AllThingsD » Utah

Start-Up Domo Goes 100 Percent More Social Starting Today

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:22:10 +0000

When I last looked in on Domo Technologies, the Utah-based business intelligence start-up run by Omniture founder Josh James, it had just raised a $20 million round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

Josh James Start-Up Domo Says Arigato to IVP in $20 Million Funding Round

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:59:24 +0000

It’s been a little while since we heard from Josh James. Having raised boatloads of money, the Omniture founder who bolted Adobe last year bought a small start-up in his native Utah and transformed it into Domo Technologies, a data analytics company.

That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

Meet Domo, the Latest Chapter in the Josh James Saga

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:59:24 +0000

If you were going to write a Saturday afternoon serial about the adventures of a young entrepreneur starting over, you could probably draw a lot of material from Josh James. You certainly can’t fault him for all the fun he seems to be having.

In our last episode, James and his employees threw a party — actually kind of a funeral (it’s complicated) — for the name of the Utah-based company he had bought: Corda Technologies. The point was to make way for the new name: Domo Technologies.

And he couldn’t just rename it and put out a press release like everyone else. He had to have fun with that, too. So he drew up a complicated mathematical formula, that would lead people good at math to the clues they would need to figure out the new name. The first person who guessed it right would get $10,000. (Someone in Utah, an engineer, ultimately won the prize money.)

But it wasn’t all fun and games. There was the uncomfortable matter of a continuing lawsuit with Adobe, which acquired James’ first company, Omniture, in 2009. Adobe claimed that James violated noncompete agreements by buying Corda and trying to hire away a former Adobe employee. Adobe sued James in Utah, while James sued Adobe alleging unfair competition in California. That part’s complicated, too.

And as we reported in April, after bolting Adobe, James started raising money and found investors willing to line up, checkbooks in hand, based almost entirely on his reputation. Today he confirmed our reporting by announcing that Benchmark Capital, whose notable investments include Twitter, eBay and MySQL, has invested $33 million in a Series A round of funding. Matt Cohler — General Partner of Benchmark; also the fifth employee at Facebook and a founder at LinkedIn — led the deal and is joining Domo’s board of directors.

Also joining Domo’s board:

Mark Gorenberg, Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and former board member of Omniture
John Thompson, Chairman and former CEO of Symantec and current CEO of Virtual Instruments
Fraser Bullock, co-founder and Managing Director at Sorenson Capital, former Omniture director and one of the founding partners of Bain Capital
Neal Williams, founder of Corda, the company James bought and is transforming into Domo

The funding comes on top of a $10 million seed round from several angel investors, including Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and several others.

What’s the name about? Domo will be a cloud-based software-as-service play, James says. And cloud-based companies are different from traditional enterprise software companies in one key way. “With traditional enterprise software, it’s all about selling a license and then signing up the customer for maintenance fee, and you live on that,” he told me. “With software-as-a-service, it’s all about making the customer happy. You’re doing everything you can to make their user experience a good one — one that’s so good that at the end of the day they say ‘thank you.’” As in “domo arigato,” which is Japanese for “thank you,” and which is also part of the title of a very strangely memorable song that was a hit for the band Styx in 1982. Get it?

The son of a U.S. Marine, James lived for a time in Japan. Plus, Domo is the sort of word — like Google — that can function as both noun and verb. And, like Google and Facebook, it has two Os.

So what will Domo do? Business intelligence, but it’s not what you think. “When you think about BI, it’s a big industry worth $10 billion a year, and all those companies have done all the work to collect all the data. But the customer is not getting any real value from that data,” James told me. “They feel like they’re spending a lot of money putting data in a box but not getting anything useful out of it.” He plans to fix that.

All the major vendors that collect any kind of business data have APIs, or application programming interfaces. Taking advantage of those APIs, Domo will collect data from the major business applications to craft what James calls an executive management platform. “It sits on top of all your systems and all your corporate data and allows you access to it in a way you never had,” he says.

