Marissa Mayer — the typically press-loving Silicon Valley exec who has avoided much media interaction since she took over as CEO of Yahoo — will be doing her first sit-down interview at the end of the month at a Fortune magazine event.

In the chat, according to an invite for a November 27 Silicon Valley dinner for its Most Powerful Women franchise, “she plans to talk about where she is taking Yahoo and what excites her about the future of technology.”

Pull up your chairs, people!

Actually, Mayer has recently spoken most specifically about her plans for the long-troubled company, but it was more formally during Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings call, in which she outlined a mobile-heavy strategy and also a plan to make smaller acquisitions.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said then to Wall Street analysts, soon after which she bought a tiny mobile start-up called Stamped.

But Mayer has yet to sit down live with a journalist — she had agreed to appear for a sit-down stage interview at a recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, but she opted instead to be a demo judge, where the former Google exec said nothing about her new job at Yahoo.

Mayer will presumably be doing just that with Fortune editor-at-large Pattie Sellers, who helms the high-profile annual Most Powerful Women conference and also the magazine’s list that featured Mayer on the cover this year (see above). Sellers has also just written a profile of Mayer titled “Ready to Rumble at Yahoo,” which did not include her participation but did have quotes from one of her recent hires — Patricia Moll Kriese — at Yahoo.

But Sellers appears to be the only reporter that Mayer has spoken to on the record since she got the job, although her comments in one piece just after she got the job were mostly limited to the topic to her pregnancy. Sellers also announced the name of Mayer’s baby — Macallister — in another recent post.

Presumably, Mayer will talk about her new son with Sellers, but it will be interesting to see what she says about Yahoo, as well as on the future of technology. At an annual Churchill Club gadget event the techie did with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, Mayer showed off a keyboard whose keys had embedded LCD screens, a wireless rabbit, an alarm clock that can jump off your nightstand and a T-shirt with a wireless signal locator in it.

Here is a video of her in full geek mode talking about that way back when:

So that’s what Tim Armstrong is going to do: After years of keeping its clips off YouTube, AOL is finally going to start distributing its video on Google’s site, via 22 branded “channels.”

TechCrunch will gets its own real estate there, and so will HuffPost Live, and Moviefone, etc.

These aren’t YouTube’s new channels, where Google offers video makers a cash advance in exchange for a window of exclusivity on the site.

Instead, the deal is constructed the way YouTube used to approach “premium” content makers: A simple Internet real estate + revenue sharing deal.

That is, AOL gives YouTube access to the stuff it’s already making, and sells the YouTube inventory itself. The clips will run using YouTube’s player, and the two companies split revenue.

A simple premise, with an obvious upside for both sides. The only real question is why it took this long to get it done. Perhaps Tim Armstrong’s predecessors didn’t fully appreciate YouTube’s heft, but the AOL CEO doesn’t have that excuse himself: His last big job at Google before he left for AOL was a YouTube overhaul.

It was an important moment — the first time the company’s CEO would publicly address the company’s tanking share price.

After an impressive performance, the Street seemed reassured. Facebook stock posted a gain of nearly 8 percent on Wednesday, lifting it to $20.93 per share at the close.

Perspective: The uptick is not earthshaking in itself, as far as price jumps go. Facebook debuted at $38 per share back in May, and has since been chopped in half. But shares are out of the teens, back to mid-August levels — an encouraging boost for those shaken by the stock’s precipitous drop in such a short period of time.

Another potential bonus: It’s probably nice for those employees inside of Facebook concerned about their shares. Perhaps the perks that come with starting work at Facebook aren’t as attractive as they once were. But the fact that a powerful speech from their company’s CEO can raise hopes on Wall Street will no doubt have implications for internal morale (not to mention recruitment possibilities).

(h/t to @mattlynley for hed inspiration!)

But Reid Hoffman, co-founder and now executive chairman of the company, ain’t trippin’.

“We were initially trying pretty hard to keep the relationship with Twitter,” Hoffman said, because “we were concerned about the liquidity of the stream.” That is, Hoffman and company could have been left up a creek without Twitter, considering most of the content flowing through users’ LinkedIn streams was made up of their Twitter accounts.

