of the art of content programming, one that has been mastered by the TV networks, is knowing what performs when. Prime-time shows don’t work in the mornings, and re-runs would squander the huge opportunity of evening viewing. There’s a time for opinion and a slot for hard news, and reversing them tanks performance and tunes out audiences.

  But on the Web, well, somehow the only rule of thumb our industry seems to know is “the best time to post is now.” And that’s preposterous.

  In terms of social, the state of the art sounds better, at least at first: There are lots of generalizations out there about when to post content: Mornings are better than evenings, Facebook sharing spikes on weekends, tweeting peaks on Fridays. Well, that’s all great in theory, since it documents average behavior of average audiences. But the point isn’t to get it right for someone else’s average consumer. Whether we’re talking about work or play, we all develop our own individual routines and habits. Discovering the personal quirks of your particular audience is a goldmine for programmers.

  How powerful is it? Several years ago, a U.K. content agency called Collective Content was helping a small management firm develop its programming strategy. Traffic to the client’s website waned on weekends. Nothing surprising there. But Collective Content began to notice an uptick in Sunday visits. “Sunday evenings had become the new Monday morning,” wrote Collective Content founder Tony Hallett. “Execs and other managers were getting a jump on the working week. This was a great time to feed their need for information.”

  At Wetpaint, we try to time content delivery to the distinct habits of our audiences, which vary from show to show. The very young (13-24) “Pretty Little Liars” audience likes a fast-paced, high volume content diet, so we serve them fresh stuff all day long. Older (55 percent are over 24) “Grey’s Anatomy” fans catch up on new content in the evening, just before they get into TV-viewing mode. So we freshen our “Grey’s Anatomy” pages late in the day. If you program according to someone else’s guidelines, all your best shots will miss your target. Instead, know your audience and you will hit the mark.

• Like it or not, people judge books by their covers. Design your packaging to resonate.
  In pre-digital days, content packaging discussions went like this: How long is the story? Do we need photos or illustrations? Today, fuhgeddaboutit. Digital editors have lots more arrows in the quiver. They can trot out old packaging chestnuts like long-form profiles or Q&As, or they can present content in slideshows, video, audio, polls, quizzes, clickable infographics, Spotify playlists, etc. The packaging options just keep growing — and so does the menu of social media megaphones you can use to trumpet the final product.

  Working all those levers in a way that engages your audience and exploits the strengths of each packaging and delivery option is an art and a science. BuzzFeed is one of its master practitioners. In its self-proclaimed rules for “How to Go Viral” (an infographic, of course), Buzzfeed recommends making lists (“9 out of ten Internet lists go viral”), using quizzes to appeal to user vanity (“People online love talking about themselves”) and staying relevant. We won’t quibble with the BuzzFeed rulebook. But in our own experience, packaging — like timing and just about everything else — is audience-specific. Fans of “Vampire Diaries” like to vote, for example; so we give them polls. And it works — to the tune of thousands of Facebook ballots click-cast for star Nina Dobrev in our sexiest legs poll.

• Test, test, test, for insights you can use.
  If you follow my Digital Quarters blog and Media Success newsletter you know I’m a nut for data. I firmly believe that the only way you can truly know your audience in all its wondrous eccentricity is to embrace testing with a gusto that borders on obsession. (Yes, I am seeing somebody about this.) Every shred of content you produce, from the glossy video to the tiniest tweet, is an opportunity to learn something about the consumers who visit your site. Don’t waste it.

  As you generate (via surveys, focus groups or, our favorite, A/B testing) and then sift through the mounds of data, trends will unfailingly emerge. These insights into user preferences help drive programming decisions at Wetpaint.

  Testing tells us that our “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” fans revel in relationship gossip. Stories about dating, cheating, break-ups, pregnancy rumors, etc., perform four times better than episode-related news like recaps or sneak peeks. But within that relationship news subcategory, the two audiences diverge: Bachelorette watchers are scandalmongers. Bachelor fans are sentimentalists. We tailor our content accordingly. Testing has also made us smarter about social media. Facebook posts with photos work best when we’re promoting content for scripted (“Grey’s Anatomy”) or reality (“Bachelor”) shows. For breaking news, text-only posts do just fine. If the news is big, words are enough to catch the eye.

• The News Feed is the new EPG, and you must be present to win.
  The greatest opportunity of all in digital media is the chance to be relevant to your audience — not once a day, not on an appointment basis once a week, but minute by minute. To do that means being where your users are at all hours of the day — with exactly the right content at the ready. For consumers, it would be like the “Electronic Program Guide” that we’ve had on TV for the last 20 years — only it would be completely personalized and constantly refreshed. Quel fantasme, n’est-ce pas?

  Lo, there’s an app for that — and it’s the No.1 app on every smartphone. Yes, Facebook is the new Electronic Program Guide. Consumers check Facebook many times a day — usually just briefly, sometimes longer — to see “what’s on” in their lives. In fact, 23 percent of all time spent on smartphones is spent on Facebook mobile apps.

  For media companies, the great opportunity here is to cement your relationship with your audience by getting in their network — and then turning up the content they’ll enjoy to whatever frequency interests them. Do it right — with great audience targeting, insight, timing, packaging and testing — and you earn a position at the top of the News Feed hour after hour, day after day.

