Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009′s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009′s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability. This week my mailbox contained questions about badly scratched up iPod nanos, using Slingbox to beam a cable signal, and video chat on Windows.

If you have a question, send it to me at mossberg@wsj.com, and I may select it to be answered here in Mossberg’s Mailbox.

You and other writers gave the Apple iPod nano a rave review. But my nano is badly scratched up after only a couple of weeks of careful use, and there are lots of similar reports online. What’s going on?

Based on my own experience of about a month with the product, and emails I’ve received from readers, I believe the tiny, thin iPod nano is much more prone to scratching than earlier iPods, even though they, too, picked up scratches.

If I were reviewing the nano today, I would still call it “the best combination of beauty and functionality of any music player I’ve tested,” as I did in my review. But I would include a strong, prominent, warning that it scratches too easily in normal usage. This is a real downside to an otherwise excellent product.

My review of the nano ran on Sept. 8, and was based on four days of tests with an evaluation unit lent me by Apple. I bought my own nano the next day. The test nano, a new production model delivered in the box, picked up some scratches in testing, like any iPod, but nothing out of the ordinary or which impacted functionality.

But, after just under a month of daily use, my own nano is badly scratched, and looks beat up when viewed at an angle. Worse, there are several large scratches across the screen that impede functionality by making text and photos slightly harder to see. I have never tested or owned any portable electronic device that picked up as many scratches as quickly as the iPod nano.

Like the previous iPods I’ve owned, my nano has never been sheathed in a case. Like the others, I carry the nano — by itself — in my pants or jacket or shirt pockets; or loosely in a briefcase or carry-on travel bag, in a pocket containing no other hard objects. This is also how I carry my Treo smart phone, whose screen is free of scratches after much longer and harder use than the nano’s. My nano hasn’t been dropped or scraped. Yet it is badly scratched.

My recommendation now is that nano owners must buy and use a case for the device. That’s a shame with a product as beautiful and sleek like this, because it ruins the look and feel of the thing and adds to the cost. But I don’t consider it optional.

Apple says it uses exactly the same clear coating on the nano as on some earlier iPods, and that its engineers have conducted tests that show the nano isn’t any more vulnerable to scratches than other current iPods. Apple also says it hasn’t had a large number of complaints about scratching on the nano.

Company officials speculate that, because cases for the nano aren’t being sold in volume yet, early buyers who would normally protect an iPod with a case haven’t been able to do so with the nano. They also suggest that, because of its small size, some users may have carried it in places and ways that differ from how they carried larger iPods, and which increased the possibility of scratching.

I can’t dispute any of that, but I believe that something about the size and weight of the nano, and therefore the way it is used and behaves when carried, is making the coating Apple applies far less effective than it is with larger iPods.

I believe Apple should include a strong, thin case with every nano, starting as soon as possible. And Apple should research some sort of tougher coating for future nano models.

I would like to have the ability to watch TV at my office from my cable at home. We have Comcast cable-modem service at the house, but Verizon DSL in the office. Will the Slingbox work between two different Internet providers?

Yes. The Slingbox, a $250 gadget that beams TV from your home to a distant laptop via the Internet, works just fine with mixed groups of broadband services and providers. All you need is broadband on both ends. In fact, when I tested it, I used different types of broadband with no problem. More information is at www.slingmedia.com.

Is there a Windows equivalent to the video chat feature in Apple’s iChat instant-messaging program that comes with the Macintosh?

Yes and no. Both Yahoo and MSN, and possibly others, allow video chats to be conducted using Windows PCs over their instant messaging services, if both parties have a camera installed. But unlike with Apple’s iChat, these are one-to-one chats. The Apple program allows as many as four people in a video chat, each in its own large window, provided the person initiating the video chat has a powerful Mac model and all four people have cameras.

There is a lesser-known IM service called Paltalk (www.paltalk.com) that allows group video chats. I haven’t tested or reviewed Paltalk, but I have seen it work. It allows many more participants than Apple’s product does, but only one person can be speaking at a time. With Apple’s iChat, everyone can speak at any time, just as if they were in the same room. Paltalk plans to add the multiple-speaker feature next year.