Hoffman’s tale, three months on, is a different tune entirely. “When Twitter cut us off, we got better, business-focused conversation,” he said onstage at the TechCrunch: Disrupt technology conference in San Francisco. “From a LinkedIn perspective, it improved the product to lose the Twitter connection.”

In a nutshell: Whatever, Twitter. LinkedIn doesn’t need you.

Quite the about-face, considering the strong relationship between the two companies over the two-and-a-half-year span they were together. As Twitter contained far more content flowing through the system than LinkedIn users provided, the partnership certainly seemed to make sense for LinkedIn and in theory for Twitter as well, as a source of new referrals.

Alas, as I’ve been told by sources in the past, LinkedIn was really the only one benefiting from the partnership. Twitter didn’t see any major boosts in sign-ups coming from LinkedIn, yet LinkedIn was able to parlay the wealth of Twitter data into launching the LinkedIn Today product, a highly trafficked portion of the site where users see the day’s top news stories from around the Web. Tweets fueled the social news service, boosting the Today product’s rapid ascent.

But as a LinkedIn spokeswoman told me then: “Tweets have not been powering LinkedIn Today for some time.”

So in essence, LinkedIn got what it needed from Twitter — tons of free content flowing through the network for years. Now that LinkedIn is on its feet and riding high with its existing products, however, the loss isn’t as big a deal as it may have once seemed (or at least so Hoffman says).

However, the LinkedIn cutoff was a big deal for another reason: It signaled the end of Twitter playing nice with its ecosystem of partners and third-party developers, instead setting more strict guidelines on how others could use tweets in their products and services. The technology world as a whole has largely been up in arms over it, citing Twitter’s about-face as too harsh to the engineers and people who made Twitter into the great service it is today.

Hoffman had choice words on that issue, too, albeit slightly more politic than others in the Valley: “It was partial bullshit, not total bullshit.”

That is to say, Twitter’s moves toward better controlling its ecosystem are to be expected — after all, the company must focus on monetizing as it matures, and it has a fiduciary responsibility to its investors to do so.

On the other hand, the mom-and-pop developer outfits who have based their livelihoods on the platform now find themselves in the lurch. And Twitter has been slow to clarify how its new developer guidelines would affect its third-party network, further fueling the fire of confusion and techie outcry.

Whatever the case, LinkedIn seems to have come out ahead in the ordeal: The company’s product portfolio remains solid, with its user base growing steadily. And of all the tech IPOs in the past year, LinkedIn has fared quite well: The company’s shares have more than doubled over the past 52 weeks.

In other words: We’re cool, guys. With or without Twitter’s ongoing help.

Horowitz compared Facebook’s recent woes to his own experience with taking a company public, when as CEO he led hosting services company LoudCloud to market 11 years ago.

“We were similar to Facebook,” Horowitz said at the TechCrunch: Disrupt technology conference Monday morning, “in that it wasn’t the most opportune time for the company to take it public.” Because of this (and other factors, no doubt), LoudCloud initially lost 95 percent of its value.

Contrast that to Facebook’s current plight. The company’s shares have been in free fall, its stock price more than halved in the four months since first being listed on the Nasdaq at $38 per share, valuing the company at a massive $104 billion. As it sits this morning, shares of Facebook are hovering around $18.

Also familiar is the blame game, Horowitz said: “Lots of people were calling for me to be fired.” Similarly, there have been some calling for the heads of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg or the oft-blamed David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer who painstakingly led the company through the long IPO process.

Perhaps the biggest strain, however, isn’t on the management — it’s on the rank-and-file members of the social giant. “It creates a lot of pressure on the employees,” Horowitz said. “A lot of the employees go home at the end of the day, facing others who are saying to them, ‘So I read in the paper that you guys are a bunch of idiots.’” That’s a gnarly morale hit that would wear on any company over time — especially after one of the most-watched public market debuts in tech history.

That’s most likely why Zuckerberg will take the stage at Disrupt on Tuesday, to address the public for the first time since his company went public. No doubt Wall Street, the Valley and Facebook’s employees will all be paying rapt attention (I know I will).