  Who understands this well in media? Of late, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has been talking about building a “daily habit” with consumers. Why not twice a day, or more? That is the power of presence in the feed. And it comes from meeting each member of your audience where she is.

Smart programming is like a good relationship. It requires paying attention, being responsive, trying new things. It’s hard work, but the rewards are enduring — a loyal, ongoing relationship with a growing audience. And that surely makes it worth the effort.

This is a guest post by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz). Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint, and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile.

Now one cable provider says it will try to break up the bundle: Cablevision has sued Viacom for “illegally forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for 14 lesser-watched ancillary networks its customers do not want.”

On the face of it, Cablevision is directly attacking the core bundling principle the industry has used for years, and continues to implement as pay-TV providers and programmers sign new, long-term deals. It is accusing Viacom of an “illegal tying arrangement in violation of the federal antitrust laws,” and if it is successful, the repercussions could be widespread and significant.

But note that the conventional wisdom in the pay-TV industry is that “tying” rules aren’t applicable to cable bundles — people have tried repeatedly to break the bundle using the courts and failed (here’s the most recent attempt, from last year). And the main remedy Cablevision seems to be seeking is to get out of a carriage agreement it signed with Viacom a few months ago, in December 2012.

If that’s the case, the suit would fit into a familiar pattern in the pay-TV business, where programmers and pay-TV providers joust with lawyers and press releases before agreeing to keep the status quo.

That seems to be what Viacom is suggesting with its response:

“At the request of distributors, Viacom and other programmers have long offered discounts to those who agree to provide additional network distribution. Many distributors take advantage of these win-win and pro-consumer arrangements. Reflecting the highly competitive cable programming business, these arrangements have been upheld by a number of federal courts and on appeal. Viacom will vigorously defend this transparent attempt by Cablevision to use the courts to renegotiate our existing two month old agreement.”

All that said, if the case does go all the way through the court system and ends up in Cablevision’s favor, then we might finally see real change in the pay-TV world: You could imagine a scenario where pay-TV providers and their customers end up paying Disney for ESPN, but not ESPN 2 or ESPN3. Or the Disney channel. Or where News Corp. (which owns this website) wouldn’t be able to require Fox News viewers to take the FX channel as well.

It’s also possible that, given all those choices, consumers might end up choosing the bundles anyway, since pay-TV buyers could experience sticker shock when they see the “real” price of unbundled programming. If ESPN is currently getting more than $5 per subscriber when it sells as part of Disney’s bundle, it’s going to have to charge a multiple of that in an on-demand world — or cut its programming costs way, way, way down.

And even that scenario will take years to play out. Which means that, in the meantime, anyone who’s looking to get into the pay-TV business right now — like, say, an Apple — is still going to have work with the bundle. That’s what Google has already worked out as it steps cautiously into the pay-TV world, and that’s what Intel is doing as it prepares its Web TV subscription service.

Here’s Cablevision’s press release:

CABLEVISION FILES FEDERAL ANTITRUST LAWSUIT AGAINST VIACOM FOR ILLEGALLY FORCING PURCHASE OF PROGRAMMING SERVICES

BETHPAGE, NY, February 26, 2013 – Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC) filed an antitrust lawsuit today against Viacom (NYSE: VIA), in federal court in Manhattan, for illegally forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for 14 lesser-watched ancillary networks its customers do not want, such as Palladia, MTV Hits and VH1 Classic, in order to carry must-have networks such as Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central.

Commenting on the lawsuit and Viacom, Cablevision offered the following statement:

“The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong. Viacom effectively forces Cablevision’s customers to pay for and receive little-watched channels in order to get the channels they actually want. Viacom’s abuse of its market power is not only illegal, but also prevents Cablevision from delivering the programming that its customers want and that competes with Viacom’s less popular channels.”

Cablevision’s suit contends that:

[-] Viacom abused its market power over commercially critical networks, including must-have networks such as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and MTV, to coerce Cablevision into carrying the 14 far less popular ancillary channels.

[-] Viacom coerced Cablevision by threatening to impose massive financial penalties unless Cablevision complied with Viacom’s demands.

[-] Viacom’s conduct harms Cablevision and its customers, and impairs competition by making Cablevision pay for and carry networks that many subscribers do not want to watch, while other networks are excluded from distribution, preventing Cablevision from being able to differentiate its services and harming subscribers.

Cablevision’s complaint asserts that Viacom engaged in a “per se” illegal tying arrangement in violation of the federal antitrust laws. Cablevision’s antitrust lawsuit also asserts that Viacom has engaged in unlawful “block booking,” which is a form of tying that conditions the sale of a package of rights on the purchaser’s taking of other rights. Viacom’s conduct also violates the Donnelly Act in New York State Law, which parallels federal anti-trust laws.

The complaint was filed under seal and a public version is not yet available.

Cablevision is seeking a number of remedies including:

[-] Declaratory relief voiding the December 2012 carriage agreement.

[-] A permanent injunction barring Viacom from conditioning carriage of any or all of its Core networks on Cablevision’s licensing any or all of Viacom’s ancillary networks.

[-] To effectuate the permanent relief, a requirement that Viacom permit Cablevision to carry the Core networks and ancillary products on terms pending negotiation of a new, lawful agreement

[-] Treble damages and legal fees.