The average day of a modern executive is full of reports brimming over with data. “Every week and month you get dozens of different reports in PowerPoint and PDF and email and Excel from all sorts of different people, and you have access to a few dozen systems that you have user names and passwords for,” he says. “But if you want to use it, you have to remember where it came from and how to get to it, and who to call to find out more, because they’re usually static.”

It was a revelation running Omniture, which specializes in Web traffic data and analytics. James would hear back from online marketing companies about how useful the Ominiture data was to their business, and wished he could have the same kind of useful data for running his own. “I was getting all these reports from all these different parts of the business. It was overwhelming.”

And none of it was live. “All of the data has already been created. But there’s nothing that sits on top of them all, and gives you real-time access to all of it and lets you look at it the way you want to,” James says. So that’s what Domo is all about. Tune in next week!

Omniture's Former CEO: $10,000 Says You Can't Guess My New Company's Name

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:03:48 +0000

Remember how Josh James, the former CEO of Omniture, left Adobe to start a mysterious new company, for which he was found to be raising a boatload of venture capital money? Of course you do.

When we last looked in on his efforts to fund this new venture, James had raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, and had also gotten a commitment from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, both as part of a seed round worth more than $5 million. On top of that, he’s already pretty far along in raising a Series A round, and Benchmark Capital had already committed up to $30 million.

Remember also that though he had acquired Corda Technologies, a company based in Lindon, Utah, near his home, he said that company was to be the basis for the new one, only with a much bigger vision? The thing is, he hadn’t decided on what to name the new venture.

Well now, he’s apparently decided on the name, but he’s just not ready to tell the world yet. Instead he’s going to let you guess. And there are clues. He’s announced on his personal blog a contest to work out the name, and to guess it you have to figure out a mathematical equation. A $10,000 prize goes to the first one with the answer, as explained in the fine print from James’s personal site. Send your answers to info@corda.com.

The $10,000 prize for solving the math equation and puzzle will only be awarded to one person, as determined at our sole discretion. The recipient will be the first person who we determine has found the answer key, signed a non-disclosure agreement, and then finished the equation and puzzle and demonstrated proof of his or her solution after obtaining the key.

Think you’ve got the brains to do it? Well here it is, smarty pants. Get to it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are some clues you can find in James’s recent video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Probably not, but it’s worth watching all the the same.

[ See post to watch video ]

Techies Pause Long Hours for Long Weekend of Snow Kiting in Utah

Liz Gannes — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:20:33 +0000

It’s a good time to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and not just because the parties are getting swankier. More than 30 techies went snow kiting in Park City, Utah, over MLK weekend on a trip organized and funded by the venture capital firm Charles River Ventures.

Snow kiting is the winter and land equivalent of kite surfing (which has been the hot new thing for some five years or so), and it looks insanely fun. Forbes video anchor Kym McNicholas got to go along last weekend, and posted this video report:

CRV partner Bill Tai (pictured) is well known in Silicon Valley as a kiting ambassador and enthusiast, and has been organizing such trips for the past four years, with the group size growing each time. Many of the invite-only Utah participants, including McNicholas, had been to previous editions in Maui, though many were snow kiting for the first time.

This year’s snow-kiting participants included Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Tango CTO Eric Setton, Twitter Director of Search and Geo Othman Laraki, Apple Engineering Director Andy Belk, Speechpad CEO Konstantin Othmer, Triggit COO Susan Coelius Keplinger and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman. Co-organizer and CRV partner Saar Gur said via email that CRV “picked friends and techies who bring an awesome attitude to try the sport.”

The trip seems to function as a marketing event for CRV and a fun boondoggle for everyone involved. One repeat participant told me the trip only increased his positive impressions of Charles River Ventures, but that it didn’t necessarily mean he would take its money. He did say he’d be less likely to go to events that made him pay to attend.

Viral Video: "Page One" at Sundance

Kara Swisher — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:39:59 +0000

One of the more interesting movies at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, which opens today in Park City, Utah, will be “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.”

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Here’s the program description from Sundance:

With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source, newspapers going bankrupt, and outlets focusing on content they claim audiences (or is it advertisers?) want, PAGE ONE chronicles the media industry’s transformation and assesses the high stakes for democracy if in-depth investigative reporting becomes extinct.