* * *

Because of the volume of e-mail I receive, I can’t routinely answer individual questions by e-mail, or consult on individual problems or purchasing decisions. I read all questions I receive and select three each week to answer in the column.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

But there is another idea for making TV watching convenient that is less well known. It is called “place shifting.” Place shifting allows viewers to watch TV shows they receive at home in other locations, and on devices other than their TV sets.

Unlike time shifting, which has been around for decades, place shifting is just getting going. A few portable video players are available, but they can’t play live TV, only shows recorded on special TiVo models or relatively expensive TV-capable “Media Center” PCs. And they are clumsy to use.

Today, however, place shifting of TV shows takes a big leap forward. A Silicon Valley start-up company called Sling Media is introducing a $250 gadget it calls a “personal broadcaster.” This small device, named the Slingbox, can beam any live TV show coming into your home to an Internet-connected Windows PC anywhere in the world. It also allows you to remotely watch shows you have recorded at home on a TiVo or other digital video recorder.

Sling Media’s Slingbox

The Slingbox gives you full control of your home TV and digital recorder even if you are thousands of miles away. You can change channels, use the program guide, and perform any action on the menus of your TV or recorder just as if you were sitting in front of your set. The home TV doesn’t even have to be on at the time.

And, best of all, the Slingbox is just a piece of hardware, not a service. It is a small silver box that simply sits between your cable or satellite receiver and your home broadband Internet connection and pumps your TV programs out via the Internet. It doesn’t require a TiVo, and it works with a standard Windows PC.

There are no periodic fees to pay, no membership is required and no advertisements are beamed at you other than the normal commercials that appear in the TV programs. All you shell out is the $250 for the device itself. Starting today, it will be available at CompUSA and Best Buy stores, and at those companies’ Web sites.

I have been testing the Slingbox at home, in my office and on the road. In my tests, it worked exactly as advertised. At my office, about a dozen miles from home, I watched recorded episodes of “Charlie Rose” and “Desperate Housewives.” At an airport, I watched CNBC live on my laptop via a public Wi-Fi connection. And in a Boston hotel room, about 450 miles from home, I watched a live Washington Nationals baseball game unavailable in Red Sox country.

The Slingbox was even useful when I hung around the house. I was able to watch live and recorded shows in rooms of my house that lacked TVs, and even while sitting out on my porch.

Video quality was surprisingly good — much better than the average video clip streamed over the Internet. The company has some video-optimizing technology that resulted in mostly smooth, stutter-free viewing. There were a few brief freezes, but nothing serious, even when I expanded the video playback window to the full screen.

The Sling software is well designed and easy to use. It allows you to view TV programs in a variety of sizes and formats, and it includes a software control panel with all of the key functions of your home remote control.

Setup, while not perfect, was as easy as the company could possibly make it, given the complexity of computer networking.

That brings me to the inevitable downsides and limitations of any new product. The Slingbox requires a broadband connection on both ends. It only works on PCs running Windows XP. The company has demonstrated it running on PDAs and cellphones, but software for those devices isn’t ready yet. Software for Macintosh computers is in the works.

You need a home network and a router. And even though the setup software and the manual are very well done, there is a step where you have to configure your router for the Slingbox that can get complicated fast. This has more to do with the needless complexity of computer networking than with Sling Media itself, but it can be an obstacle.

Also, the Slingbox doesn’t allow you to record or save the programs you receive on your remote computer, mostly for legal reasons — though somebody will probably come up with a way to do that. Similarly, mainly for legal reasons, there is no built-in way to give access to your Slingbox to another person, but all that person needs is a copy of the free Sling software, your password and your Slingbox’s ID number, which you could give them. Two PCs can’t access the same Slingbox at the same time, however.

There is another problem with the Slingbox: It extends the fight over the remote well beyond the walls of your home. If someone is watching the TV at home and you start changing channels from afar or launching recorded programs the other person doesn’t want to watch, long-distance arguments can ensue.

Still, I really like the Slingbox and can heartily recommend it to roaming TV lovers. It is a very good product that finally makes TV place shifting a reality.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com