Viacom’s eight core networks:

MTV
MTV2
Nickelodeon
VH1
Spike
TV Land
Comedy Central
BET

Viacom’s 14 ancillary networks:

Centric
CMT
MTV Hits
MTV Tr3s
Nick Jr.
Nicktoons
Palladia
Teen Nick
VH1 Classic
VH1 Soul
Logo*
CMT Pure Country**
Nick 2**
MTV Jams**

*Optimum East Only
**Optimum West Only

Antitrust Legal Background
[-] Federal antitrust laws protect competition. By protecting competition, antitrust laws secure lower prices, higher quality, and other benefits for consumers.

[-] The antitrust laws prohibit tying, where a powerful firm wields its leverage from a product in one market, called the “tying” product, to compel a customer to take another product, called the “tied” product, when that customer would have preferred instead to take a product that competes with the “tied” product.

[-] The reason antitrust law prohibits such tie-ins is to protect competition and consumers. If powerful firms can leverage their power from one market to another, they can insulate the tied product from competition. Forcing customers such as Cablevision to take Viacom networks instead of competing networks, in turn, hurts consumers because they get less for what they pay for video services.

Cablevision officials indicated that there would be no immediate disruption in programming offerings pending the resolution of this matter.

About two weeks ago, I heard about a restructuring under HBO SVP of consumer technology Otto Berkes, who also takes over the job of CTO in March from longtime vet Bob Zitter. The former Microsoft exec and Xbox co-founder was named the top tech figure at the premium cable network at the end of last year, after being the primary developer of its popular HBO Go and MAX Go streaming video offerings.

As part of the changes, the memo of the Time Warner unit said, product strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer is leaving HBO.

HBO has been very active in the digital space, increasingly offering its shows on a variety of mobile devices. Earlier this week, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, HBO said its subscribers will be able to stream programming from an Apple iPhone or iPad onto their television via AirPlay.

All the various details are below, in a memo HBO sent to its employees at the end of January:

HBO GO has established HBO as a company that understands the value of technology as a tool for delivering great content and experiences to consumers, and HBO.com has become a primary means of driving broad consumer engagement and awareness of our offerings. We are proud of these achievements and also recognize that we have more ahead of us to accomplish. Over the course of the next several years, our mission is to build best-in-class technology execution capabilities. That mission is central to ensuring that HBO has the tools available to support our business through the ongoing technology-based disruption of media and to support new areas of growth. Like other leading Internet-based video service providers, we will design, build, and deploy scalable products with global reach.

Achieving these goals will require focus and a disciplined approach. Roles and responsibilities must be clear and well-defined to ensure efficient distribution of work and smooth collaboration between groups and people. In order to provide the organizational framework needed to achieve our goals, I am restructuring Digital Products around four functional groups (listed alphabetically):

1. Infrastructure Operations & QA,
2. Program Management,
3. Software Engineering,
4. User Experience & Product Design.

Each of these groups will have responsibilities for both HBO GO and HBO.com as appropriate for the functional areas of each group. This will enable more efficient end-to-end integration and coordination of our design, platform architecture, and infrastructure development.

The attached “Digital Products Organizational Pillars” slide illustrates the roles and responsibilities of each of these four functional groups in greater detail. The leaders of these groups will report directly to me and will continue to do so after my transition to the CTO role.

Donna Stalworth will continue to head up the infrastructure operations and QA efforts in Digital Products. She will also add build and release management to her responsibilities.

Rebekah Calabrese will be stepping into the role of VP of Program Management for Digital Products. She and her team will be responsible for cross-group coordination, project management, budget management, technology vendor relationships, and overall status communication for Digital Products. Rebekah will also continue to provide contract support for Digital Products as well as the other technology groups. Her team will consist of the existing Digital Products program and project management staff and her current reports.

Drew Angeloff will lead all of Digital Products’ software engineering activities in New York as well as in Seattle. Centralizing consumer software engineering in one group under one leader will maximize coordination and the flow of information, and will help ensure a consistent and robust software architecture. This is especially important given geographic distance between the New York and Seattle teams. The engineering staff working on device application development and the GO service currently on Rob Caruso’s team will now report to Drew.

Rob Caruso and the workflow team led by Jason Kui will transition to Diane Tryneski’s organization; Rob will report to Diane. Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.

Dina Juliano will lead the User Experience & Product Design organization. Her team’s responsibilities will include HBO GO, HBO.com, and HBO On Demand. Dina’s team will conceive, design, and realize new digital experiences in partnership with key stakeholders across HBO. She and her team will incorporate consumer and market insights to create a coherent product vision and roadmap that engages our users. Dina’s team will consist of her existing team and the groups formerly in Hans Deutmeyer’s organization.

Hans has decided to leave HBO to pursue opportunities that better align with his future interests. Hans has been a part of the HBO GO story since its genesis and has played a key role in bringing it to the market successfully. Given the new organizational direction, he has decided that this is the right time for him to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank Hans for his contributions and wish him success in his new endeavors.

Please welcome Donna, Rebekah, Drew, Rob, and Dina in their new roles. The changes in their teams and roles are effective immediately.

I am very excited about the new organization and am confident that we have the right the structure, leadership, passion, talent, and creativity needed to deliver best-in-class digital products to our users.

Please let your manager or me know if you have any questions.

Thank you-

— Otto —

Toney is one of the many Zynga employees who have left the games company over the past few months. In October, he stepped down after working there for three years, most of that time as the general manager of Zynga Poker.

