Earlier today Yahoo reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat analyst estimates, on still-flattish revenue.

Still, up is up, even if it is not really that much up, so Wall Steet bid up shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant in after-hours trading.

Now it’s onto the conference call with investors for CEO Marissa Mayer:

2:02 pm: Before the call, you can hear Mayer complaining about the goofy music played during the pre-conference call waiting time.

“We have to get better music,” she says to some minion. “This is not good music.”

Music to my ears! I say we get Beyoncé, lipsyncing or not.

The call starts quickly after that, with the ever-eager Mayer leaping right in with the fourth-quarter news, which is not all that bad.

It’s the first full year of growth in a while — though not the first quarter-to-quarter increase — even if it is only a very modest two percent increase.

That compares to industry-wide gains in revenue of many, many, many times that, but for Yahoo this is cause for a parade. A small parade, with good music, but a parade nonetheless.

“It’s hard to believe this is only my first full quarter here at Yahoo,” says Mayer in an upbeat tone.

She notes that her focus on product excellence and user experience was continuing, with some “early positive trends” in both products and people.

Mayer then list a series of moves, from the free food and better smartphones for employees to the addition of well-regarded entrepreneur Max Levchin to the board to the refreshes of Yahoo Mail and Flickr to the acquisition of some sassy new mobile startups.

Mayer also notes that the company under her purview had removed “385 of highest priority obstacles,” although she did not name any specifics.

I imagine what No. 332 is: Switching out the iceberg lettuce at the URL cafeteria on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ campus with some tasty organic mesclun as they have at Google, from whence Mayer came.

Better roughage means better returns!

2:14 pm: Mayer turns the call over to CFO Ken Goldman, also a newbie. As usual, he runs through the numbers that are already in all the releases already. But I am enjoying his New England accent, hoping he will say the slight increase in revenue was “wicked” good.

Goldman, in fact, calls the revenue increase “modest,” which is true, although it sounds like “mah-dist.”

What’s not mah-dist is how much stock Yahoo has bought back, using its windfall from the recent sale of assets in China. It’s $1.45 billion, with more that that left to use for more share buybacks. That should keep Yahoo’s stock up nicely.

Goldman also talks about increases in the company’s search business, although notes that the Microsoft relationship is still not the most fantastic.

He speaks more effusively of Yahoo’s Asian partners, including Yahoo! Japan and China’s Alibaba Group. It’s deserved, since they have been the company’s treasure trove against its meh core performance in recent years.

Not so tasty is the problem Yahoo has with a big-money contract dispute in Mexico, which Goldman reiterates is “without merit.”

2:28 pm: Goldman moves onto Yahoo’s cash position, which is strong and which he says is going to be used to make the company better.

Mayer is back on board, talking about key focuses over multiple years.

She says Yahoo needs a “chain reaction of growth,” which needs to be fueled by a dozen new products that become a daily habits for consumers to increase usage and other metrics.

A nuclear bomb explosion is not exactly the best metaphor for a company’s turnaround, but in Yahoo’s case it is probably a pretty good one, given how stubborn its decline has been.

Mayer then switches the metaphor to one she recently used about “returning to the roots” of Yahoo.

Actually, mixing the metaphors, Yahoo has to blast some significant roots that have gotten in the way of its innovation over the years.

“The best is yet to come,” promises Mayer, in what she says will be a multi-year effort.

Now onto questions from the analysts!

2:40 pm: The first question is about commercialization of its products. Mayer answers she is both pro-advertising and anti-ad — meaning they are good when they add to user experience and bad when they do not.

There will be slight margin declines due to this, which is the real point of the query, which Goldman says will not be too impacted.

The next question is on the weaker performance in display ads and whether mobile ads can ramp up quick enough or not.

Yahoo is not breaking out mobile revenue numbers as yet — it’s not impressive as yet, so that’s what’s going on there — although Mayer points to the number of mobile users increasing to 200 million now.

As to the declines in display, Mayer gives a non-answer, but it is likely due to big changes that new Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro has put into place in the way it sells ads and which AllThingsD.com previously reported on. Mayer earlier in the call had confirmed those changes.

The fact of the matter — which is just what the analyst was asking about — is that Mayer simply has to improve display revenue, which is Yahoo’s core business.

Mayer then addresses the issue of not providing usage metrics anymore. Yahoo has withheld a lot of them since she has taken over, and she says it is because they are not indicative of metrics that, well, she thinks you need to know.

Instead, Mayer points to other metrics that she feels are better, such as number of ads sold and price per click on search.

Speaking of search, the next question is about that. What can Mayer say — and she does — but that Yahoo must also improve in that area. Indeed, it is lucrative low-hanging fruit for the company.

Here comes an interesting observation she makes based on a question of mobile versus desktop, which Mayer says should not be separated as two areas as consumers don’t think that way.

Yahoo is tuning up a dozen products, she says, having started with Yahoo Mail and its Flickr photo-sharing app.

2:54 pm: Mayer is not saying which of this dirty dozen is next to get a makeover.

“We’re investing in small, nimble, excellent teams,” says Mayer, who then tries to reference a famous Margaret Mead quote, but ends up mangling it a bit.

It is, for the record: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This is true, which might make some Yahoo staffers nervous, since Mayer’s recent stack ranking of them means she can start on employee layoffs anytime she likes to separate the wheat from the chaff.

3:01 pm: Whoo-whee, this is going long and I am getting weary. Mayer has to be some kind of digital Energizer Bunny — she just flew in from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and moved right into the prep for the Q4 earnings.

Tomorrow, she is presumably off to Las Vegas, where Yahoo’s global sales conference will start and she will doubtlessly be making an appearance.

I am exhausted simply by walking up and down the stairs at my house.

The next question is about third-party publishers and ad tech on mobile.

“Mobile monetization is new for everyone,” she says correctly, making the point that no one knows what is going to shake out.

She uses — as she has used — the example of when people thought search was not a moneymaker until Google proved otherwise.

The problem is, of course, that Google is Yahoo’s biggest rival in this new mobile ad arena, along with Facebook and many others. And Google, as its recent results showed, does know how to make money compared to Yahoo.

The next question is about mobile monetization eating into desktop revenue.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has hired 120 people with computer science degrees in the quarter to work on that area.

In other words, get ready for a symphony of geeks to return Yahoo to relevance.

Would they can pull it off, as that would be a tune worth listening to.

Speaking of something worth listening to, here is a video of Diana Ross’ song, “Chain Reaction,” to enjoy:

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is still not backing down in his ongoing battle with Hewlett-Packard.

“Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them,” he said in a statement, as well as aiming at $5 billion in writedowns the company has taken related to the controversial deal. “We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms.”

Lynch’s latest volley was prompted by a regulatory filing HP made earlier today, noting that the U.S. Department of Justice was indeed investigating its acquisition of British software company, for which it is trying to write down about $5 billion in expenses due to alleged “serious accounting improprieties.”

HP had taken the case to U.S. federal authorities in the first place, but now it’s official.

This caused Lynch, who has been vociferously battling the Silicon Valley tech giant over the allegations and rejecting HP’s claims of fraud in the $12 billion acquisition, to respond again.

In his statement, he presented a laundry list of arguments about how HP is trying to fool investors by pointing the finger at him.

Here’s his whole thing, so you can read for yourself:

It is extremely disappointing that HP has again failed to provide a detailed calculation of its $5 billion write-down of Autonomy, or publish any explanation of the serious allegations it has made against the former management team, in its annual report filing today.

Furthermore, it is now less clear how much of the $5 billion write-down is in fact being attributed to the alleged accounting issues, and how much to other changes in business performance and earnings projections. This appears to be a material change in HP’s allegations.

Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them.

We also do not understand why HP is raising these issues now given that Autonomy reported into the HP Finance team from the day the acquisition completed in October 2011, there was an extensive due diligence process and Autonomy was audited as a public company for many years.

We would particularly make the following points:

* HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak and her team, plus a number of outside advisors, had access to all Autonomy accounts and documents from October 2011 onwards, and raised no issues.

* Beginning in November 2011, HP and KPMG reviewed Autonomy’s closing balance sheet in detail, and Ernst & Young reviewed Deloitte’s audit work papers.

* Beginning in October 2011, HP studied in detail Autonomy’s tax structure and transfer pricing as well as its revenue recognition practices (led by Paul Curtis, HP’s worldwide head of revenue recognition).

* An independent, third-party valuation of Autonomy’s assets was carried out in January 2012.

* Quarterly business reviews were held with Autonomy management, Meg Whitman and Cathie Lesjak to discuss Autonomy’s financial performance.

* HP has continued to sell and account for hardware alongside Autonomy software in the same way that Autonomy did for the year since the acquisition completed.

* Regarding differences between IFRS and US GAAP accounting standards, which appear to have a role in some of the allegations HP has made, Autonomy’s accounting policies were made clear in Autonomy’s 2010 annual report.

We also note the statement in HP’s annual report that it received confirmation from the US Department of Justice on 21 November 2012 (the day after HP’s first public statement), that the Department had opened an investigation. We can confirm that we have as yet had no contact from any regulatory authority. We will co-operate with any investigation and look forward to the opportunity to explain our position.

We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms. Autonomy’s financial accounts were properly maintained in accordance with applicable regulations, fully audited by Deloitte, and available to HP during the due diligence process.

We remain deeply concerned about how this process has been conducted, and believe it is in everyone’s interest for it to be resolved as soon as possible.

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According to sources close to the situation, Facebook is looking seriously at purchasing Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions ad-serving platform.

Sources said the social networking giant has been conducting due diligence on the media measurement platform, part of its efforts to create its own advertising network for third-party Web sites to compete with Google’s DoubleClick offering.

Atlas has been quietly on the market for some time and has been looked at by a number of companies, such as Adobe, said sources. But the effort to sell it got a jumpstart with recent interest from Facebook, which had been debating buy-versus-build options.

While there are some technological issues in taking over Atlas, sources said the prospect of starting from scratch was more daunting than picking up a platform that already delivers billions of ad impressions a day.

Atlas was acquired by Microsoft as part of its 2007 purchase of aQuantive for $6 billion. The new price for Atlas will be substantially lower, said sources, but could involve a more complex advertising agreement between Facebook and Microsoft.