The film deftly makes a beeline for the eye of the storm or, depending on how you look at it, the inner sanctum of the media, gaining unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism–including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching–is alive and well. The resources, intellectual capital, stamina, and self-awareness mobilized when it counts attest there are no shortcuts when analyzing and reporting complex truths.

What is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

And, as someone who made the move away from a big mainstream newspaper to an online-only publication, I experienced some significant déjà vu watching clips in this interview with Rossi below, especially of the editor-centric tone of the newsroom and the franticness of reporters to get a story on the front page.

Which these days feels like such an odd and ancient way to think of journalism and which I also don’t miss for a second. (By the way, you can do “rigorous” journalism online too and without all the endless meetings.)

Check out Rossi (and that’s the very funny NYT media columnist David Carr in the photo below):

Exclusive: SnagFilms Snags $10 Million in Funding at $50 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:15:38 +0000

SnagFilms, the online video distribution site for professional documentaries, has nabbed $10 million in funding from Comcast’s investment arm and New Enterprise Associates, and will also now be distributing fictional independent film releases.

That and the new investment giving SnagFilms a valuation of $50 million should be big news at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, the famous independent film gathering opening in Park City, Utah, on Thursday.

And SnagFilms also announced that well-known industry exec Bingham Ray is joining the start-up to spearhead its distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films.

The service, unlike the subscription-based video giant Netflix, currently distributes free non-fiction documentary films with advertising, as well as offers rental streaming and purchase options.

And it is profitable, said Ted Leonsis, the former AOL exec who is the founder and has been the driving investor in SnagFilms.

“It was always my personal frustration as a backer of documentaries that you could not get distribution far and wide,” he said in an interview earlier today.

He noted that while Netflix is really now focused on big studio fare, “what we’ve discovered is a big supply of independent video that has never seen light of day, but that has a big audience.”

SnagFilms’ strategy is to give broader reach to these films, which often don’t even have a theatrical opening–or, if they do, are very small.

Along with its site, which digitizes the films and adds advertising to them, SnagFilms also encourages Web sites and others to grab films and create a “virtual movie theater.” (You can see my effort below.)

It also has video-on-demand deals with Comcast, Verizon and more, as well as purchase options with Apple’s iTunes and others.

Earlier this month, SnagFilms also launched an impressive and free iPad full-movie-watching app.

SnagFilms also owns a popular news site called indieWIRE, which covers the independent film market, and the new funding will also be used to expand it.

That market has been in need of a boost of some kind, since it has been struggling as financing has dried up for the production of quality documentaries and outside-the-Hollywood-machine movies.

It has long been hoped that the Internet would perhaps save and strengthen the genre, with its supposed long-tail magic.

But the going has been slow. Currently, SnagFilms has 2,000 films in its online library, although Leonsis said the aim is to use the new funds to get 10,000 films on the service as soon as possible.

“We’re trying to build a beachhead in the independent film world,” he said of SnagFilms, which currently has about 40 employees in Washington, D.C., and New York. “We think we have a niche and video is the killer app on Web now.”

Leonsis, who has backed such notable documentaries as “The Rape of Nanking,” said NEA’s Peter Barris will join the board, along with existing investor Steve Case.

Case and Leonsis, of course, were the dynamic duo of AOL’s glory days.

So, I am rooting for another win in an arena that needs it.

Thus, here’s my own movie palace online and also the official press release from SnagFilms:

Watch more free documentaries

Industry Powerhouses NEA and Comcast Invest in SnagFilms

$10 million in new funding to distribute documentaries and fictional independent films on all digital platforms and devices, globally

Washington D.C.–January 17, 2011 – SnagFilms announced today it has received $10 million in growth capital from new investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Comcast Interactive Capital (CIC). Existing investors, including Ted Leonsis (SnagFilms’ Founder) and Steve Case, also participated. The financing will be used to expand its distribution of independent films–including, for the first time, fictional independent releases–across all digital platforms and devices, and on a global basis.