But in the end, Horowitz essentially argued that everything ends up working out — as long as the company leadership stays focused. LoudCloud pulled a pivot (to some degree) and turned into OpsWare, which went on to be acquired by HP for $1.6 billion in 2006.

Horowitz’s message wasn’t, “Don’t worry Mark, one day you’ll be able to sell!” It was to weather the storm, because when you go public, negative attention like this is to be expected.

“In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong,” Horowitz said. But when that IPO comes, “the public reverses, and investors are all incensed that the entrepreneur screwed them” if they aren’t getting expected returns in the market.

In other words — hang in there, Mark.

Waiting to pay $8 a month for Spotify’s premium service? Don’t hold your breath.

Yes, as TechCrunch reported yesterday, the streaming music company is getting ready to roll out a version of its service that will work on a Web browser, instead of requiring special software.

But it’s not, as TechCrunch suggested yesterday, preparing to cut the rate for its mobile, ad-free service by 20 percent.

The price cut would have been a biggish deal for Spotify, because it would have suggested that the company had concluded that its current model was broken. But it’s not happening now or anytime in the forseeable future, say people who understand Spotify’s thinking.

A couple things to bear in mind:

• Spotify, like its streaming service competitors, hands the music labels and copyright owners about $7 a month for each paid subscriber it signs up. Cutting its monthly fee from $10 a month to $8 would blow up its margins.
• Spotify is open to monkeying around with its pricing and lots of other features. For instance, it’s currently testing a version of the service that doesn’t require new users to sign up via Facebook. And in the long run, it would probably like to cut its prices if it could figure out how to make the economics work. But Spotify has already tested out a price cut, in Spain, and found it had little effect on take-up rates. So for now, if you want to hear Spotify without ads, or if you want to hear it on an iPhone or Android machine, it’s going to be $10.

As far as the browser goes: Some users should start seeing the option pop up in the next month or so. In practical terms, that means new and current users will find it easier to play songs immediately, because they won’t have to download or boot up secial software. That’s particularly useful when people encounter Spotify links via social media, or “play buttons” the company has been pushing out to Yahoo and many other sites.

But Spotify still expects most users to use its software most of the time, and will encourage new users to download the client.

The browser-based version will be missing some capabilites that Spotify thinks are crucial, like the ability to play cached music without an Internet connection, as well as the apps the company made a big fuss about last year.

The main idea here: Spotify has 15 million users, and 4 million of them are paying subscribers. It would like to increase both numbers, and thinks a Web-based version of the software will help do it.

But it’s also not counting on the browser to do a whole lot for them. Expect to see a big marketing push from the company — including evidence of the big Coke partnership it touted earlier this year — in the coming months.

Think of it as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook with a purpose.

In other words, #waywire wants to be a media company where teens and young adults can share user-generated content, kick off a debate and spur discussion.

“There’s a big void out there,” said #waywire’s Founder and CEO Nathan Richardson. “There’s a lot of people using social utilities to say things, but very few places are bringing context around it.”

Richardson said his company is targeting millennials — a generation of people who grew up completely wired and never read news from a paper, make calls from a landline or take pictures that require developing.

“There’s an opportunity to give them the way to give them a place to upload user-generated content that matters to them and marry it with curated content to give context and then anchor with original content,” Richardson added.

One of those contributors will be Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, who is also one of the company’s founders.

In an interview, Booker joked that you can follow him on Twitter at your peril, because he sends so many tweets. He said the idea for the company started to jell earlier this year as he sought other ways to shift America’s public conversation away from “divisiveness” and toward “solutions.”

Mayor Booker plans to contribute content for the network, but since he’s already got a day job, he will not be part of company’s management. To keep everything separate between his role at the company and his role as a public figure, he will keep his stake in #waywire in a trust while he’s in public office.

The New York-based media site is coming out of stealth on Monday to announce that it has raised $1.75 million in capital to get off of the ground. The site will launch in beta this summer, but will start accepting registrations as soon as Monday.

Joining Booker as co-founders are Richardson and Sarah Ross. Most recently, Richardson was president of Gilt City; before that, he had a variety of media roles, including CEO of ContextNext Media, head of Dow Jones online, and general manager of Yahoo Finance. Ross comes to #waywire from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo.