Facebook declined comment and I am awaiting a response from Microsoft.

(Business Insider is also reporting that the pair are in talks.)

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.

New York magazine just published what will doubtlessly be the first of many larger-scale profile pieces on new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (Fortune’s at work on one, too).

Titled “Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?” New York’s version is a very solid and fair effort that raises a lot of pertinent questions about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s latest leader.

That, of course, includes pondering the high-profile issues around her coping with a newborn (really new) and work; her carefully crafted public glamour-geek-girl persona that is at odds with her sometimes more tetchy private one; Mayer’s mostly-up-and-then-down-at-the-end career at Google as a key exec; and the myriad challenges she faces in turning around the long-troubled Yahoo.

Writes Lisa Miller quite astutely: “This newest version of Marissa, the mom-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer’s iterative powers, for she’s playing to a tougher crowd, one that won’t be placated by tweets, Manolos, and rapturous praise for pineapple malts.”

Indeed not, which is why sources said Mayer is likely to begin to make postpartum appearances back at Yahoo as early as this week. She delivered her first child with husband Zach Bogue, whom she dubbed “Big Baby Boy Bogue,” on Sept. 30.

Among the initiatives she has been working on up to and after her son’s birth, said numerous sources, is the redo of Yahoo’s powerful home page, a reorganization of top management duties, and an announcement about whether it will buy back shares or give a dividend from its recent multibillion-dollar sale of part of its lucrative stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

In addition, said sources, Mayer is also putting into place her new methodology of keeping track of employee performance and rewards. There is an all-hands meeting scheduled today, in fact, apparently to go over the system, which Mayer spoke about in her last all-hands meeting.

The home page redo is also in the late-stage works for unveiling soon, said sources. Those who have seen it said it has a starker and simpler design ethos, and will stress user personalization, customization and more social elements. It will also have ample opportunity for third-party developers to offer a variety of services on it (maybe Mayer can save Zynga by copying a little bit from Facebook!).

The reorg will also be interesting. Mayer has made a number of top exec appointments, including adding a new CFO and head of HR. She will also be rejiggering other roles of existing management.

For example, expect tech and operations EVP David Dibble — who got a mess of new responsibilities right before Mayer was appointed — to have some of that dialed back.

The disposition of all $3.6 billion of Alibaba cash is perhaps the most immediate issue, especially for investors, who are largely hoping for a buyback of stock. Such a move will likely cause Yahoo shares to rise, as happened at AOL.

That would be nice, since Yahoo stock has stayed pretty flat since Mayer got to the company in July. (That compares, ironically, to a 31 percent rise at Google since she left.)

But Wall Street analysts and others have been making bullish calls on Yahoo recently, including CNBC’s screamy stock guru Jim Cramer of “Mad Money.”

Boosted by the growing value of its Asian assets — in China, as well as in Japan, which Yahoo is trying to sell — and also anticipating some kind of magic mojo from Mayer, price targets for Yahoo shares have been as high as $22.

That was from Goldman Sachs, which reinstated coverage of Yahoo with a “buy” rating recently. Analyst Heath Terry noted that “while user engagement continues to decline, the company lacks a mobile strategy and significant talent has left the company, Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of users, valuable Web properties, and the financial resources to fuel a potential turn around over time.”

Translated: Yahoo kinda stinks, but it still might be able to buy itself out of this mess with a $10.6 billion pile of dough from Asia.

All eyes will be on the actual business Yahoo operates itself in two weeks on Oct. 22, when the company announces third-quarter results. Sources said the quarter will come in as expected, but will still tell a story of lackluster growth in advertising, engagement and, well, every key part of its native offerings.

That said, Mayer is expected to be on the call — her first at Yahoo — to outline her grand vision in more detail, as a spokeswoman has noted.

That’s good, since shiny profiles of her can only do so much. It’ll be nice to finally hear her say something definitive in public about how she’s going to fix the company that has given the mediagenic exec even more press.

(And, let’s hope, without the tweets, Manolos and pineapple malts.)

Upon its reception, most of the public attention focused on a single passage, which stated that Twitter will soon introduce stricter guidelines to its developer partners in the coming weeks, limiting the ways in which outsiders will be able to use Twitter’s rich, ceaseless stream of data.

This was a big deal. Countless numbers of smaller start-ups rely on access to Twitter’s public-facing feed, using the tweets in their own businesses for any number of reasons. If the terms of access were to be altered significantly, it could impact the livelihoods of thousands. The company didn’t elaborate on what exactly those guidelines would be, and has said little else since. The key takeaway echoed in one repeated word: Consistency. Twitter’s future plans strove for consistency across the platform.

Naturally, Twitter developers across the Web proceeded to freak out. Of the many third-party app developers I’ve spoken to who have massively popular apps that depend on Twitter, all of them have told me they have received no guidance from Twitter beyond Sippey’s original post.

While members of the press scramble to cover Twitter’s most recent dustup involving the censorship of a reporter, speculation in the developer community continues to run rampant, and many accuse Twitter of being unnecessarily opaque.

But amid the confusion of the past month, nearly all have overlooked the section of Sippey’s post which holds the key to Twitter’s future: Cards. Twitter’s new Cards technology allows third-party developers to create richer, more compelling — and, above all, visually consistent — content inside of Twitter itself.

Therein lies Twitter’s goal: A rich, consistent Twitter experience for every user. When the hammer drops and Twitter changes its guidelines, those apps that can’t deliver this consistency will no longer be able to integrate with Twitter. The most likely candidates to go first, according to multiple sources, fall into two camps: Third-party-client apps which essentially reduplicate the Twitter stream — such as Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora — and news reader apps like Flipboard, which re-renders Twitter data to create a different visual experience of a tweet entirely.

The answer lies in the cards.

Cards on the Table

The mandate to crack down on developers comes straight from Dick Costolo — no doubt feeling the pressure of being the company’s third CEO in almost as many years — who is charged with the task of making profitable a company backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and valued near $8 billion (see Googler Hunter Walk’s excellent post for more on this). Right now, Cards are the long-term bet in continuing to bolster monetization efforts.

First, let’s back up a bit. What are Twitter Cards, exactly?

In effect, they are the technology behind expanded, multimedia-rich tweets. With the addition of a few lines of code, publishers, brands and developers can create better tweets showcasing their content inside of the Twitter stream. For example, when sites like AllThingsD and the New York Times tweet a link to a story, a “summary” Card shows a fancier version, like so:

Developers can also push out media-based tweets, which include full photos and video that show up inside Twitter’s stream.

Though any developer may apply to use Cards, currently only major publishers — like the New York Times, the Huffington Post, CNET and others — big brands like Nike and Nascar, and high-profile media apps like Instagram and YouTube are able to take advantage of it. Twitter is restricting access initially, working with select partners on a slow, cautious rollout.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Right now, it rests on these developers’ shoulders to make their Card-enabled tweets work across official Twitter clients: Twitter.com, the Twitter Android and iOS apps, and Twitter’s mobile Web site.

The problem is, there are far more clients than the official ones: Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora are all popular alternatives, among many others. And right now, the tweets that use Twitter’s shiny new Card technology don’t show up in their rich new form inside of these third-party clients.

For Twitter, this is awful: The company needs its new, media-rich tweets to appear the same to everyone, not just to those using the official Twitter apps.

This could mean death for those third-party clients. According to multiple sources, when Twitter introduces the new set of API guidelines, the days of these apps are likely numbered.

That also goes for many news aggregation apps as well, according to my sources, with the very popular Flipboard being the most notable among them. The writing has been on the wall for Flipboard for some time — enough that Mike McCue, the Flipboard CEO who also occupied a seat on Twitter’s board, seemed likely to relinquish his board seat, back when Kara Swisher first reported it in May.

Multiple sources confirmed to me recently that McCue is indeed no longer a Twitter board member.

Quality Control

Here comes the burning question: Why are Cards and visual consistency so important to Twitter? Is Twitter’s obsession with good design so extreme that it is willing to risk alienating its developer community at large?

In three words: No, but sorta. This section from Sippey’s post gives us a further hint at the “why”:

“Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter. That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.” (emphasis mine)

Building apps to run inside a platform. Sound like any other major social companies you’ve heard of?

Yes, it does: Cards are Twitter’s own version of a Facebook-like Open Graph. Just as developers’ apps look, feel and function better when integrated into Facebook’s Open Graph, third-party developers can use the Twitter Cards technology to build apps into Twitter. As Sippey alludes, pictures and media are just the beginning: Twitter wants developers to create all kinds of apps — it just wants them to do it on Twitter’s terms, inside Twitter’s visual constraints.

Indeed, while Sippey’s post read as a warning shot — which, to some degree, it certainly was — it is also a call to arms for developers to take to Twitter’s platform in a different way than they have before. Twitter even plans to amp up its efforts in bolstering its developer ranks, listing multiple developer evangelist and advocate positions on its recruiting site.

The direction in which tweets are evolving is a deviation from Twitter’s modus operandi. The company has prided its service on its simplicity: Stripped-down, text-only messages. And, for years, Twitter has resisted doing anything that would complicate the simplistic appeal. For the company to give an about-face and turn toward media is a major sea change — and if Twitter can’t be as simple as it always has been, staying consistent is the next best sort of insurance.

And if these other unofficial clients can’t (or won’t) use Cards, that cuts Twitter’s plan off at the knees.

Promote This

Looking good has its advantages: Better-looking tweets will send more traffic back to publishers and more eyeballs to brands, while Twitter users get the benefit of a better in-stream experience.

But that’s not all Twitter gains. Rich tweets give brands more bang for their buck when buying Twitter ads. Take Promoted Tweets, one of Twitter’s top ad products, as an example: A regular Promoted Tweet gets pinned within users’ streams, where users may or may not click on it. But if you compare that with a Promoted Tweet that includes an embedded, custom-made app or video clip inside of it, my guess is you’ll see engagement levels rise in the latter case. Give advertisers the chance to stick more bells and whistles into their ad, and it’s an easier sell.