SnagFilms is a leader in distributing free, ad-supported titles from a library of over 2,000 non-fiction films. Last year, SnagFilms entered the transactional world with launches of video on demand channels on Comcast and Verizon FiOS, as well as titles for sale through the Apple’s iTunes store. Earlier this month, SnagFilms debuted its iPad application with the largest collection of award-winning U.S. films offered free to iPad users.

“As a profitable company with substantial private investors, SnagFilms didn’t need to raise outside capital,” said company founder Ted Leonsis. “However, we saw overwhelming strategic value in involving NEA, a pioneer and leading venture capital firm, and CIC, the investment arm of Comcast. SnagFilms is very well-financed and uniquely positioned now to bring the full array of independent films–fiction and non-fiction, U.S. and foreign–to global audiences on all platforms and devices. We’ve amassed a library of 2,000 documentaries since our launch, and we’re now building distribution opportunities for tens of thousands of independent films in both categories. That’s great news for film fans and for filmmakers.”

“SnagFilms is perfectly positioned to fuse technology and content in a manner that has marked many of the transformational industry leaders we have helped build in the past,” said NEA Managing General Partner Peter Barris, who joins the Company’s Board of Directors. “New devices and digital platforms will allow consumers unprecedented access to quality content, and SnagFilms will be there to delight them. We are pleased to be able to invest in SnagFilms at this time, and to help them add fictional indie films to their expertise with documentaries–and to take both genres to the full swath of digital platforms and devices.” Among many other investments, Barris serves on the board of Groupon as its first VC investor.

“We are excited about the new opportunities SnagFilms creates, especially for independent filmmakers who historically could not get distribution,” said David Horowitz, Managing Director of Comcast Interactive Capital. “This investment reflects our view that consumers are demanding a diverse selection of high-quality content that can be watched on any platform or device.”

SnagFilms also announced that industry veteran Bingham Ray will join the Company to help guide its entry into distribution of fictional narrative and foreign-produced independent films. Ray, former President of United Artists, October Films and Kimmel Entertainment, and honored for Lifetime Achievement by the Gotham Awards, has deep experience in the acquisition, marketing and distribution of motion pictures, including “Hotel Rwanda,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Secrets & Lies,” “War Room,” “High Art,” “Last Days” and “Breaking the Waves.”

“Bingham has been an advocate for filmmakers throughout his career,” noted Rick Allen, SnagFilms CEO. “His record of successful distribution on traditional platforms provides a strategic sense and depth of relationships that will be invaluable as we extend our model into a broader array of films. Bingham will be a key member of our large presence at the Sundance Film Festival this week and beyond.”

“I’ve been a big fan of SnagFilms from their earliest days, and am truly thrilled to be part of the team as they expand the service, bringing more filmmakers to bigger audiences on a wider array of platforms,” said Ray. “This is the future of our business.”

“SnagFilms plus Bingham Ray is a great combination,” said Tom Bernard, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics. “Bingham knows the indie world as well as anyone alive and is admired for his experience and for always delivering for filmmakers. He’ll be a big asset to SnagFilms’ expansion.”

In addition, SnagFilms intends to use its new growth capital to expand its indieWIRE unit, now in its 15th year as the leading web source of news, reviews and analysis of independent film.

“indieWIRE’s traffic is now ten times what it was when we purchased it two and a half years ago,” Allen said. “Before the Academy Awards are announced later this month, you’ll see new editor-in-chief Dana Harris add ongoing features to our coverage of the indie world, and exciting new blogs to our Network, like the recently-added blog The Playlist.”

About SnagFilms

SnagFilms features free ad-supported viewing of more than 2,000 award-winning titles from some of the greatest names in documentary film. All films are shareable across the web. Since its launch in July 2008, SnagFilms’ library has been featured on over 2 billion web pageviews, with more than 325 million minutes of SnagFilms titles streamed across over more than 100,000 affiliated sites and webpages, including through partners such as Aol, Comcast, Hulu, the Starbucks Digital Network, IMDb, the Miami Herald, hundreds of non-profits, special interest sites and blogs. SnagFilms also offers selected titles via VOD (with Comcast and FiOS), on iTunes and through a new free application for the iPad.