Here’s the full release:

First Round Capital and Innovation Endeavors Lead Seed Funding Round in New Social Artery #waywire

NEW YORK, NY, JULY 2, 2012 — #waywire, a social artery for video news, inspiration and leading voices, today announced it has closed a seed capital round led by First Round Capital and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, along with Troy Carter and a group of angel investors. #waywire is focused on providing a network that will serve to fundamentally alter the tone and content of public dialogue around some of society’s most pressing issues. The network will provide original, syndicated and community created video content, allowing today’s digital generation to develop informed opinions on topics and then engage in positive debates and discussions.

“As soon as I was exposed to the #waywire concept, I knew there was something truly different here,” said Howard Morgan, Managing Partner of First Round Capital. “Most people agree that there is a real problem with the tone of our public dialogue. #waywire will work to change that by building a network that latches onto the attitudes of the digital generation and deliver rich content that helps to educate and inform as well as provide a forum to express opinions.”

The company was co-founded and is led by Chief Executive Officer, Nathan Richardson along with Sarah Ross another #waywire co-founder. Richardson brings an extensive track record of building and leading successful online properties including prior positions as president of Gilt City, CEO of ContentNext Media, head of Dow Jones online and General Manager of Yahoo! Finance. Ross comes to #waywire with digital experience from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo! Inc. Howard Morgan, of First Round Capital, will join the #waywire Board of Directors.

“There are networks to connect friends, and there are simple ways to share news articles or stories, but there is a definite opening in the social spectrum for a network where people can go and learn about issues that truly matter to them and engage with peers and experts on a wide range of topics,” said Richardson. “This existing gap contributes to the divisions that impact our national dialogue. We think #waywire can help address this problem by providing millions of people – especially the young, digitally savvy generation – a network for video news, inspiration and leading voices.”

Also among #waywire’s co-founders is Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, N.J. The idea behind #waywire came from Mayor Booker and grew from his desire to shift America’s public conversation away from divisiveness toward a debate focused on achieving solutions. The Mayor plans to contribute original content to the #waywire network where he will discuss America’s most significant challenges with a variety of thought leaders from diverse backgrounds. Mayor Booker will not be part of day-to-day management of #waywire and will have no editorial involvement in the network. His ownership stake will be maintained in a trust while he remains in public office.

“When I experienced the possibilities of social media and video, I saw the beginnings of an answer to a problem that is facing America. I believe #waywire can be a network for people everywhere to move away from partisan grandstanding toward a productive national debate about solutions to the problems we are all facing,” said Mayor Booker. “It is also extremely important to me that we not only begin to convene an online dialogue with as many people as possible, but provide a series of face-to-face conversations in live settings.”

#waywire will begin accepting email registrations for the site’s private beta release at www.waywire.com. Additional content agreements are expected in the coming weeks.

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider of Automattic, speaking at the Le Web conference.

That’s why sites like Tumblr and more recently Automattic — the 106-person company behind the powerhouse blogging platform WordPress.com — have taken steps toward better social integration, hoping to attract publishers who are looking to increase user engagement on their sites.

Take Automattic first, for instance. WordPress introduced a Facebook plugin on Tuesday, allowing for simpler integration of Facebook features across WordPress.com VIP clients as well as self-hosted WordPress sites. The plugin lets publishers cross-post WordPress content to Facebook Timelines, Pages and activity feeds, while also offering a series of improved widgets such as “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, a Meebo-like recommendations bar and a Facebook-integrated comment system.

It’s a nice, enriching update that helps both sides of the reader/publisher equation. For one, it embraces “Facebook as Internet passport,” allowing readers to comment and reach content through existing Facebook accounts rather than signing in through a separate commenting system. And for publishers, content can spread further, faster; the plugin streamlines the process of pushing out articles to Facebook Pages and attracting a wider readership.

(Disclosure: AllThingsD is a WordPress.com client. I’m writing this post using WordPress.)

And it’s a much-needed feature set for WordPress, a platform previously criticized for being late to social. Despite having launched close to a decade ago, it was only last year that Automattic first introduced social features into WordPress.com. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg previously told AllThingsD that the company was more focused on making WordPress into a richer, more general publishing platform than choosing to pursue social features initially, hence the tardiness.