Right now, Twitter is taking a conservative rollout approach, partnering with a handful of high-profile developers to create a fancy first round of well-produced tweets. It’s akin to mobile app Path’s recent approach with its Nike FuelBand integration — Path worked with one partner to produce one well-integrated partner experience within the Path app.

And herein lies the advantage of reining in the platform: The less room Twitter gives developers to play with the API willy-nilly, the easier it is for Twitter to create better experiences within Twitter.

In other words, enough building innovation out — it’s time to innovate in.

Choices

The road ahead is foggy. And it is unclear whether Twitter’s API changes to come will immediately ax a wide swath of apps completely, or whether developers will be able to adjust to Twitter’s new rules of the road. Perhaps if Twitter can give developers the proper guidance, it won’t be a third-party-app bloodbath.

I’ve been told by a few sources that even Twitter is still figuring this out. Right now, a source says, the company is facing a series of choices as it stares down the path it has chosen.

Some of those choices are easy: Ending the LinkedIn partnership was a no-brainer, sources say, as Twitter received little traffic back from those tweets syndicated in LinkedIn’s stream. (It should have ended much earlier, I’m told, but the occasional quick phone call from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner had a way of convincing Dick Costolo to keep the partnership in place.)

Instagram, which will most likely soon become property of Facebook (after the FTC gives the okay), was also an easy choice, sources say. Facebook is Twitter’s competition for ad sales, plain and simple. Coupled with the social graph, any access Facebook has to Twitter’s interest graph could make Facebook’s ad targeting exponentially better, and therefore far more lucrative for advertisers. (It also probably didn’t hurt that Facebook set the precedent of cutting off its competitors when it did the exact same thing to Twitter years ago.)

Other decisions — like cracking down on developers and third-party apps who until now have enjoyed positive relationships with Twitter — most likely won’t be so easy for the company to make.

But Twitter has proven tough thus far, and is most likely to continue taking flak to see its plans through.

Meanwhile, Twitter runs the risk of watching developers depart the platform, perhaps seeking refuge in alternatives like Facebook or — dare I say it — Google+. There’s even a new kid on the block that aims to do it a better way, opting to build a real-time platform like Twitter, wholly unsupported by ads. Dalton Caldwell, a Silicon Valley familiar, has pitched App.net as a paid service for app developers who don’t want the pressure of advertisers bearing down on the network over time. It is ambitious, and idealistic in the extreme (perhaps, many would say, to its own detriment).

Or, developers can continue to do what they’ve been doing: Watch, wait, and let the cards fall where they may.

Last week, Ford Motor Company officially opened a new “lab” in Silicon Valley, a move to get it immersed into the tech scene here and also burnish its innovation cred.

The reasons for the move — which some other car companies have also made — are myriad, including focusing on leveraging big data from its four million cars that have a variety of sensing and other synching technology embedded in them.

It’s all been part of an aggressive effort by Chairman Bill Ford Jr. and CEO Alan Mulally to double down on tech as a key differentiator of its automobiles.

That includes Ford’s nifty hands-free SYNC offering, which lets consumers control a variety of devices without interfering with driving. Detroit-based Ford has opened up the technology to allow third-party development using SYNC.

Now comes the inevitable Palo Alto, Calif., office in the heart of the digital industry, to push Ford further and to move the company from the car business to the “mobility” one.

That’s according to Paul Mascarenas, the charming CTO of Ford Research and Innovation, who leads the global development and implementation of the company’s technology strategy.

He talked about a wide range of issues for automakers going forward — from air bags in seatbelts to cars that sense your every move.

Mascarenas was even brave enough to let me drive him around in Ford’s latest all-electric vehicle — the 2012 Ford Focus Electric, with a range of 90 miles — which I thankfully did not crash into some geek on University Avenue.

Here’s the video of the interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120624/fords-cto-drives-new-silicon-valley-office-opening-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120618/exclusive-yahoo-hires-google-exec-barrett-as-chief-of-revenue-as-big-ad-changes-loom/ http://allthingsd.com/20120618/exclusive-yahoo-hires-google-exec-barrett-as-chief-of-revenue-as-big-ad-changes-loom/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:30:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=220961

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo has hired high-profile advertising exec Michael Barrett to be its chief of revenue.

Sources said Barrett will be in charge of ad revenue and operations worldwide, including units in the U.S., Europe and Asia reporting in to him. Barrett will report directly to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn when he starts in July.

(Update: Yahoo confirmed the hiring in a press release.)

The move to hire the experienced Barrett — who has been working at Google since it bought an ad tech company he ran a year ago — is a significant one, giving the company a boost in its most critical area of business.

It is also a clear signal that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is about to make major changes to its ad business going forward. According to numerous sources, Yahoo is again mulling a plan to abandon or sell its large parts of its ad tech business and rely on third-party vendors.

In fact, it has been in talks with Google about taking over its automated ad sales and ad network operations, while focusing instead on premium ad sales and sponsorships. Yahoo is also considering turning its entire search business over to Microsoft, with which it already has an ad partnership.

“Yahoo is going to be a media company again — in the digital ad sales business and not in the ad tech business,” said one person.

That impending change has already caused much debate within Yahoo already, with sides drawn between those who think Yahoo should not outsource its core ad technology and those who believe that the company lost the battle to others already — most especially Google — due to poor execution over the years.

While there have been a variety of multibillion-dollar plans drawn up by some to double down on Yahoo’s ad tech business, that effort has now been supplanted by a feeling that the company needs to quickly get out of businesses it cannot win in or see growth.

Barrett is one of the few obvious choices to usher in a new era, given his long experience in all aspects of both digital and traditional media.

He used to work with Levinsohn at Fox Interactive Media, but came to Google a year ago, when the search giant bought AdMeld for $400 million. Barrett was CEO of the supply-side advertising technology platform, which worked on behalf of publishers by trying to get the best prices for their inventory from a variety of ad networks.

Barrett has also worked in ad jobs at a range of companies, including AOL and Disney Online, as well as at Meredith Publishing and Newsweek. He even previously worked at Yahoo, when it bought GeoCities, back in the Web 1.0 era.

As part of the changes, sources said, current Americas sales head Rich Riley will be stepping down from the job he just got under ousted CEO Scott Thompson. He will remain at the company, but it is not clear in what position.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120618/exclusive-yahoo-hires-google-exec-barrett-as-chief-of-revenue-as-big-ad-changes-loom/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120509/courting-precious-developers-facebook-announces-an-app-center/ http://allthingsd.com/20120509/courting-precious-developers-facebook-announces-an-app-center/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 20:54:10 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=206228 Facebook is clear about the future of its platform: Third-party apps are the key to attracting and keeping users inside of its ecosystem.

In yet another huge stride toward bolstering its app platform, the company announced plans for its own central app hub inside Facebook itself, making it easier for users to discover Facebook-integrated apps, as well as easier for developers to submit and feature their apps on Facebook itself.

Until now, users had a handful of ways of discovering apps through Facebook; the company touted “social discovery” as its strong suit, as users were encouraged to find apps through their news feed. The idea is, you’ll find the apps that are most relevant because they’re the ones your friends use. They’ll surface in your newsfeed, and you’ll pick the ones you like while ignoring the ones you don’t care about.

So this is somewhat different. To be clear, it’s not exactly a proper “App Store” competitor to take on the likes of Apple or Google’s respective hubs. It’s more of a centralized location so that everyone — users and developers alike — knows where to go to find Facebook apps. And that didn’t exist before.

But the social discovery part still plays a huge factor. The apps that show up when you visit the App Center will be those that Facebook finds most relevant to you — that is, ones your friends are using, or ones that are scoring particularly high on Facebook’s own internal ratings system that judges just what apps should show up.

“Success through the App Center is tied to the quality of an app,” wrote Facebook employee Aaron Brady in a blog post. “We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the App Center.”

This is a big deal for building out the future of the platform. Part of what will determine just how much time users spend inside Facebook is the amount of content they have to play around with, and the company relies on outside developers for that. The unveiling of the Open Graph at Facebook’s F8 developer conference last year was the first step in this direction, making it easier for third-party developers to fully integrate their applications into the Facebook ecosystem. Then came the different verbs with appropriate apps — like “Listening” with Spotify and “Watching” with Netflix — broadcasting user activities across Facebook, thereby upping the potential for others to try out those third-party apps.

But as Facebook seems to realize with Wednesday’s announcement, developers can’t rely entirely on social discovery for their apps to grow. Sure, you’ll get the occasional breakout successes like SocialCam, Viddy or Pinterest through organic growth, but users still need a home page to browse through apps.

What’s more, the new App Center will feature additional ways for developers to get paid. The only initial payment options for developers who actually wanted to earn money through Facebook apps were via in-app purchases. So for an app like Farmville — which relies on users buying virtual goods to make money — the original sort of system works well. Now Facebook will give the option for developers to offer paid apps. That makes it easier on developers’ apps for which in-app payments make little sense.

So if the App Center takes off, the impetus for an app to succeed isn’t dependent on a sudden burst of viral growth. In theory, a developer’s app can simmer inside the App Center and eventually bubble up to the forefront of users’ App Center dashboards.

It’s also another potential revenue stream insofar as splitting the cash on paid apps and in-app purchases. And more app use, of course, means more engagement within the Facebook platform. That means more ads. And with the wealth of new data Facebook will receive by looking at the apps its subscribers are using, it also means better targeted ads.

Now it’s up to developers to make apps worth downloading. And what’s good for developers is good for Facebook.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120509/courting-precious-developers-facebook-announces-an-app-center/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120314/to-stanch-layoffs-yahoo-has-been-shopping-its-ad-technology-platforms-to-google-microsoft-and-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20120314/to-stanch-layoffs-yahoo-has-been-shopping-its-ad-technology-platforms-to-google-microsoft-and-others/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:04:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=186081

In an effort to minimize the impact of massive layoffs that Yahoo’s top management has been planning, according to sources close to the situation, one of the latest ideas to save costs and presumably jobs by new CEO Scott Thompson is to sell off much of its advertising technology platform, including Right Media.

And among the possible buyers Thompson has been targeting in recent visits: Google and Microsoft, as well as Silver Lake, the private equity firm that had once been talking to the Silicon Valley Internet giant about making a large investment in the company.