OVGuide has twice named SnagFilms a Top Site and MovieMaker Magazine named SnagFilms to its annual list of “50 Best Websites for Moviemakers.”

The One-Year Report Card of Yahoo's Carol Bartz–Deal-Making: Incomplete

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:24:13 +0000

Sorry for the break in grading Yahoo’s Carol Bartz on her one-year anniversary as CEO.

But BoomTown was swanning around the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this weekend, went partying with those boozy Hollywood types and ended up in Provo with the crazy gals from “The Runaways”!

I wish! Actually, running away from issuing any grade for deal-making for Bartz is a pretty good way to put it.

Because today, after much thought, I have to give the Yahoo leader an incomplete for deal-making.

That’s because the only deal that truly counts–the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) struck in July–has still not been approved by regulators.

More to the point, no one will really know what it means for Yahoo (YHOO) until the company finally embarks on the biggest bet of its recent history.

And that answer is many, many quarters away.

I began handing out marks to Bartz recently, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo in 2009 into five categories: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and moxie.

I awarded Bartz an A- for management, a C+ for financials and a C- for product innovation so far.

And as much as I would like to give a definite grade for deal-making, she has made no other deals of major consequence on which to base a grade.

The deal to integrate Facebook Connect and Twitter? A catch-up long past due and not as impressive as similar ones by Google and Microsoft. The sale of Zimbra and other assets? Essentially, cleaning up. A few minor acquisitions? No needle-movers in the lot.

Thus, the only deal has been with Microsoft, which is indeed a very big deal.

And it is, as I said, incomplete, although not to everyone.

Some thought the deal, which Bartz said she should have made sooner, was the best that Yahoo could pull off after the disastrous attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo for upward of $40 billion collapsed and left egg on everyone’s face.

With Google (GOOG) and Microsoft gearing up for a costly search war and no chance of Yahoo ever regaining any kind of tech advantage, the argument in favor goes, Bartz opted to get some kind of leverage while she still had some.

On many levels, that makes a lot of sense. And if it works, the deal will surely help improve Yahoo’s bottom line, cutting expenses in the search technology arena drastically and, the company hopes, giving it the ability to compete better in the marketplace by combining Yahoo and Microsoft search against the Google behemoth.

Presumably, if Yahoo can innovate in search experience and add to share, all is not lost.

But a lot of people certainly don’t like the deal, citing a variety of problems, especially the fact that Yahoo has essentially turned over all search monetization to Microsoft and traded away a big part of its business with no financial guarantees.

In fact, Bartz said in an interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference–months before she struck it–that she would want “boatloads of money” in any deal with Microsoft (see that video below).

[ See post to watch video ]

At the time, most people thought she meant a gigantic upfront guaranteed payment for handing over search to Microsoft, which she did not get in the final deal.

Wrote one Internet exec in a long email to me, expressing a typical sentiment I have heard time and again:

She would have been much better off to simply have sold the current Yahoo search biz to Microsoft along the lines of the deal Carl Icahn tried to broker the summer after the acquisition bid was pulled. The cut over could have happened much faster (just start running Bing results on Yahoo) and Microsoft would probably have given a revenue guarantee that would keep Yahoo whole on revenue per search for the traffic they generated. That would also have eliminated the sales overhead immediately, providing greater cost savings…She chose a middle-ground (classic Yahoo) and will end up with lower returns for the declining search business than she could otherwise have had.

Only reason she doesn’t get the F that [former Yahoo CEO and Co-founder] Jerry Yang obviously earned on this topic is that she did actually make a deal.

And, indeed, Bartz had to play the cards she was handed by her predecessors, and they were not good ones.

Still, Yahoo is now depending on Microsoft to innovate in search technology. If it does not or cannot, look out below in that category, even if Yahoo recovers in its stronger display advertising arena.

So, with Yahoo’s search share declining of late, even as that of Microsoft’s Bing grows, it is right to start worrying and be nervous.