“It’s hard to imagine being at a big company now, like Zynga, now that I’m at a small company,” said Toney, after only five weeks on the job. “But that’s why I chose to leave. I wanted to join a company I could lead, and take it to the next level.”

LearnStreet was founded a little over a year ago by Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who saw an opportunity to create an easy way to create online courses. Other education companies have also sprouted up around it, including Codecademy, Khan Academy and Coursera.

LearnStreet claims to teach someone the basics of three programing languages (JavaScript, Python and Ruby) with no development background needed.

Toney said it reminds him of his college years, when he bought himself an HTML programming book and taught himself how to make websites (despite the fact that he was studying business). LearnStreet is the online version of buying a book, and can be used by a student studying computer science, or by a teenager or adult looking for job skills.

While Toney’s most recent experience is based in gaming, he said there’s a number of overlaps between Zynga and the new company.

First, running the Poker division is like “having your own startup,” he said. As the general manager, he was in charge of managing an entire team and budget.  The other similarity is that he plans on LearnStreet having a freemium business model, where customers get some of the course work for free and then pay for additional help — sort of like free-to-play games.

“What we’ve done and discovered is we are beginning to pick up on pain points and friction points, where people are willing to pull out their credit card and pay for additional help,” Toney said.

So far, the company has raised $1 million from Khosla Ventures; now, with Toney on board, he said it plans to raise additional funding soon.

Prior to Zynga, Toney held positions at Nike and eBay. At Nike, he was the Global General Manager for Nike.com, working on the company’s e-commerce strategy; at eBay, he was director and general manager of the company’s collectibles business.

Image via cg-art

In the past decade, I’ve watched software applications experience their own boom in prosperity. When I was at Microsoft, SQL Server 2000, which took two years and hundreds of engineers to build, was a highly regarded product release in large part because of its speed and efficiency. Fast forward to October 2007, and fewer than 20 engineers built and launched the Hulu.com beta after 84 days of development. Less than three years later, three people built the Instagram app in eight weeks. Doing the math, that’s roughly a million collective hours of work for SQL Server 2000, ten thousand work hours for Hulu, and a thousand work hours for Instagram. I’ll admit, those are three very different applications, but they do all share an impressive trait: They are all very successful software products serving millions of users and worth billions of dollars. And the changes in the orders of magnitude are indicative of an important trend: Great software applications have clearly become easier to build.

But that’s only half the story. In a single decade, gone is the need to manufacture, package and distribute physical media (SQL Server). Gone is the need to buy, rack and maintain server hardware (Hulu). You can now focus exclusively on the customer experience and business logic of your application and use third-party platforms for all the supporting infrastructure, and do that all for a fraction of the cost (Instagram). Software applications are doubly prosperous: They are not only easier to make, they’re also far cheaper. The next billion-dollar start-up launched with 100 hours of dev work, costing only a few thousand dollars? It not only could happen, it will happen.

Another way to think of this app prosperity phenomenon is this: Because of the rapidly decreasing time, resources and costs involved, it’s now a given that any app can be built. Pure technical execution is no longer the difference-maker for companies that it once was. Of course, bad engineering can sink any business, but great engineering alone isn’t enough to win anymore — think about highly technically gifted companies like Color, for which engineering capabilities didn’t result in a win. Building faster than the competition is now often a difference of weeks, not years. Building cheaper than the competition is now often a rounding error. When multiple companies can solve the same customer problem in the same amount of time for the same cost, factors other than product and engineering execution will determine who wins.

So what are these new success factors? I’ve seen three important ones emerge: Distribution, Design and Business Model.

Not long ago, Groupon became the fastest company in the history of business to reach $1 billion in sales. But it would be tough to say that was achieved on the backs of engineering horsepower, considering the company didn’t hire its fifth engineer until it had over 100 other employees. But what Groupon did have was total mastery of viral distribution by setting up a clever incentive for customers to promote Groupon to their friends in order to activate deals, which helped grow its email list to more than 150 million subscribers.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann also recently credited distribution — not engineering — as the key ingredient to his company’s success. It’s true that social bookmarking services are pretty easy to build — stand up a templatized Web site and grab Scrapy, Goose or another free crawler framework and you’re in business, which is why there were plenty of those sites before, during and after Pinterest launched. But none were as beautifully crafted or as thoughtfully designed as Pinterest (the poster child for Masonry layout), and none have 20 million users.

More recently, as Warby Parker, Birchbox and a host of other new commerce companies have burst onto the scene, highly targeted and vertical e-commerce has become cool again. But unlike the commerce companies of yesteryear that had to invest in big engineering teams to create custom infrastructure (Amazon used to have its own internal web programming language called catsubst, if you can believe it), these new companies have built on top of third party solutions, most commonly ecommerce-in-a-box Magento. They can then focus their resources and attention on their innovative business models — like Warby Parker with its disruptive pricing and margin management, or Birchbox with its creative subscription plans.

Exceptional growth strategy, user interface and monetization are what made the difference here, not engineering.

In a world of app prosperity, the most prosperous technology companies will be the ones that understand that being able to build their products is only a single step in a much longer journey. When every app can be built by anyone, you don’t need the greatest engineering team to win, and your competition doesn’t need that team to beat you. For businesses, technical execution is necessary, but no longer sufficient, for success. New skills and disciplines will be required to win out. And as consumers, we get to sit back and enjoy the show — because when every app can be built, that also means every app will be built. And that’s when we all get to prosper.