(That particular deal has gone south, but there is always yet another scheme on the horizon at Yahoo!)

The concept behind such a sale, according to several sources inside and outside the company, is to turn a cost center into a revenue source, with Yahoo essentially outsourcing a business that was a cornerstone of its strategy. A negotiable number of employees affiliated with those units would then move over to the new owner.

The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology “stack,” including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.

According to info on the company’s site, it has “300,000 active global buyers and sellers and more than 11 billion daily transactions.”

Also part of the possible package is APT, a system Yahoo has built to make buying and selling online advertising easier. In addition, Yahoo’s technologies for display-ad serving have been mentioned as a possibility for sale.

It’s unclear what the potential sale means for the new ad strategy that U.S. boss Ross Levinsohn and his lieutenant Jim Heckman have been pursuing since last summer. That plan included its own acquisition of ad network Interclick and an attempt to sync up with rivals AOL and Microsoft in an effort to fend off Google and some third-party players, like ad networks.

But the reason for contemplating much a major move — which has been considered before, but never has been seriously offered — are obvious: While Yahoo once dominated this arena, it has steadily lost ground, especially to Google. The search giant has made almost all of its money in search-related ads, but has been moving aggressively via its DoubleClick and other ad-serving entities into higher-level ads.

Microsoft has also been trying to compete, as has AOL, but it’s getting to be an expensive race, and one where Yahoo would have to make major investments to once again gain momentum. Building up this business again had been the aim of co-founder Jerry Yang, who wanted to go big in the arena in a number of ways before he left the company earlier this year.

But those days seem to be over at Yahoo.

“A lot of what has happened so far under Scott [Thompson] has been trying to find more revenue anywhere it can be generated, and get out of businesses that are not growing,” said one person. “Right now, it’s a lot about what we shouldn’t do rather than what we should.”

That has meant visits to see both Google and Microsoft about possible deals by Thompson, with the involvement of CFO Tim Morse and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving.

Thompson (pictured here) has also recently been talking to Silver Lake about the ad-platform sale, in a deal that might include the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund. This would be a different kind of transaction, said sources, in which a separate company would be formed, with Yahoo owning a piece and contracting with the new entity to provide ad technology.

All this activity is related to the layoffs in the works of perhaps thousands of employees, which were to have been communicated to the company this week.

Sources said those have been delayed for some weeks for several reasons, including whether to consider more deeply if certain larger business units can be spun off, sold or somehow transformed. (To be clear: Major layoffs are still being planned, but now might take place in two parts, said sources, in what is a quickly changing and volatile atmosphere at Yahoo.)

Another area being looked at, said sources, is Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft, which has not been as successful as had been expected. While Yahoo has been working with the software giant about improving the results, Thompson has apparently been contemplating other possibilities, including working with Google (calling all regulators!) and/or laying off up to 900 employees who work on the company’s search offering.

Any of these moves could, of course, cause a firestorm of controversy, which Thompson appears to not worry much about. He was the driving force in Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook earlier this week, which is largely attracting a negative reaction across the tech landscape.

A number of prominent voices have spoken out against the legal action, including well-known VC Fred Wilson, who yesterday penned a poisonous blog post, titled “Yahoo Crosses the Line.”

It ends thusly: “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.”

Ouch!

Also weighing in publicly via Twitter was former Yahoo director Eric Hippeau, who was one of the company’s first investors, which is embedded below:

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Double ouch!

All I can say is that Thompson certainly has a lot of gumption. That has actually been his M.O. from the start, said several sources, with the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and dark horse cold-emailing his way into the Yahoo CEO job.

True story: He had not been among its list of possible candidates — largely because he had been placed in his job at eBay many moons ago by Heidrick & Struggles, which was conducting the Yahoo CEO search, and that’s a talent acquisition no-no to poach someone you placed.

That did not stop Thompson, who thought he might be good for the job and reached out directly to board members at the end of the selection effort, which then led to the search committee and soon enough to the job in what was a very quick vetting and secretive (although not secretive enough!) hiring process.

Since then, Thompson has been on a tear, from working on a restructuring to trying to assuage activist shareholder Dan Loeb to helping put the kibosh on its Asian stake sale talks to suing Facebook. And now this sale effort, too.

If the peripatetic Thompson — who might need a dose of Ritalin before this thing is over — wanted to get noticed by the tech powers that be: Mission accomplished!

“He’s definitely someone who appears to have decided on shooting the moon with a lot of these actions,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the move in the card game of Hearts, which is a risky gambit to capture every penalty card worth 26 points in order to win. “I just hope no one loses an eye in the process.”

(That would be triple ouch, by the way.)

No comments all around, but everyone was certainly cordial on this rainy morning.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120314/to-stanch-layoffs-yahoo-has-been-shopping-its-ad-technology-platforms-to-google-microsoft-and-others/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/ http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 13:29:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43637

Last week, after he turned in better-than-expected earnings and tried to explain to a worried Wall Street how the search algorithm changes at Google, called Panda, were significant but not devastating to his business, BoomTown had a short phone interview with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

To ask even more questions about Panda! Grrrrr…

Actually, Rosenblatt was as cordial as ever about what is a hair-pullingly critical issue for his newly public company, which has really been under investor and other scrutiny from the get-go about the way it handles content.

Which is to say very much differently than traditional media companies had done in the past, with an eye on how to optimize traffic and advertising revenue by using tech to know exactly how much each piece of content online is actually worth and how much it should cost.

Them’s been fighting words for a while, with accusations by detractors of Demand’s system that it is little more than a “content farm,” producing poor quality fare.

Rosenblatt has battled that charge all the way through a lucrative IPO, but the company definitely got caught in the Panda maelstrom, as Google has tried to cull out bad results (and make itself look better, it must be said).

This has put Demand in an awkward position–trying to minimize the damage, real and perceived, created by the changes, and also making sure Google does not become even more aggressive by tut-tutting those changes.

It’s a delicate dance for Rosenblatt, as you will see from my handful of questions (especially since Demand’s stock has been badly hit):

Q: What were you trying to communicate in the call, especially since investors seemed very focused on Panda?

A: I was trying in the simplest way to explain the way we figure the relationship of how much traffic to ROI (return on investment) and RPM (revenue per 1,000 impressions).

I think the best way to assuage the worries is to just keep on growing our business and traffic.

What I also wanted to show was that third-party data sources should not be relied on.

We did get affected, for sure. But I was not just being optimistic, we wanted to use that to really understand what we can do better.

We really need these kind of signals to shake things up.

Explain what you are doing to improve quality–does that mean longer articles or paying more for content to get better stuff?

A: There are some topics that do not deserve more than 500 words, and some deserve more.

But we’re not going to make content that is expensive just because, except maybe for marketing purposes. It has to make financial sense at the scale of our current business.

We would spend more on a post on “How to Build a Deck,” for example, if Home Depot were interested in sponsoring that content.

Q: Given Google’s shift in its algorithm, are you shifting your distribution, such as toward social and mobile?

A: If you look at where trends are going, that’s where we are going to be.

Everything is shifting quickly to mobile and social and we will shift in the same way.

It used to be there were not a lot of places to make content for, and now we have a lot more choices.

If you are out there with our data and our assets, you change as the market changes.

Q: How are you changing the continued perception that Demand is a content farm?

A: I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either.

We obviously don’t think we are a content farm and I am not sure we can counter every impact if some people think we are.

The only way we are going to do that is continued growth in revenue and showing that we are doing this for the longterm.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:20:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42002

Today, BoomTown braved the floods and skippered All Things Digital‘s S.S. Minnow through a Noah-like rainstorm in Silicon Valley to visit the HQ of Pulse.

Last summer, you might recall, co-founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta of the nifty visual news-reading app got publicly picked out by Apple’s Steve Jobs in a speech about third-party innovations on the iPad.

It was a high point for the pair of Stanford University students and newbie entrepreneurs–except that the very same day, the New York Times slapped them with a cease and desist for misusing its RSS feed.

Dramatic, for sure, but they have made nice with the Times since then and have also raised more than $1 million in funding from a range of notable venture players.

Compared to a similar start-up–the social news-reading app Flipboard–that’s a very small budget for Pulse, which was making a profit on a paid app but, since it went free in November, it’s not making a profit now.

The move–while it will require a new business plan at some point–allowed Pulse usage to explode, hitting three million users today from 250,000 paid users only four months ago.

A lot of that growth has been on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphones, rather than on the iPad tablet, where Pulse began.

And, although the Android mobile operating system was the last platform to be introduced, it is the fastest growing one, with over one million users on it, Pulse said.

Pulse launched a 2.0 update for the iPhone and Android today, with “enhanced performance, new content sources and improved sharing with social feeds and news discovery features.”

That means the app is speedier, has more news offerings in more categories and a bigger dollop of social content and sharing tools with Facebook, Twitter and other social networking companies.

Pulse now has eight employees squeezed into its small offices in downtown Palo Alto, CA–complete with the required start-up garage door.

Here’s a video interview I did with Kothari and Gupta this afternoon, just as the sun came out, along with one I did with them in cloudier times last June during the Times’ dopey assault:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/microsoft-to-add-multitasking-internet-explorer-9-to-windows-phone-later-this-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/microsoft-to-add-multitasking-internet-explorer-9-to-windows-phone-later-this-year/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:00:42 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=4067 Microsoft announced on Monday plans to fill in some of the key gaps from the initial Windows Phone 7 release with two updates due out this year.

The more interesting of the updates is the second one–a major release–due later this year. In a Mobile World Congress keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer plans to demo only a couple of features of the release, including improved multitasking, simultaneous game play with an Xbox as well as the addition of the company’s Internet Explorer 9 browser.

An earlier update, now due out by March, brings the long-awaited copy-and-paste features to the operating system as well as some performance tweaks and support for CDMA networks.

Windows Phone unit President Andy Lees told Mobilized that the new release later this year should answer critics who worried that Microsoft wouldn’t be able to innovate fast enough to catch up or leapfrog over features available on rivals such as iPhone and Android.