Nonetheless, as much as I like to dole out grades and as much as Bartz’s detractors would like to say it is over, it’s probably fairer to wait and see what happens.

One thing is certain: Bartz has shown either amazing guts or an astonishing lack of foresight here.

But let’s save that particular grade–moxie–for tomorrow, on the day Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings come out and Bartz is front and center in the earnings call.

Speaking of moxie–a.k.a. ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!–here’s the trailer for “The Runaways,” which just opened at Sundance:

Education Documentary Featuring Bill Gates Gets First Distribution Deal at Sundance

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:03:01 +0000

Like BoomTown, Bill Gates was at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend–not just to sample some of the fare at the well-known independent film festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, but also to appear at the screening of a documentary about the crisis in public education in which he appears and that scored the first distribution deal at the event.

The worldwide rights for “Waiting for Superman,” directed by Davis Guggenheim and produced by Participant Media, were sold to Paramount Vantage, a unit of the Viacom (VIA) movie studio.

The film premiered Friday at Sundance, with Gates in attendance. The Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder took questions at the screening and made it to several Sundance events, surprising several film types.

“I couldn’t believe it was him,” said one participant at a filmmakers’ gathering.

Yes, it was him, especially since issues in public education have been a big focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been spending most of his time since leaving day-to-day work at the software giant in 2008.

Interestingly, Participant Media–along with Guggenheim–put out “An Inconvenient Truth,” the global-warming doc starring former VP Al Gore, which was a huge success.

And in yet another Silicon Valley connection, Los Angeles-based Participant was founded by former eBay (EBAY) exec Jeff Skoll.

Here are highlights from a terrific interview Walt Mossberg did with Melinda Gates at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference in 2008, where she talked eloquently about the problems faced by U.S. schoolchildren:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here’s the press release from Participant on the “Superman” deal:

HOLLYWOOD, CA (January 21, 2010)–Worldwide rights for the new documentary from Oscar®-winning director Davis Guggenheim (AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH) and Participant Media have been acquired by Paramount Vantage, it was announced today by Adam Goodman, Paramount Film Group President and by Participant Media’s CEO Jim Berk.

The documentary will have its world premiere tomorrow, January 22, at the Sundance Film Festival. Paramount Vantage will release the movie in the fall of 2010 in the U.S. with international release dates not yet determined.

The studio’s specialty division Paramount Classics released Guggenheim’s acclaimed AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH in 2006. The influential documentary, financed and executive produced by Participant Media, received two Academy Awards®, and was a worldwide box office hit, grossing more than $24 million in the U.S. and nearly $50 million worldwide.

The new film, developed, financed and executive produced by Participant Media, examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories–from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system.

The documentary features several leaders in the field of education, including philanthropist Bill Gates of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone in Harlem, New York Geoffrey Canada; Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools Michelle Rhee; Knowledge is Power Program Founders (KIPP) David Levin and Mike Feinberg; and President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation Bill Strickland.

Six-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist, concert performer and philanthropist John Legend composed the end title song “Shine.” Legend’s own Show Me campaign uses education to break the cycle of poverty through sustainable development at the individual, family, and community levels.

Said Paramount’s Goodman: “Our commitment to this movie and the issue of education is urgently important to all of us at Paramount. In collaboration with our partners, we hope to bring about a real solution.”

Said Davis Guggenheim: “With these two great partners, Participant Media and Paramount Pictures, we have a chance to create public awareness around this issue, and this is the only way we can make real change in our children’s schools.”

Said Jim Berk, CEO, Participant Media: “The movie creates an emotional personal connection to an issue which underpins the very future of our country. By reuniting with our good friends at Paramount, we have the chance to build on our ground breaking partnership on AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH to launch a national conversation from movie theaters, to kitchen tables all across the country.”

“It’s wonderful to have Paramount as partners on this film,” says the film’s producer, Lesley Chilcott, who was also a producer on AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. “It’s crucial to have experts like Paramount and Participant that understand the power of a film to create urgency about an important issue. We need to get the message out there. Millions of kids are waiting.”