As time wore on, however, WordPress weaved in and out of redefining itself, moving from blogging platform to full content management system to an application platform. While power users may have grown happy with WordPress’ rich feature set, the simpler, more accessible Tumblr quickly sprang up over that same period, making it easier for the layman to sign up and start blogging right away. In just five years, Tumblr has grown to hosting nearly 60 million blogs. WordPress, which has been around for twice as long as Tumblr, currently powers around 74 million blogs. About half of those are hosted by WordPress.com.

And since Tumblr integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph in April, their numbers are only trending upward. Tumblr saw 2.5x growth during the month after integrating with Open Graph, Facebook recently wrote in a blog post.

Caveat: Automattic expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year, which flows from the company’s VIP service as well as site “power ups” and other products available for purchase. Tumblr’s business model could generously be described as emerging: The company just switched on its first paid advertising in May.

There are other winners. Facebook obviously stands to gain much from the new plugin, potentially allowing tens of millions of new blogs to funnel content into the Facebook newsfeed with the mere checking of a box inside WordPress. That means increased stickiness inside of Facebook which, again, makes for more — and potentially better targeted — ads served.

There are also losers. Disqus, long seen as a strong contender in the comment and moderation software space, could be seriously threatened by Facebook’s continued spread across blogs. Sites like TechCrunch switched to Facebook comments after years of being dissatisfied with Disqus. CNN and BuzzFeed also use Facebook integration.

But Disqus still has reach. It is currently integrated across 750,000 sites (including AllThingsD, by the way) and hopes to extend that further with a redesign expected in the coming weeks. To compete for publisher attention against Facebook comments, however, Disqus will most likely need to improve its existing social functionality.

Whoever wins or loses, one truth remains clear: You can’t get away with putting off social anymore.

After buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL gave Ms. Huffington editorial oversight of all its properties, including tech-news site TechCrunch, the patch.com network of local news sites, MovieFone and MapQuest. In addition, more than 30 AOL properties, such as Politics Daily, were absorbed by the Huffington Post.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Have you never heard of Starboard Value?

Me, either!

But the New York activist fund is readying to make a splash as soon as today, several sources said, if it follows through on the expected naming of an alternate board to challenge AOL.

Saturday is the official deadline to nominate directors to the board of AOL, also based in New York, which will have all eight up for reelection.

Sources said Starboard has talked to several Internet types, but that it has plans to put up a slate made up more of Wall Streeters to present at the company’s annual meeting later in the year.

In a filing last week, Starboard said it had been in discussions with AOL management about its concerns, so it is certainly possible the investor and the company could come to some agreement over board seats and strategic direction before it gets Yahoo-ugly.

That would make it a kind of an East Coast proxy battle version of what’s been going on over at Yahoo and its tussle with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. He recently followed through on long-expressed unhappiness with the Silicon Valley Internet giant, and named a slate of directors — including well-known media exec Jeff Zucker — to replace current ones there.

The same kind of thing has been in the works at Starboard, which sent a letter in late December to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, saying his much-touted strategy around content was not a good one for investors.

Like Loeb at Yahoo, Starboard is one of AOL’s largest shareholders, with a stake of just over five percent.

The letter signaled an increasing impatience with the pace of Armstrong’s turnaround efforts, which are still in turnaround. Meanwhile, AOL’s stock has rebounded from last summer’s lows of near $10 a share.

The stock is up more than 22 percent this year, to $18.44. But that’s still down almost 20 percent from when AOL spun off from Time Warner and went public in late 2009.

The grumpy (and opportunistic) Starboard entered the picture late last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Starboard, which focuses mainly on small-cap companies, was spun off from Cowen Group Inc.’s Ramius Capital LLC in March. In October, the fund successfully waged a proxy fight against hair-salon chain owner Regis Corp. when three of its director nominees were elected to Regis’s board. AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009 after a failed merger, is its most high-profile target yet.”

One of the investment fund’s bugaboos is Patch, the local news network that AOL has sunk a lot of dough into. Also under fire is Armstrong’s content efforts and the pace of its display advertising sales, including the high-profile acquisition of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

I have emails into all the bigs at AOL and Starboard, so we’ll see who calls back first, if at all.