“Part of what we are doing is sharing technology across the company,” Lees said in an interview. In other examples, Microsoft is showing a demo of how a user on the phone might play a game throwing balls at someone playing with an Xbox or Kinect. Microsoft also plans to allow sharing of Office documents directly between phones, Windows PCs and the cloud-based Windows Live service.

Moving the full IE9 browser over to the phone will allow for hardware acceleration and other features that had not been possible on phones in the past, Lees said. For battery and other reasons, Lees said that the new release won’t support Adobe’s Flash, but Lees said it is not a religious issue for him, and that the company may add such support down the road.

“We’re not allergic to Flash,” Lees said. “It’s not in this update, but we’re not making some particular statement that it will never be there.”

Microsoft also plans to announce that it will integrate Twitter into the People hub in much the same way that the initial release brings in Facebook updates.

The update later this year will be the one adopted by Nokia in its first Windows Phone, Lees said. Nokia announced last week, of course, that it plans to make Windows Phone its primary smartphone operating system going forward.

As for early reaction to the Nokia move, Lees said the response has been positive, both from mobile operators as well as from phone makers, even those that now find themselves with a new competitor.

Lees said that basically all of the companies that make Windows Phone devices also make phones for Android and have plenty of competition there as well. Lees said that, if anything, Nokia’s move could spur some device makers that were on the fence about supporting Windows Phone 7.

“We have had other [phone makers] approach us who were talking to us and have now increased their, should I say, level of focus,” Lees said.

As for Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s comments that the amount of money flowing to Nokia from Microsoft is measured in billions rather than in millions, Lees said that one must consider that the deal includes partnerships around search and services as well as the amount of marketing and other support being directly provided by Microsoft.

“We’re not talking about specifics,” Lees said. “But it’s a sizeable opportunity.”

Update: 4:00 pm Barcelona time: I finally made it in after being stuck in a massive crowd (see image). Ballmer’s keynote is slated to begin shortly and I’ll add live updates shortly.

4:06 pm: Ballmer has taken the stage, talking about rapid pace of change in industry and for Microsoft.

Talks about first update, the copy and paste one, which will come in first two weeks of March.

4:09 pm: Ballmer said most of smartphone competition the same–a “sea of icons” that lead to applications that lead to actions. Windows Phone is easier and simpler, he said. “With Windows Phone it’s easier to see information at a glance,” Ballmer said.

4:12 pm: On to new stuff, in the “near future in 2011, we will bring multitasking to Windows Phones” Ballmer said.

Ballmer is talking IE9. “We need to give people the full Web on their phone, like we do on the PC,” Ballmer said. (Wouldn’t that also include Flash, Mobilized wonders?)

4:15 pm: Apps are great, Ballmer said, but not enough. “It’s often too hard to find what you want when you want it,” he said. That, he said, is why Windows Phone also has task-specific hubs like People, Pictures, Office, Music and Video.

4:16 pm: Interesting note, Ballmer has again touted 93 percent customer satisfaction number, but no new sales figure.

4:19 pm: Windows Phone exec Joe Belfiore comes onstage to demo the new features coming to Windows Phone later this year.

4:26 pm: Both updates will be available for all Windows Phone 7 owners, Belfiore said.

4:30 pm: Belfiore showing an IE9 demo highlighting its hardware acceleration feature. In the demo, Belfiore shows IE9 for Windows Phone allowing 50 fish to rapidly swim around in an aquarium demo. He then shows the same demo on an iPhone 4 with the fish barely swimming.

4:32 pm: A few demoes fail. Streaming video doesn’t work because of connection issues. “This is preliminary not final code,” Belfiore said. “We’ll get all these kinks worked out.”

On to multitasking…

4:36 pm: Press-and-hold back button lets users access the new multitasking and see tiles for recently run apps.

Also shows Slacker playing with other tasks. Until now, only Microsoft’s own Zune could play in the background, not third-party apps.

4:39 pm: Last demo is the Xbox one showing Kinect game being played with the phone. Shows a “tech preview” of Windows Phone being used as a companion in Kinect’s dodgeball/breakout game.

4:42 pm: Ballmer back and talking about the ecosystems and Microsoft’s interaction with device makers and mobile operators as well as growth in the number of mobile apps for Windows Phone 7.

“We’re off to a strong start,” he said. “We know we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Ballmer said the company knows it needs both scale and variety.

4:44 pm: Now he’s talking Microsoft-Nokia deal.

4:47 pm: Ballmer invites out Nokia CEO Stephen Elop,

Elop calls the deal “a natural partnership,” in which Nokia will bring the global reach and scale that Microsoft needs, while giving Nokia a needed in back to the North American market, where it has struggled badly.

Elop repeats now well-worn point that Microsoft-Nokia will offer mobile operators a third viable choice to iPhone and Android.

4:51 pm: Ballmer makes the same point Lees made in our interview, arguing that the Nokia deal will even help other Windows Phone device makers by giving the ecosystem a needed level of scale.

“Today, customers are falling in love with Windows phones,” Ballmer said, adding that the company is investing to further popularize the phone, including new features.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/microsoft-to-add-multitasking-internet-explorer-9-to-windows-phone-later-this-year/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110210/facebook-moves-to-disallow-apps-from-running-google-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/facebook-moves-to-disallow-apps-from-running-google-ads/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:07:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3475 Facebook announced this week it will begin enforcing a policy that requires app developers to run advertising from a list of approved providers. The list is not short–it includes 40-some options–but it notably does not include Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick.

Facebook is not necessarily targeting Google specifically, but it’s an obvious omission. The social networking giant said ad providers can join the list if they agree to certain restrictions on advertising, which include a commitment to never utilize Facebook user data.

Facebook and Google have warred over transmitting user data in the past, with a back-and-forth over exporting user email addresses turning nasty in public last fall.

Facebook will start enforcing the whitelist ad provider policy starting Feb. 28. At that point, app developers who run Google ads–which seems a natural thing to do, given so many publishers use Google ads on other platforms–will have to shut them off and find another provider.

A spokesperson for Facebook said, “We are continuing to work with various ad providers and will add them to the list as they sign the terms. Note that the policy doesn’t go into effect for a few more weeks.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Google declined to comment.

The CEO of an approved ad provider commented that Facebook’s efforts to “restore control and authority of how third-party companies work within its platform” make sense and are generally good for users. (And also good for him, with Google out of the hunt!)

Image via Flickr user bulliver.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110210/facebook-moves-to-disallow-apps-from-running-google-ads/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/whats-on-the-table-for-tablets-this-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/whats-on-the-table-for-tablets-this-year/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2011 02:09:57 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1744 Lots of consumers are planning to buy tablet computers this year, and lots of companies are hoping to sell them. Apple managed to sell around 15 million of its ground-breaking iPads last year in only nine months, and, for many users, the iPad has replaced the laptop, at least for some uses. So it’s no surprise that consumer appetites for tablets have been growing and tech companies are planning to roll out as many as 80 iPad competitors in 2011, by some estimates.

But the tablet mania can be confusing. The coming devices will be heavily defined by a variety of operating systems they’ll use. They will be offered in different screen sizes, with attendant pluses and minuses. And they’ll come from very different kinds of companies—major computer makers like Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Acer, Lenovo and Dell; phone makers like Motorola and Research in Motion; multi-faceted electronics giants like Samsung; and even Vizio, which is largely a TV manufacturer.

And, of course, a second generation of the iPad is expected to be announced in the next few months.

So here’s a guide to what to expect in the tablet market in 2011, and some key factors that could affect your choices. As it’s early in the year, the road map is necessarily incomplete. For instance, prices aren’t generally known, though many rivals will be trying to undercut the iPad’s $499 base price. Some will be sold on a subsidized basis through phone carriers, others won’t. And there will surely be surprises as companies adjust their strategies.

Apple’s Next Move

Given the quality and success of the iPad, it makes sense for tablet buyers to hold off until they see what Apple has up its sleeve for the second version. One big reason: The iPad has a huge head start in third-party apps designed for tablets—more than 60,000 of them, plus the 350,000 or so iPhone apps that the iPad can run.

The Motorola Xoom

But Apple is more secretive than the CIA, so we know little about this product. I believe it will almost certainly have one or two cameras, and be able to make video calls. And there’s widespread speculation that it will be thinner and lighter, since even the original’s 1.5-pound weight was a bit too heavy for extended use for some people. There’s some evidence it will have at least one added port, perhaps for a camera memory card or connection to a bigger display.

The Android Army

Just as in the smart-phone market, the bulk of Apple’s tablet competitors will rely on Google’s Android operating system, which is provided free to hardware makers. Most of the hardware companies mentioned above are counting on Android to allow them to undercut the iPad on price, add different features, and attract third-party apps.

The big question mark here is the tablet-specific version of Android that’s code-named Honeycomb, which hasn’t been publicly unveiled. The first Honeycomb tablet is likely to be a 10″ model called the Motorola Xoom, which is expected to show up in the early spring. The others will mostly emerge in the summer. If Honeycomb succeeds, the Android tablets could be a very attractive alternative, though it will take awhile for large numbers of third-party tablet apps to become available. Honeycomb will support Flash video on the Web, while the iPad doesn’t.

One big issue will be how these Honeycomb-powered products will be differentiated from each other. Here, price and hardware features could be decisive. Speed, size, screen quality, connections to TVs, and support for fast, 4G wireless networks are all possibilities. For instance, the Xoom will work with “smart dock” accessories, and will eventually support 4G. The Vizio Via will have a big speaker and a built-in TV remote control.

BlackBerry PlayBook

RIM and H-P

BlackBerry maker RIM plans a light, thin, 7″ tablet called the PlayBook, likely in the next few months. In demos, it looks handsome and colorful—nothing like a BlackBerry phone. That’s because it runs on an entirely different operating system.

One unusual feature of the PlayBook is that, in key respects, it’s more of a companion to a BlackBerry phone than a standalone tablet. It draws its cellular connectivity from a BlackBerry, rather than having it built in. The first model will lack its own email, calendar and contact apps, and instead merely view and interact with those in a user’s BlackBerry. This reliance on a BlackBerry could be a plus for BlackBerry users. But it could be seen as a downside for users of other phones.