Eric Feng was formerly the founding CTO of Hulu and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). He most recently founded Erly, a social media start-up funded by KPCB, which was acquired in May of this year.

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

NBCUniversal’s digital unit has hired well-regarded HBO exec Alison Moore to be EVP and GM for its women-focused online property DailyCandy.

The move is an interesting one for Moore, who has been a key player in the premium cable channel’s aggressive efforts in digital, including its much-praised HBO Go offering. Moore, a longtime HBO exec, has most recently been the Time Warner unit’s SVP of digital products.

At DailyCandy, the longtime online newsletter and Web site focused on fashion, food and lifestyle, she will report to Nick Lehman, president of digital for NBCU’s Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media group. (NBCU is owned by Comcast.)

Moore’s job will be to turbocharge DailyCandy’s efforts on a range of platforms, and expand its user base of six million women, especially its video offerings.

She also will be working on various multiplatform programming partnerships with NBCU’s many television and digital assets, such as the Style Network.

Moore has worked for HBO since 1995, although at two different times. She left in 1999 to work on two Internet start-ups — Flooz.com and DatSat — and also at Cablevision. She returned to HBO in 2003.

“From my end, it is a huge opportunity to do something new and run a business,” said Moore in an interview yesterday. “At the same time, the user base is passionate and engaged, so it is not unlike HBO in that way.”

Moore said mobile was obviously a top priority, along with more app development and experiments with geolocation. DailyCandy already serves up a wide range of consumer information to women from cities across the U.S., including San Francisco and New York.

“I think the trick to any successful product is how do you create something with an authentic voice that consumers see value in,” said Moore. “This area is ripe for explosion, because great content is king.”

Speaking of great content, here’s a video interview I did with the charming Moore at an HBO event in San Francisco in the spring:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121015/top-hbo-digital-exec-alison-moore-hired-to-run-nbcus-dailycandy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-tv-and-omg-head-moves-to-young-hollywood/ http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-tv-and-omg-head-moves-to-young-hollywood/#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:00:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=259846

Young Hollywood, the high-profile next-gen digital media start-up, has hired a top Yahoo content exec, Liz Coughlin.

The Beverly Hills-based Young Hollywood named Coughlin SVP of business operations, overseeing new business initiatives and all digital operations.

At Yahoo for a decade, Coughlin was most recently in charge of omg!, one of the largest celebrity sites on the Internet, as well as Yahoo TV. She also worked on corporate strategy, partnerships and large events for the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Previous to Yahoo, she worked at the Digitas advertising agency.

“Right now, Young Hollywood is small, but it’s special, and where content production and media business is headed,” said Coughlin in an interview yesterday. “Trying to build new forms of content with the use of new devices and metrics and new forms of programming is an exciting place to be.”

Coughlin officially left Yahoo last week.

Currently, Young Hollywood creates “Entertainment Tonight”-style celebrity and lifestyle programming for other online outlets such as YouTube, Hulu and also Yahoo, as well as working on various marketing initiatives for large brands.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-tv-and-omg-head-moves-to-young-hollywood/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120906/twilios-new-queue-command-offers-hope-to-those-in-the-on-hold-wasteland/ http://allthingsd.com/20120906/twilios-new-queue-command-offers-hope-to-those-in-the-on-hold-wasteland/#comments Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:14:04 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=248327 Raise your hand if you’re familiar with this experience: You’re on the phone with some company you do business with, and you’re on hold. An annoying voice tells you the wait time is going to be 15 minutes or more. You’ve entered your account number and ignored the option to oprima numero dos in the event you’re a Spanish speaker. And you wait, and wait and wait. When you finally get to a human, they don’t know your account number so you have to tell them again. If it’s a repeat call on something you’ve already called about, they don’t know that, either.

Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if, while you were on hold, that otherwise pointless disembodied voice greeted you by name, reassured you that you’re going to be connected to someone who knows exactly what your problem is and how to deal with it, and that it will only be a few more minutes because there is only one more person ahead of you?

If that sounds like some kind of utopian vision for the otherwise infuriating world of automated phone support, it’s not that far from reality. Remember Twilio? This is the company that lets you program your own phone system. It’s the one that makes all its employees create their own application as a way of making everyone familiar with the platform and also showing how easy it is to use.

So yesterday the company announced on its blog a new feature. The wonky software engineer word for it is a “primitive,” which means it’s a deeply fundamental command in an API. Whatever. The command is “Queue,” and what it does is allow companies using Twilio to program their own logical flow for managing people waiting on hold.

For instance, you might decide that when a customer calls in a second or third time within a certain period of time, that they’re having a serious problem. Since presumably you know their phone number from Caller ID, you might route their call directly to the guy who helped them before. Need to get someone else on the phone to help out? It’s easy to bridge the call and bring someone else in.

It’s the sort of thing that, when used creatively, can potentially speed up an otherwise unpleasant, time-consuming and costly process. When you get right down to it, no one on either side of the call really wants to be there, right?

I had a quick chat with Thomas Schiavone, product manager for voice at Twilio, earlier this week. He told me companies using Twilio had already been trying to do some of this using the existing commands in the API. Adding the new Queue command makes it easier, and requires fewer steps to get those things accomplished. “You could have built applications that do all this previously,” he told me. “But we’re making it easier for the developers so they have to do less.”