As has been widely reported, well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy has a new gig: Running her own new tech news site, which debuts today.

(She’s pictured here with another recent adorable start-up of hers, named Eli.)

Not so widely reported? The site, called PandoDaily.com, will feature three of TechCrunch’s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.

That’s right, Lacy is Arrington’s boss this time around — even though his CrunchFund venture firm will also be an investor, in a funding round of more than $2 million for PandoDaily.

Other investors — whom Lacy described as “people I like and respect” — include a panoply of tech movers and shakers, including personal investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Matt Cohler, Jeff Jordan, Josh Kopelman, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Saul Klein, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon, as well as seed investments from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures.

There will certainly be questions about all these funders who are also topics of PandoDaily’s posts, which Lacy acknowledged. She said the large number of funders was calculated so that none had undue influence.

Of course, many in Silicon Valley will be watching her carefully for any conflicts of interest or punches pulled. Lacy insisted that there will not be a problem and joked that she will definitely not become a VC, referring to the controversy around Arrington becoming one while at TechCrunch.

That issue blew up like a Roman candle, of course, leaving everyone with powder burns — I called the incident a “giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.”

Interestingly, Lacy did manage to stay out of the spotlight (she was, in fact, having her baby during the worst of the controversy, which was likely more painful).

Ignoring the delicious epic revenge part of this on AOL — which bought TechCrunch and then promptly presided over a tech version of the War of the Roses (and is, ironically, an investor via CrunchFund) — PandoDaily will focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley and everywhere else that homegrown spirit of innovations reaches.

Here’s a screenshot of the cleanly designed and handsome site:

In an inaugural post, titled ““Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy compared the site to a colony of trees in Utah, saying, “We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”

Which is kind of like TechCrunch, which she left earlier this year.

“This is not TechCrunch 2.0,” Lacy said to me in an interview last week. “But, of course, we will be compared to TechCrunch.”

Of course, especially because of the presence of its star lineup on PandoDaily — who will write regularly, along with an initially small staff of other writers — and also its plans for conferences and other gatherings.

(An AOL source, by the way, said there were no contractual noncompete issues for PandoDaily to worry about.)

Here’s a longish interview I did about PandoDaily with Lacy, who has written two books focused on entrepreneurs, worked at Businessweek and was founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s daily show “TechTicker.”

She talks about the site’s unusual name, her wrangling over leaving TechCrunch, and the prospect of now running her own show.

Welcome back, Sarah (and call me if you need help with those dudes, as we have wrangled before).

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120116/sarah-lacy-debuts-new-tech-site-pandodaily-and-guess-whos-working-for-her-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:06:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=157537

I was on San Francisco’s public radio station today, talking about this past year in tech with “Forum” host Michael Krasny and fellow panelists, former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy and CNET’s Molly Wood.

2011 was a big year, as it turned out, with good and bad news for companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and others.

We also looked forward to 2012, which will include new online TV efforts and, of course, the much-anticipated Facebook IPO.

Here’s the chat:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111228/viral-audio-a-year-in-tech-a-look-back-at-2011-and-forward-to-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111111/tech-blogger-starts-a-company-around-his-data-mining-aka-web-stalking-skills/ http://allthingsd.com/20111111/tech-blogger-starts-a-company-around-his-data-mining-aka-web-stalking-skills/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:10:24 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=143265 Longtime tech blogger (if there is such a thing!) Marshall Kirkpatrick is starting a data mining company devoted to discovering emerging information.

Called Plexus Engine, the start-up will target information workers such as those in marketing and PR.

Kirkpatrick had developed over his years at ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch tools for getting scoops not by talking to sources but by tracking people online. For instance, he found geo-located tweets from a Twitter engineer in Utah that corroborated the location of a Twitter data center there, and generated instant message alerts for himself when people he was tracking made comments on any blog around the Web.