H-P plans to unveil a 10″ tablet on Feb. 9 based on Palm’s sleek webOS operating system, which H-P now owns. Based on trademark filings, it’s likely to be called the HP TouchPad. While the computer giant has said little or nothing about the device, it’s likely to ship this summer and feature, out of the box, integrated video calling and document editing. A big question is whether the software scales well to a tablet size and whether third-party developers, who mostly shunned webOS when Palm launched it, will write enough apps for the HP tablet.

Windows Tablets

Unlike the other players, Microsoft seems to be planning to cram a full PC operating system into a multi-touch tablet. The first Windows tablets, which will be out soon, will be based on Windows 7, use styluses, and be aimed mainly at corporations, not consumers. Even their makers privately express little enthusiasm for them. However, later in the year, Microsoft is expected to roll out a new Windows-based multi-touch tablet platform better designed to go head-to-head with the iPad and Android tablets.

Size Matters

One big decision for consumers will be whether they like the 10″ size of the iPad, and of many of the new Android tablets, or the smaller 7″ size of some other models. A 7″ screen actually has less than half the surface area of the iPad’s display. But 7″ tablets—like the existing Samsung Galaxy Tab—are lighter and easier to hold in one hand than 10″ models. They also can cost less. Some companies will be trying even smaller tablets, despite the poor sales of Dell’s 5″ Streak tablet in 2010. One big-name PC maker has been working on a 4.8″ tablet.

Keyboards and Ports

Since the iPad lacks a built-in physical keyboard, and common PC ports like USB connectors, many of the competitors will try to outdo it with these things. Lots of them will have some form of USB port, and a few will come with hidden keyboards that slide out or fold out somehow. Lenovo plans to ship an Android tablet that can optionally be used as a slide-in screen for a Windows laptop.

All this tablet competition is good news for consumers, but I urge you to study the landscape carefully and weigh your options before plunging into the new category.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/whats-on-the-table-for-tablets-this-year/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110113/weathering-the-storm-rim-makes-its-business-case-in-boston/ http://allthingsd.com/20110113/weathering-the-storm-rim-makes-its-business-case-in-boston/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:11:48 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=2394 Mobilized is trudging through the snow in Beantown Thursday to hear Research In Motion talk about its plans for the enterprise. RIM is set to talk about why businesses should bet on both the BlackBerry and the forthcoming PlayBook tablet.

The event, at the Marriott Copley Place downtown, is just getting under way. I won’t bore you with every detail, but will post whenever things get interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy this take on Angry Birds for the BlackBerry.

Update, 10:17 am ET: The intro is still going on. RIM Vice President Alec Taylor is talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis for some reason. However, RIM was nice enough to pass out slides for the whole day. Here are some of the highlights:

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

Other features coming later this year include automatic hand-off from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, a “move call from desk” feature and more.

BlackBerry Balance
A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.

PlayBook
As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.

10:35 am ET: The Cuban Missile Crisis is apparently over, and VP Pete Devenyi is now outlining the company’s business product road map and making the pitch for its strategy.

“We really do have a great story,” he says, noting that the enterprise is different from the “arms race” of the consumer market.

“It’s not just about the number of apps in App world,” he says, noting that businesses can and are building programs just for use within the corporation. Some businesses, he says, have hundreds of internal apps, none of which show up in the public storefront. BlackBerry, he says, also allows businesses better control than rivals over what programs are on a worker’s device. For example, Devenyi says, when workers change groups within a company, the programs they have access to can be updated automatically with programs deleted and added from their devices.

“That kind of power is power that no one else has,” he says. “We don’t read about that much.”

10:43 am: In addition to both the paid BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the slimmed-down free “Express” version of the server, RIM plans to launch an email system aimed directly at small-to-midsize businesses–MDaemon Messaging Server, BlackBerry Edition. The idea is to give smaller businesses a full email server that has full BlackBerry support. The product stems from an acquisition RIM made a year or two ago and offers what RIM says are features similar to Microsoft’s Exchange Server but at a fraction of the price.

The company is also launching “very, very soon” a modest update to its flagship server product, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3. It will add more support for employee-owned devices (including the BlackBerry Balance feature described earlier), support for encrypted attachments and certification for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the latest version, known as Lync 2010.

11:18 am: RIM is launching yet another server this year, known as the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM). BEAM, which companies would have to buy in addition to their BlackBerry email server, aims to streamline enterprise content for use on a BlackBerry. ‘What that results in is a much more efficient application than you would otherwise have,” Devenyi says. It’s in beta now, he adds.

11:25 am: BlackBerry is launching its equivalent of Find My Phone, known as BlackBerry Protect, which will allow individuals to remotely wipe or post a message if a device is lost. Protect will launch later this year, Devenyi says.

Finally, the company is talking about a number of changes it is making to the core BlackBerry Enterprise Server so that it can run via the cloud. Launching later this year, RIM will have the ability for its server product to be remotely hosted and support more than one business. It’s not clear yet if this will be RIM offering BlackBerry as a cloud-based service or if this is a product for hosting partners, though it sounds more like the latter.

11:32 am: Devenyi told Mobilized that the company is just showing the architectural changes it is making, not saying how it will bring the cloud-based capabilities to market. “We’re still working through a number of those details ourselves.” Devenyi said. “It could be both, but we are not announcing.”

11:42 am: On to the PlayBook finally. Senior Product manager Ryan Bidan gives the spiel. He says there is a lot that the company isn’t ready to share. Addressing concerns around battery life, Bidan notes the PlayBook has a 5300-miliamp battery, but doesn’t give specifics on how much battery life that will translate to.

“We’ll have good battery life,” he says. “Don’t worry about the battery life.”

Other details:
Software updates will be pushed down to the device on an ongoing basis. There will be a version of App World on the device for downloading developer-created programs.

And with that, the formal part of the event is over.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110113/weathering-the-storm-rim-makes-its-business-case-in-boston/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/ http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:10:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39480 AOL’s strategy to partner with third-party content creators for original programming–especially premium video content–keeps ticking, with another partnership, this time with Endemol USA.

The New York-based Internet company said it would “co-develop and co-produce new Web programming initially aimed at AOL’s growing women’s audience” with Endemol.

Endemol makes television shows, such as “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” “Big Brother,” “Wipeout” and “Jerseylicious,” as well as Web series “Married On My Space 1 & 2″ and “Coupon Mom.”

AOL is working on several other content partnerships, said sources, to add to its previous ones.

AOL said the first two “built-if-sold”–meaning some big advertiser has to pony up–will be:

“Re-Dressed by America”: An interactive Web series where online users make over subjects facing a life-changing event (high school reunions, first dates, etc.) by voting on their hairstyles, fashion, accessories and more. The series will be featured on Stylelist.com and MyDaily.com.

“Mamá’s Recipe”: U.S. families compete for the best family recipes and share their secrets with the AOL audience. The series will be featured on KitchenDaily and AOL Latino.

Not exactly “The Sopranos,” but there you have it.

Here’s the full press release from AOL:

AOL INC. AND ENDEMOL USA ANNOUNCE WEB PROGRAMMING PRODUCTION PARTNERSHIP

Agreement Further Expands AOL’s Original Video Offerings

New York, NY–January 12. 2011– AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Endemol USA today announced a production agreement to co-develop and co-produce new Web programming initially aimed at AOL’s growing women’s audience, as well as at the broader AOL audience. The partnership will focus on creating premium, unscripted digital video content that will enhance the user experience by taking advantage of the real time, interactive and community nature of the Web.

“Endemol is a premiere producer of unscripted programming and their expertise in creating unique, interactive, popular shows, combined with AOL’s growing video audience will take digital production to the next level,” said David Eun, President of AOL Media & Studios. “Endemol is the latest in a string of partnerships that serve both the AOL consumers and our advertising partners.”

“We are thrilled to partner with such a successful and global leading company like AOL,” said David Goldberg, Chairman of Endemol North America. “This deal continues our growth as a leader in interactive digital entertainment, and we look forward to creating many genre-defining series with AOL.”

The first two built-if-sold series to be produced under the new agreement are:

“Re-Dressed By America”: An interactive web series where online users make over subjects facing a life-changing event (high school reunions, first dates, etc.) by voting on their hairstyles, fashion, accessories and more. The series will be featured on Stylelist.com and MyDaily.com.

“Mamá’s Recipe”: US families compete for the best family recipes and share their secrets with the AOL audience. The series will be featured on KitchenDaily (http://www.kitchendaily.com) and AOL Latino (http://latino.aol.com/).

AOL will promote each Web series throughout the AOL Network focusing on the sites and destinations relevant for each series’ demographic. Every series produced through this partnership will feature enhanced online programming, such as user voting, supplemental video clips and supporting blog content to create deeper user experiences, and opportunities for sponsors to integrate their messaging in creative and highly-engaging ways.

Endemol USA, one of the world’s leading producers of entertainment programming, will leverage its experience producing hit shows such as Emmy-award winning “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” “Big Brother,” “Wipeout” and “Jerseylicious,” as well as the hit Web series “Married On My Space 1 & 2″ and “Coupon Mom” to create captivating Web series with AOL.

“You’ve Got…” the video series that debuted with the new AOL.com launch, generated nearly 8 million views in its first month, and featured a diverse guest list including Kelly Ripa, Barack Obama, Matt Damon and the Marines in Afghanistan. For comparison, that puts “You’ve Got…” on-pace with a top 10 Web series. Overall, video views on the new AOL.com rose more than 3X in its first month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110112/in-yet-another-content-hook-up-aol-ups-deal-with-endemol/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101229/wi-fi-hotspot-safety-and-mac-viruses/ http://allthingsd.com/20101229/wi-fi-hotspot-safety-and-mac-viruses/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:50:38 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=805 Q:

I have had a little disagreement with my IT guy. He says that when taking my laptop out in public, I should never type anything with passwords or confidential information. He says that someone can pick up my information. I say that I can’t believe that everyone in public is totally exposed. There must be some way to protect yourself while on a public network. Who is right?

A:

There’s no single correct answer. It’s true that thieves in public places can and do steal passwords and other sensitive information transferred over public Wi-Fi hotspots. But it’s also true that methods like Virtual Private Networks can mitigate this problem, and that most public hotspots are, just by the odds, unlikely to harbor these thieves at any one time. However, my advice is to avoid doing any sensitive tasks, like banking or stock trading, while using public hotspots. And, if you’re doing anything confidential on your company or home network remotely, use a VPN, which is like a secure tunnel through the internet.