It’s just another example of how Twilio has been busy this year. In recent months, it has been adding support for international markets in Europe and also Israel. It has also been hiring new senior execs at a fair clip: A CFO in May and before that a CMO in April. Lots of interesting customers, too, including Intuit, eBay and Sony.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120906/twilios-new-queue-command-offers-hope-to-those-in-the-on-hold-wasteland/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 23:50:24 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro and Sam Schechner http://allthingsd.com/?p=242508 Apple Inc.’s vision for a new television set-top box includes features designed to simplify accessing and viewing programming and erase the distinction between live and on-demand content, people briefed on Apple’s plans said.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company proposes giving viewers the ability to start any show at any time through a digital-video recorder that would store TV shows on the Internet. Viewers even could start a show minutes after it has begun. Time Warner Cable Inc. offers a limited version of this feature called Start Over.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120710/blake-krikorian-joins-freewheel-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20120710/blake-krikorian-joins-freewheel-board/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:00:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=228581

Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Amazon board member Blake Krikorian is joining the board of directors of FreeWheel, the video tech start-up that helps entertainment companies manage content across digital platforms.

FreeWheel’s customers include NBC Universal, Vevo, Fox, Turner and ABC. It has raised close to $29 million in funding from a number of venture firms, such as Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said Krikorian will help with corporate strategy and partnerships.

Krikorian was founder and CEO of Sling Media, the device maker which was acquired by EchoStar in 2007. He’s been an angel investor since then, and became an Amazon director last fall.

In an interview, Krikorian said that monetization and rights management have held back innovation in online video, but that content owners have recently released some promising products, such as Disney’s new Apple iOS apps for watching linear television programming.

“FreeWheel has built a trusted technology platform to manage the money flow for video content providers and distributors as their content is delivered across the Web and on mobile,” said Krikorian. “With these business and technology foundations in place, I can finally see the day coming when every media company will deliver all their programming online, in all of its forms including live linear TV.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120710/blake-krikorian-joins-freewheel-board/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:00:14 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=224222

What a weird weekend for journalism.

On Sunday, a day once reserved for fat feature-laden newspapers, a new television show and a San Francisco hackathon brought the future of the media into the limelight in very different ways.

The TV show was HBO’s “The Newsroom,” the newest project of “The Social Network” scribe (and D10 guest) Aaron Sorkin. The hackathon was NewsHack Day, an ambitious attempt to bring self-proclaimed “hacks and hackers” — journalists and coders — together for a mad weekend of learning, brainstorming and creating.

Both were entertaining. But, one was stuck in the past.

First, consider the opening scene of “The Newsroom,” which you can watch on YouTube here. Waxing nostalgic onstage in front of cameras and hundreds of students, protagonist news-anchor Will McAvoy pines for a time when America was great “because we were informed … by great men, men who were revered.”

Then, there was the upshot of NewsHack: In the span of fewer than 30 hours, eight teams formed, built practical Web sites and tools for journalists, and demoed their work for a panel of reporters and programmers.

One team’s Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) tracker, called Bird-Dog, got the big prize: A partnership to develop the tracker inside the Mother Jones newsroom.

“I think [Bird-Dog] is going to become a pretty standard tool in newsrooms across the country,” NewsHack organizer Michael Coren said.

Back in TV-land, Sorkin’s idealistic protagonist is not wrong to let past successes inspire him to be a better journalist.

However, solely celebrating and imitating “great men” is incompatible with the present trajectory of the news media toward greater collaboration among diverse groups of journalists and non-journalists alike.

Other projects at NewsHack (which was free with sponsorships by Knight-Mozilla Open News, among others) included Contextualize, a tool to easily annotate data visualizations to give readers added context; Dial Me In, a site that would automatically upload and transcribe reporters’ phone interviews; and On the Record, which pulls direct quotes out of news articles and lays them out in an aesthetically pleasing timeline, so readers can track who said what and when.

In addition to observing NewsHack Day, I also participated, joining a team called Haystax that aimed to make scraping data from any sort of table on the Web a simple point-and-click process.

The demo of our working prototype generated “oohs” from the audience. But it wouldn’t have happened if Haystax didn’t have a team of some experienced journalists, a dogged programmer and a team leader who straddled both worlds — Tyler Dukes, the managing editor of Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab.

But what we blatantly didn’t have, what no team had, was an easy answer to the big question: What’s next?

At the official start of NewsHack on Saturday morning, Coren emphasized job losses in the media and the “crumbling” of old business models, without new ones to take their place.

The characters in “The Newsroom” know this story, too. “You’re one pitch meeting away from doing the news in 3-D,” one staffer spits at McAvoy.

To which he correctly replies, “This isn’t non-profit theater. It’s advertiser-supported television.” It’s impossible, he gripes, to do a high-quality commercial news show.

Photo courtesy Michael Coren

At the close of the hackathon, money was far from the minds of almost all participants. Only one group described a potential business plan for their project, and many (including Haystax) moved to make their nascent projects open source and free for all online.

“Somebody asked me today, ‘Did you save journalism?’” Coren said. “I’m not sure hackathons are really about fixing the business model.”