Kirkpatrick said Plexus Engine has been in testing for a year and a half. He will continue to write columns for ReadWriteWeb.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111111/tech-blogger-starts-a-company-around-his-data-mining-aka-web-stalking-skills/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111102/exclusive-aols-tim-armstrong-says-he-doesnt-want-a-yahoo-deal-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111102/exclusive-aols-tim-armstrong-says-he-doesnt-want-a-yahoo-deal-video/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:11:42 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=139387 Tim Armstrong felt good enough about his Q3 results to host two calls today: One with Wall Street, and another with the media. And the AOL CEO also let me drop by HQ with my shakycam and film a quick interview.

Important points from our chat:

• AOL’s domestic display-ad sales — a key metric for the company — were up 14 percent, but those numbers include new revenue from the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, both purchased in the last year. If you stripped those acquisitions out, domestic display would be up 4 percent — down from 6 percent last quarter.
• AOL’s traffic, meanwhile, which includes Huffington Post and TechCrunch, has flatlined. Armstrong says that’s in part because his access business is declining (once people stop paying for AOL, they visit less often) and, in part, because of integration issues. But he predicts that number will tick up again.
• Asked to identify AOL’s key competitor, Armstrong passed, and instead offered “the usual suspects”: Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
• What’s up with Yahoo? I expected some squirming from Armstrong on this one, and if you watch the video, you’ll see he never denies that he has talked to Yahoo about some kind of deal, or bankers, or whatever. But he also insists that he wants to keep the company independent, which is as close to a denial as we’re going to get.

Here’s my quickly edited transcript of that discussion (I’ve paraphrased my questions, but quoted his answers), which kicks in around the 3:35 mark.

Me: So what’s going on with Yahoo? Are you talking to them?

Armstrong: “… when I think about our company and where our future is, and those things, it’s really as an independent entity, and being very focused on our core strategy.”

Me: Ah. So you want to be a standalone company, and you don’t want to merge with Yahoo. Right?

Armstrong: “From our results today, and from what you’ve heard me say publicly, and what we’re focused on, the answer is yes.”

Wall Street seems to share Armstrong’s enthusiasm, at least for today: Shares are up 11 percent in morning trading.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/exclusive-aols-tim-armstrong-says-he-doesnt-want-a-yahoo-deal-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/ http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:05:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=139301 Here’s a first look at AOL Q3 earnings: Revenue of $532 million and an earnings loss of $0.02 per share. Wall Street estimates for the company tend to be all over the map, but Yahoo Finance thinks the consensus was $524 million and a loss of $0.06 per share.

But Wall Street will quickly scrutinize the breakdown of CEO Tim Armstrong’s sales performance. Last quarter, the company posted a 5 percent ad bump, but investors hated the details: Much of the growth was coming from the company’s low-margin network business, in addition to gains from its HuffPo and TechCrunch acquisitions.

What Wall Street really wants to see (or at least what it wanted to see last quarter) is organic growth in the company’s core display business, and improving earnings.

Overall, AOL’s ad sales are up 8 percent, and display is 15 percent. Investors might raise an eyebrow over the fact that domestic display growth of 14 percent is a sequential decline from last quarter’s 16 percent rise, though. And bear in mind that these numbers include both TechCrunch and Huffington Post boosts. Also worrisome — a mere 1 percent increase in the company’s owned and operated properties — again, that’s after accounting for those two big acquisitions. (Click image to enlarge.)

 

Another flag for AOL: Even though it has added TechCrunch and the Huffington Post over the last year, traffic to AOL’s own sites has barely budged: A year ago, AOL attracted 106 million monthly unique visitors to its sites; this year, the total only moved up to 107 million.

AOL earnings call starts at 8 am ET, and beyond this morning’s release, investors will also want to hear what Armstrong is seeing in the ad market in general. Until recently, digital ads have been booming for just about everyone except for AOL and Yahoo, but recently we’ve heard about softness/slower growth making its way to the Web, too. (Though no sign of that from Google.)

And, of course, Wall Street will also want to see if Armstrong has anything to say about eternal speculation that he wants to link up with Yahoo itself.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111031/on-the-verge-of-a-new-tech-site-which-finally-debuts/ http://allthingsd.com/20111031/on-the-verge-of-a-new-tech-site-which-finally-debuts/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:18:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=138536

Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

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