Q:

I recently purchased a new iMac and am considering installing anti-virus/spyware/malware programs on it. Reader forums in MacWorld magazine say it’s not needed. A local newspaper computer columnist says he’s had Macs since the early ’80s and has never run an AV program and has had no problems. Other online computer advisers say Macs are always vulnerable and advise to run AV programs. Any recommendations here?

A:

No computer is inherently invulnerable to malicious software, and that includes the Macintosh. However, nearly every malicious program known is meant to run on Windows and simply won’t operate on the Mac operating system. The handful of Mac viruses and other malware that have been discovered are either proofs of concept, or have spread to very few users and done little or no damage. Most Mac users I’ve known don’t run third-party security software and haven’t had malware problems. So I don’t routinely recommend Mac security software.

There are two caveats, however. If you are running Windows on your Mac, you should install Windows security software, to run while Windows is in use. Also, Mac users are just as vulnerable as Windows users are to online scams, or to insecure public networks. So, even though you may never get a virus, you still have to be careful about doing sensitive Internet tasks via public hotspots or careless behavior like clicking on links sent you by unknown email senders.

Q:

My car has an audio jack that integrates any input into the sound system. I know that Kindle has a text-to-speech feature. Would I be able to use that feature via the audio jack in the car?

A:

Without having tested your car’s input jack, I assume the answer is yes. The Kindle has a standard headphone jack.

However, note that the text-to-speech feature works only on certain books, not all of them. Publishers have the right to allow or disallow it for any book.

Also, even if it’s enabled, it isn’t the same as an audio book, which is usually read by a trained narrator or by the author. Instead, it’s a computer doing the reading.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101229/wi-fi-hotspot-safety-and-mac-viruses/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/russias-dst-out-of-twitter-funding-race-as-kleiner-poised-to-take-the-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/russias-dst-out-of-twitter-funding-race-as-kleiner-poised-to-take-the-deal/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:24:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38220

According to sources close to the situation, the aggressive Russian investment outfit DST Global is out of the running to fund Twitter.

Instead, the prize is almost certainly going to Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley venture firm of Web 1.0 that has been making a big push of late into the Web 2.0 market.

The valuation for the new round–which sources said is well above $150 million–will be from $3.5 billion to $4 billion.

And it is not clear if there are any other smaller investors in this funding, but sources said that was likely.

Sources added that the San Francisco microblogging service will be completing its newest round of funding next week, although Twitter might not even announce it publicly.

The new round will be the first in a year for Twitter.

In the fall of 2009, Twitter raised funding at a $1 billion valuation to help spur its growth to its current size of 325 employees, serving its 175 million users.

Such growth was of interest to DST, which has made giant investments in social networking giant Facebook, social gaming rocket ship Zynga and Groupon, the social buying site that recently ended acquisition talks with Google.

Twitter moving into its next phase of development is an attractive target for many VCs, as it seeks a lucrative way to monetize its popular business.

And, in fact, Kleiner star VC John Doerr has been making a big push to be the big investor in this key next round for Twitter, which also has had regular acquisition interest from both Google and Facebook.

What will be interesting to see is if acquisition interest in Twitter from the pair spikes, given the collapse of Google’s attempt to buy Groupon.

The talks with Twitter began, according to several sources, after Kleiner had considered investing in PostUp–the Twitter search engine and advertising platform start-up from Bill Gross’s Idealab, which was first called TweetUp.

PostUp irked Twitter, and its CEO Dick Costolo was particularly vocal about not allowing third-party ad rivals to create a spammier service.

Sources said it was Bill Campbell, well-known Silicon Valley exec and adviser to multiple companies such as Google, who brought Kleiner and Twitter into discussions.

Campbell’s latest coaching task has been at Twitter.

Kleiner has also recently stepped up its Web 2.0 game with the hiring of high-profile Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley.

She has been brought in to help turbocharge the firm’s digital investment portfolio, especially in social, mobile and commerce.

The move has underscored Kleiner’s noisy intent of late to jump into the social Web market.

After scoring a late entry into the scene with its investment in the fast-growing social gaming start-up Zynga, Kleiner has made a big marketing push recently to allocate a dedicated $250 million “sFund” to social start-ups.

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes first wrote of Kleiner’s interest in Twitter a week ago, followed by a report a day later in TechCrunch about Kleiner’s primacy in the Twitter funding race and Doerr’s fervent effort to land the investment.

None of the players mentioned here has responded to BoomTown’s request for a comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/russias-dst-out-of-twitter-funding-race-as-kleiner-poised-to-take-the-deal/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101118/twitter-partner-gnip-raises-2m-for-social-media-monitoring-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20101118/twitter-partner-gnip-raises-2m-for-social-media-monitoring-data/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:32:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=538 Gnip, which helps social media monitoring companies collect data, and yesterday became the first company authorized to resell Twitter data, has raised $2 million in funding.

In a bit of coincidental timing, said Gnip CEO Jud Valeski, the filing for the round was posted yesterday on the SEC site (which is where I found it). He confirmed the round amount as $2 million, coming mostly from previous investor Foundry Group and including First Round Capital again. This brings the company to $6.6 million raised so far.

Gnip’s deal with Twitter finally brings pricing clarity to usage of Twitter’s data streams, at least for analytics and monitoring companies. The company has permission to collect significant revenue on the streams. Previously, Twitter’s only paid data option was the Firehose full stream of all user status messages, for which it charged different amounts depending on the size of the customer and what it was doing with the data. While Microsoft paid $10 million to incorporate the Firehose into its real-time search, some start-ups that create Twitter clients were getting the Firehose for free.

As I reported yesterday, Gnip will offer social media monitoring companies the Halfhose (50 percent of Tweets at a cost of $30,000 per month), the Decahose (10 percent of Tweets for $5,000 per month) and the Mentionhose (all mentions of a user including @replies and re-Tweets for $20,000 per month), with the caveat that they can’t publicly display the data.

Boulder, Colo.-based Gnip has gone through a big turnaround in the last year. In September ’09, it laid off seven of its 12-person staff, saying the huge increase in creation of social media data had overwhelmed the company’s self-built database and it needed to start over. In May of this year CEO Eric Marcoullier left the company, leaving it in the hands of his co-founder Valeski. Marcoullier, who had previously founded IGN and MyBlogLog, is now working on another start-up, the “Foursquare for Web sites” OneTrueFan.

But a deal with Twitter–a company that has historically expanded into its developers’ territory much to their dismay, rather than blessing third-party companies with partnerships–is a firm indication that Gnip is back on track.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101118/twitter-partner-gnip-raises-2m-for-social-media-monitoring-data/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101112/foursquares-crowley-talks-about-a-real-ny-marathon-badge-coming-soon-to-a-d-dive-into-mobile-near-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20101112/foursquares-crowley-talks-about-a-real-ny-marathon-badge-coming-soon-to-a-d-dive-into-mobile-near-you/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:57:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37200

So what did Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley do when he was running the New York Marathon last week?

Three guesses and the first two don’t count: He checked in to the popular geolocation service from every mile marker on the 26-mile route.

Of course he did. (And you can see how here.)

It was, I will admit, somewhat charming, as Crowley most certainly was when I interviewed him onstage at a mobile conference earlier this week.

He also gave a very interesting talk about the future of Foursquare, painting a picture of a virtuous ecosystem of third-party developers helping to take the start-up into a place that’s much more than just a badge game and check-in service.

I have definitely given Crowley a bit of a hard time about a bunch of stuff, including taking the New York-based service from a hot mess of a trend to a cool necessity for consumers.

And, in the video below, he’s starting to make a very credible argument about how the company will evolve, even as it fights off intense competition from other rivals and, most especially, social networking giant Facebook’s Places offering.

I will be interviewing Crowley again at D: Dive Into Mobile on December 7 in San Francisco, where we will delve into Foursquare’s future even more.

Until then, enjoy the video interview I did, including Crowley showing off his real New York Marathon prize:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101112/foursquares-crowley-talks-about-a-real-ny-marathon-badge-coming-soon-to-a-d-dive-into-mobile-near-you/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:02:56 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1610 After seven months of unchallenged prominence, Apple’s hot-selling iPad now has its first credible competitor in the nascent market for multitouch consumer tablet computers: the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The Tab is being introduced over the next week by three major U.S. wireless phone carriers at $400 with a cellular data contract, or at $600 with cellular capability but no contract. The iPad starts at $499 for a Wi-Fi model with no cellular-data capability or contract, and is $629 for the least expensive model with cellular data capability but no contract.

Like the iPad, the Tab, which uses Google’s Android operating system, is a good-looking slate with a vivid color screen that can handle many of the tasks typically performed on a laptop. These include email, social networking, Web browsing, photo viewing, and music and video playback. It also can run a wide variety of third-party apps. But it has major differences, most notably in size.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab has less than half the screen real estate than that of the iPad.

The Tab has a 7-inch screen versus the 9.7-inch display on the iPad. That may seem like a small difference, but the numbers are deceptive, because screen sizes are always described using diagonal measurements. In fact, the actual screen real estate on the Tab is less than half of the iPad’s. That’s a disadvantage, but it allows the overall unit to be much smaller and lighter, and thus more easily used in one hand, something some users will welcome.

The new tablet will be introduced in coming days by Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, with a variety of cellular data plans. AT&T also will carry the Tab during the holiday season but hasn’t announced its timing or data-plan pricing. Although it is being sold by cellular carriers, the Tab, like the iPad (which offers optional month-to-month cellular data through AT&T) can’t make cellular voice calls.

I’ve been testing the Tab for a couple of weeks and I like it. It’s a serious alternative to the iPad and one that will be preferred by some folks. It includes the three most-requested features missing in the iPad: a camera (two in fact); the ability to run Web videos and applications written in Adobe’s Flash software; and multitasking, though, to be fair, the latter feature is coming to the iPad imminently via a software update. Another strong point is that like Apple, Samsung has rewritten some of the standard apps, such as the email and calendar programs, to make them look more like PC programs and less like smartphone apps.