So, in the absence of clear business applications for the hacks developed this weekend, the real philosophical question is one we’ve all heard before: How should technology shape the practice of journalism?

To answer that, one last comparison between “The Newsroom” and NewsHack Day is in order.

Halfway through the first episode of Sorkin’s show, the characters get some breaking news: The Deepwater Horizon oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The “good guys” then rally together to find out exactly what happened, in a refreshing acknowledgement of teamwork’s importance to fast reporting.

In a matter of minutes, they produce an hour of TV that proves McAvoy’s pessimism wrong: It’s factual, hard-hitting and insightful.

Impossible? No. But stuck in the past? Still yes.

Perfection was never an option at the weekend’s hackathon. Even given more people from more backgrounds and more time, all the projects demoed on Sunday were plainly incomplete. One of the big themes of the weekend was accepting that incompleteness is okay.

David Cohn, the founder of crowd-funded news platform Spot.us, told a group of NewsHack attendees that learning to work with limitations and imperfection is a vital part of the process, something coders know well and journalists often fear.

“This is a great first time to fail,” Cohn said.

Coren agreed that coders and journalists need to learn to borrow from one another’s rule books. And the only way they can do that is for them to actually do something, rather than just thinking or talking about it.

“It’s not enough to bring journalists in and lecture them,” Coren said. “It requires something that’s more experiential … and more difficult.”

As, of course, it always has been in media that matters.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2012 16:00:08 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=223508

More and more, regular people are learning how to program: Codecademy is drawing hundreds of thousands of students; hackathons have become a seemingly everyday happening across tech-savvy cities like San Francisco; and now some are even calling for children to learn to program in elementary school.

So, are journalists setting themselves up to get left behind by technology again?

Not this weekend, at least. At the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, a hackathon called NewsHack Day kicked off yesterday with a day-long session aimed at teaching reporters how to scrape data for their stories.

Led primarily by ScraperWiki’s Thomas Levine, attendees got a crash course in how to find and pull down data, clean it up, and apply it to projects.

“Computers can do anything that a team of interns can do,” Levine said.

My project? Instantly scraping Securities and Exchange Commission filings for the “compensation tables” that detail what company execs get each year in salary and perks. Done manually, digging those tables out of multiple documents can be slow, but they often contain interesting insights.

Even if some of the drudgery of document-reporting can be outsourced to a computer, though, technical know-how isn’t enough to make a strong story.

Levine used a Department of Labor Web page that linked to unions’ collective bargaining agreements as part of his introductory lesson. But, while looking at the site, he said he didn’t know the difference between “private sector” and “public sector” unions.

T. Christian Miller, a senior reporter for ProPublica in attendance at the event, said the union example shows the need for journalistic “hacks” and tech-savvy “hackers” to work together in the future.

“Every journalist needs to know a little about coding, but it’s hard to expect full knowledge,” Miller said.

To remedy that knowledge gap, the journalists in attendance Friday will be joined over this weekend by designers and programmers, to either flesh out their existing projects or start new ones.

NewsHack weekend organizer Michael Coren, a contributor to FastCompany and The Economist, said projects can be either “story hacks” to bring data into in-progress stories, or more general “news tools” that reporters can use on any number of stories.

So, the SEC scraper would be a “news tool,” because — if it works, and that’s a big if — it could scrape any company’s filings from any year for compensation info.

But what’s the bigger point of all this? Does the reporter of the future have to be equally adept at both writing and coding?

No, Coren said — the most important skill reporters can gain from NewsHack Day is being able to talk like a programmer. That means journalists can know what’s possible with technology and communicate what they want the tech experts to do.

Coren criticized newsrooms that segregate techies from journalists — singling out CNN, as of the time he previously worked there — as part of the problem. He said the sense of journalism as a community of people with different skills is the real goal of NewsHack weekend, not the projects.

“If we come out with great code, I’m going to be happy, but at the end of the day, it’s two days,” Coren said. “The community is what’s sustainable.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 15:59:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207290

Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

The pair will apparently say he is departing for “personal reasons.” Sources said that Thompson will be claiming to be leaving due to a serious illness that he recently discovered he had.

But the evolving crisis — which is just over a week old — centered on his botched resume and how he handled the thorny issue is the key reason for the abrupt end to his tenure as a CEO.

Thompson’s likely replacement on an interim basis will be Yahoo’s global media head Ross Levinsohn, who most recently also ran its Americas unit, including its advertising sales.

In addition to the management upheaval, Yahoo’s board is closing in on a settlement with the man who discovered Thompson’s misstep, activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, said sources.

The situation could change, since Yahoo’s full board still has to meet this morning to officially approve the sweeping changes at the long-troubled company.

But, if it is, this development goes a long way toward fixing some of what has been ailing Yahoo recently.

And it’ll also be a stunning victory for Loeb (pictured here), since the pugnacious hedge fund investor is set to get three board seats from a slate proposed by him as part of a proxy fight aimed at Yahoo. The new Yahoo directors will be media exec Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson. Loeb’s fourth selection — former NBC head Jeff Zucker — will withdraw.

The five current Yahoo directors — who were to step down at the company’s annual meeting this summer — will leave the board effective immediately, sources said, to make way for the Third Point selections.

Finally, Yahoo’s recently added director Fred Amoroso will be named chairman of the board.