On balance, however, I still prefer the iPad. For one thing, I like getting twice the screen size for a little more money up front—as little as $29 for the no-contract model with cellular capability. For another, the iPad has vastly more apps specifically designed for a tablet versus a smartphone—about 40,000 according to Apple, compared with just a handful for the Tab. And it can run about triple the apps overall, if you count smartphone apps that aren’t optimized for tablets.

Also, in my tests, the iPad’s battery life was about five hours better than the Tab’s, its maximum storage capacity is higher, and its aluminum body is more rugged than the Tab’s plastic casing. Finally, the iPad can be bought in a Wi-Fi-only model that frees you from any entanglement with cellphone carriers. The Tab also has Wi-Fi, but, so far, no Wi-Fi-only version, though Samsung is promising one next year.

Still, the Tab is a very attractive product and I enjoyed using it. For buyers who want to spend less up front, don’t mind the smaller screen, prefer the more compact dimensions and one-handed usability, and place high value on the cameras and on Flash, it may well be a better choice.

Hardware

The Tab is a rectangular slate about two inches shorter and three inches narrower than the iPad. It is also a tad thinner. It weighs less than a pound, compared with 1.5 pounds for the iPad. While its screen is smaller, it has almost the same resolution as the iPad, so almost as much material can be displayed on it.

The screen is sharp and generally responsive to touch, though, in my tests, a bit slower than the iPad’s screen. The Tab comes with 16 gigabytes of flash storage, the same as the base iPad. But with some carriers, this storage is internal and in others, it’s on a removable memory card. The card slot comes on all models and can hold up to 32 gigabytes at extra cost. The iPad, also at extra cost, comes in versions that go up to 64 gigabytes, all internal.

With its lighter weight and smaller size, I found the Tab easy to use while standing and moving. It easily fit in one hand, though for many tasks you’ll still need two hands.

Battery Life

Samsung and its partners make wildly varying battery claims for the Tab. The former says it can last up to 13 hours on a single charge, while T-Mobile claims just eight hours. I gave the Tab the same test I used for my iPad review: I put the screen on nearly full brightness, left the Wi-Fi on to collect email and played back-to-back videos until the unit died. My test Tab lasted six hours, 50 minutes, though at six hours, 10 minutes the screen dimmed irrevocably to a darkness level that made it useless. In the same test last spring, the iPad logged 11 hours, 28 minutes.

Cameras

The Tab has a 3-megapixel rear camera with flash and a 1.3-megapixel front camera mainly for video calls. Still-photographs and videos I took were of average quality, but videos taken with the front camera were fuzzy.

I tested video calling using a pre-release, tablet-optimized version of Qik, the software being preinstalled for this purpose on the Tab. Results were mixed. It will work over either cellular or Wi-Fi connections, but the version I tried wasn’t tuned for cellular, so we used Wi-Fi. In my conversation with a Qik executive, the call at first failed to go through. When it did go through, it worked fine for awhile, and then failed when I tried a feature designed to hide my image. Later, the audio dropped altogether. Qik says it is fixing the problems.

Software

The Tab uses the latest version of Android, and it generally worked very smoothly, even though Google has warned that Android isn’t yet ready for tablets. I was especially impressed with Samsung’s attractive and usable rewrites of the calendar, email and contacts apps, which, like their iPad cousins, use multiple panels to make them more computer-like, while still remaining touch-friendly.

I found the Web browser to be a bit jerky in zooming into text and scrolling through long pages. I tested several Adobe Flash videos and websites written in Flash. Sometimes they played and sometimes they didn’t. In all cases, they slowed the browser down. On one site written in Flash, I got a warning saying I might want to “abort” lest the computer become “unresponsive.” In another case, the Tab crashed. So I conclude that while the Tab does play Flash, it needs work on that score.

I downloaded a few third-party apps. I couldn’t find any that were rewritten with extra features for tablets, nor any way to discover these in the Android Market. Some of my downloaded apps scaled fine to tablet size. Others were surrounded by large black bars.

Cellular pricing

On an iPad, if you opt for cellular-data service, there is no contract and only two monthly prices—$14.99 for 250 megabytes and $25 for 2 gigabytes. On the Tab, it’s much more complicated. Verizon, which is selling only the $600 no-contract model, says its pricing will start at $20 a month for 1 gigabyte of data. Sprint charges $29.99 monthly for 2 gigabytes and $59.99 for 5 gigabytes. T-Mobile has different prices for no-contract and contract models, and different rates for new and existing customers. Just two examples: a new customer under contract on a Tab can pay $30 monthly for 200 megabytes or $50 for 5 gigabytes.

So, I urge Tab buyers to do the math carefully on the overall cost of the device under various carriers and plans.

Bottom Line

The Tab is attractive, versatile and competitively priced, though monthly cell fees can add up. It’s different enough from the iPad, yet good enough, to give consumers a real choice.

Find all his columns and videos at walt.allthingsd.com Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101110/samsung-galaxy-tab-tablet-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101103/liveblogging-the-facebook-mobile-event-single-sign-on/ http://allthingsd.com/20101103/liveblogging-the-facebook-mobile-event-single-sign-on/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:55:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36691

BoomTown arrived late to the Facebook mobile event for the press due to traffic related to the parade today for the San Francisco Giants’ World Series victory–and where I would much rather be right now.

Go Giants!

10:53 am PT: In any case, I am here in the cafeteria of Facebook again, where the company continues its attempts to take over the known digital universe before Google does.

Currently, the social networking giant notes “200 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook from a phone, more than triple the number just one year ago.”

Thus, some new tries of a lot of stuff, such as single sign-on.

Meaning you sign on a Facebook and it signs you on all over the Web (or at least at those in partnership with the company).

Such as at Groupon and Zynga.

This single sign-on stuff has been tried by many before, a kind of Holy Grail of the Web, and where everyone has failed.

But it also the proverbial camel’s nose poking in your digital tent.

As in, the whole Facebook body is surely coming in next.

Facebook’s exec in charge of all this, Eric Tseng, talks about a virtuous circle of single sign-on, happy users and happy developers, sounding as if this is the single biggest problem facing humanity.

A password crisis! Silicon Valley to the rescue!

Perhaps the only issue the now damaged administration of President Barack Obama could actually get some legislation passed on now.

“My fellow Americans, we have too long be stuck in a miasma of forgetting which name of our dog we used for our password plus the number one…”

How much do I want to be at Giants parade right now? Much!

11:02 am: Next, we move onto more ability to show your location to friends on Facebook better and make sense of it by opening location APIs.

More heavy pontificating about what a disaster it is that we cannot properly see where our friends are on Facebook in the real world.

Of course, this leaves out the pertinent point that my “friends” on Facebook are exactly those I do not want to run into at the Starbucks on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, Calif.

Loopt Founder Sam Altman comes up to show off the integration with Facebook Places, where this problem is solved anyway.

“We believe data wants to be unified,” says Altman.

Certainly if you are the Borg, you want it to be unified. Me, not so much.

11:11 am: Now comes the attempted Groupon-killer from Facebook, which is creatively called “Deals.”

This is essentially allowing Facebook Places to locate a person and then merchants to offer deals when a user is nearby via a platform offered by Facebook.

You can do individual deals, such as getting a beer at a bar when you check in. Then, there is a loyalty deal on the phone, taking the place of that dog-eared card you always lose.

And there is the “friend deal.” This is not friends with benefits, sadly.

It means if you check in and bring a lot of folks, one eats free–which sounds just a little naughty.

Also, there is one deal type related to charity.

For the Gap, for example, you get a free jeans if you are among the first 10,000 to check in at a Gap store. There are 500 million Facebook users, so you do the math.

Essentially, it is about getting stuff if you check in, including experiences.

So, just like little white mice in Facebook’s lab, we push the button, we get the cheese. Sigh.

But I wonder if I check in right now, I can be transported to the Giants parade via a time machine. Now that might be something worth handing over my privacy to Facebook.

“The big takeaway for today is that there is obviously a lot of change in the social space,” says Facebook CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. “You can rethink any product area and make it be social.”

Indeed, you can. And Facebook obviously is going to be plowing on through a lot of them in order to solidify its stranglehold on the consumer.

11:23 am: Q&A!

The first question is on privacy and third-party developers giving up your location.

Yes, that!

Zuckerberg makes assurances that the current privacy steps now in place are working just fine and also users need to consent.

“The place information about people is not public,” he says.

There is question from Ben Parr of Mashable, about whether there is an iPad app for Facebook coming.

“It’s not mobile…it is a computer,” declares Zuckerberg, dismissing the very good question.

“I think Apple would disagree with you,” countered Parr, correctly.

“Well, sorry,” said Zuckerberg with more than a little bit of snark.

For a second, he sounds just like the guy from the Facebook movie.

But Zuckerberg quickly declares his love of Apple products and apologizes, although he should not have as it was a funny exchange.

A question about single sign-on. Zuckerberg notes that it has been tried, but the experience was bad.

“What we think is going to happen now is that it is so easy when it works, it is a whole different experience,” he said, comparing it to the way YouTube made video uploading on the Web easier.

Zuckerberg’s goal is that all apps become social, which is also a virtuous circle for Facebook, of course.

A question about the deals offer. It seems for Zuckerberg that Facebook is not getting a cut from retailers right now, as Groupon does.

Ruh-roh, Andrew Mason!

Zuckerberg then notes that the Places offering is going well, without giving a lot of specifics.

At the end, PR maven Brandee Barker wraps it up by saying what I have been thinking this entire time:

“Go Giants!”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101103/liveblogging-the-facebook-mobile-event-single-sign-on/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/liveblogging-unveiling-of-the-sfund-at-facebook-with-guest-stars-kleiner-amazon-and-zynga/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/liveblogging-unveiling-of-the-sfund-at-facebook-with-guest-stars-kleiner-amazon-and-zynga/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:44:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ouch!

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

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

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

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

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

Gordon: He could see the family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:17 am: Q&A.

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

Doerr joked, “Next question.” Ha.

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

There were two other dullish questions, about new partners.

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

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

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

No, it was not, declares Doerr.

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

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

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

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

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

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