Amoroso is the director who has been conducting the investigation into the issues raised by Loeb about how the fake academic credentials got in Thompson’s public bios, as well as in Yahoo’s regulatory filings, and also the hurried circumstances around his hiring in January.

Those mysteries — read, screw-ups — might never be solved now, although Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week. In those gatherings, according to numerous sources, he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back last week with an internal memo, noting that Thompson’s claim was “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume that Thompson had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

That memo, impugning Thompson’s credibility, was one of many that piled on to create an impossible situation for the Yahoo board, related to his leadership ability going forward.

Thompson had also previously issued a Yahoo statement, in which he apologized for the “distraction” caused by the problematic resume, but not for the mistake itself.

And, initially, Yahoo — under his direction — had called the borked resume an “inadvertent error.”

Such fumbling to fix the situation was among the many other issues that the board has been considering relating the ability of Thompson to remain in his job. Also of importance was the sinking morale of Yahoo employees, who had largely rejected Thompson’s excuses in the ResuMess scandal.

Internal message boards at Yahoo lit up all last week, with staffers largely rejecting his explanations. In addition, a number of top execs and engineers approached the board calling for Thompson’s firing.

While that’s not precisely what happened here, it’s close enough to describe Thompson’s departure as inevitable.

All this change comes in the wake of a massive restructuring he was in the midst of at Yahoo, after 2,000 employee layoffs.

Thompson was pushing forward a vision of adding a much more significant data and commerce element to Yahoo’s largely ad-based business.

That is likely to be less stressed under media-focused Levinsohn, who will be essentially trying out to be the permanent CEO.

Well known in the media and advertising communities, he has worked at a number of big online efforts over many years.

According to his bio at Yahoo, where he arrived in 2010:

He previously served as the President of News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, where he was responsible for the day-to-day operations, strategy and acquisitions that helped transformed the company into a leader in digital media. He also held senior management positions with AltaVista, an early pioneer and leader in search, CBS Sportsline where he oversaw all content and development for the top rated sports site, and HBO where he launched and oversaw a unit developing new programming and revenue streams. Levinsohn also was the co-founder and managing director of Fuse Capital, an investment and strategic equity management firm focused on investing in and building digital media and communications companies.

Levinsohn sits on the board of Freedom Communications and the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Program. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from The American University.

So far in my checking, Levinsohn’s resume is accurate.

More to come, obviously.

I have emails and texts and calls into everyone for comment, but apparently they are all out at a Mother’s Day brunch (except me).

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
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• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
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• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
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• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
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• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
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• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:30:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=200299 There’s a certain kind of geek who gets excited about Twilio. Who among software developers wouldn’t jump at the chance of adding voice-calling and text-messaging options to a public-facing application? Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120427/cloud-based-phone-software-start-up-twilio-taps-former-jive-exec-as-its-cmo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120426/former-sun-ceo-vs-former-sun-ceo-in-oracle-google-trial-over-java/ http://allthingsd.com/20120426/former-sun-ceo-vs-former-sun-ceo-in-oracle-google-trial-over-java/#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:41:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=200490 Two former Sun Microsystems CEOs — the one who helped found it and the one who oversaw its sale to Oracle — presented opposing views of how Sun saw its Java platform during the Oracle-Google trial today.

Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120426/former-sun-ceo-vs-former-sun-ceo-in-oracle-google-trial-over-java/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:49:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=193639

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120315/glenn-beck-rallies-troops-for-revolution-against-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20120315/glenn-beck-rallies-troops-for-revolution-against-tv/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:00:52 +0000 Christopher S. Stewart http://allthingsd.com/?p=186593 Glenn Beck still rails against his usual enemies, from the “hardcore socialist left” to “extreme Islam.” Now there is a new target: Mainstream television.

After parting company with Fox News last year, Mr. Beck took his message of outrage and self-reliance online. He launched an Internet video network called GBTV, where he is on air for two hours a day, alongside six more hours of shows, from “Liberty Treehouse,” a history and news program for children, to the reality program “Independence USA,” where a family explores life off the grid.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120315/glenn-beck-rallies-troops-for-revolution-against-tv/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/ http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:40:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=182153 Even though our D: All Things Digital conference always sells out well in advance every year without our announcing even one single speaker (like this one, too), it’s the action on stage that truly matters.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120305/plans-for-tv-everywhere-bog-down-in-tangled-pacts/ http://allthingsd.com/20120305/plans-for-tv-everywhere-bog-down-in-tangled-pacts/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:00:31 +0000 Sam Schechner and Shalini Ramachandran http://allthingsd.com/?p=180450 It was dubbed “TV Everywhere.” But for many TV viewers, it has had trouble going anywhere.

Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120305/plans-for-tv-everywhere-bog-down-in-tangled-pacts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120217/web-tvs-new-lineup/ http://allthingsd.com/20120217/web-tvs-new-lineup/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:31:53 +0000 John Jurgensen http://allthingsd.com/?p=175961 Hollywood veteran Brian Robbins has a new production studio under construction and 35 shows in development. There’s a sitcom set in a high-school bathroom, a talk show modeled on “The View” but hosted by young Twitter celebrities and a series about an outlandish teen wrestling league.

Mr. Robbins, a producer and director known for Eddie Murphy movies and TV shows including “Smallville,” plans to produce 120 hours of teen programming this year, all of it destined exclusively for the Web. “We consider ourselves a network,” he says.

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