The film is directed and produced by Davis Guggenheim. Lesley Chilcott is the producer, with Jeff Skoll and Diane Weyermann serving as executive producers. Written by Davis Guggenheim and Billy Kimball. The cinematographers are Erich Roland and Bob Richman. Greg Finton, Jay Cassidy, and Kim Roberts served as the editors.

BoomTown Heads to Sundance Film Festival in the Fifth Annual Meet-the-Geeks Pilgrimage

Kara Swisher — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:19:53 +0000

Today, BoomTown is loading the wife and kids, along with mom, into our tricked-out All Things Digital Winnebago and heading to Park City, Utah, for the 26th Sundance Film Festival.

Now, what I know about independent filmmaking could fit neatly into a thimble, with room to spare.

But what has brought me back there for five years running is the chance to introduce those auteurs gathered on the frozen tundra to a slice of what’s to come from the digital world–for Sundance’s terrific New Frontier on Main series.

Increasingly, that matters a lot to those who make movies, especially those associated with smaller film efforts that might never see the light of a theater projector.

Thus, the tech sessions at Sundance are packed to the gills, with huge crowds turned away, because Hollywood knows what’s coming, and it has increasingly less control over it.

Imagine, for example, what the Apple (AAPL) tablet will mean to media giants in relation to entertainment distribution. And exactly how might you tell a story on a smartphone? Or not!

They can’t say they were not warned.

Last year, I interviewed a trio panelists: Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of the Google (GOOG) video service YouTube; Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, the premium online video service and joint venture among News Corp. (NWS), Disney (DIS) and GE’s (GE) NBC Universal; and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix (NFLX), the largest online DVD rental service, which has been moving into an ever wider range of movie distribution on the Web.

This year, my panel–which takes place Friday at noon and runs 90 minutes–is titled: “Spotlight on Social Media: Successful Strategies for Storytellers.”

Here’s the description:

“Today’s social media sites have the potential to bring content creators closer to audiences than ever before–creating new marketing opportunities for independents. But what more can be achieved? Can we create meaningful experiences through our profiles pages, or is it all just self-promotional clutter? Are the popular sites we use today the end of the line, or just a peek into the future?”

In other words: Will Twitter’s 140-character influence murder all creativity? Or just bruise it a little bit?

The subjects of my prying interview questions on this important issue include Robert Tercek, president of digital media for OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network; filmmaker Ondi Timoner; Chris Gebhardt, head of Participant Media’s TakePart social media platform; David Eun, head of film partnerships for YouTube; MySpace’s Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn; and Matt Jacobson, Facebook’s market development dude.

Whatever that means, since the hot Silicon Valley social networking site has done little in the way of storytelling as yet and much more in the way of pokes!

But, as ever, I shall strive to drag answers about innovation and more out of the lot of them.

Video to come, of course!

So, until I get there and thaw out the Flip digital video camera, here is my longish video from last year with the panelists, as well as cameos from my kids and once-indie film star and now TV hit queen Jane Lynch.

And below that, my 2008 Sundance video featuring Lynch and MySpace co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe.

[ See post to watch video ]

And if you want to know even more about Sundance, there is a new app on the iPhone for the festival. It costs $4.99, with the proceeds benefiting the not-for-profit Sundance Institute.

Die, SCO, Die!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:19:54 +0000

“There’s No Free Lunch–or Free Linux.” That was the title of SCO CEO Darl McBride’s keynote address at the Computer Digital Expo in Las Vegas back in 2003, and it signaled the start of a long legal siege. Earlier that day, SCO announced plans to file suit against a large-scale user of Linux as part of its campaign against the open-source operating system.

“For the last several months, we have consistently stated and maintained that our System V code is in Linux,” McBride explained. “The claims SCO has are both broad and deep. These claims touch not just IBM but other vendors as well. They also touch certain industry consortia and corporate Linux end users. Our claims aren’t trivial. The violations of our intellectual property are not easily repaired. It is our intention to vigorously protect and enforce SCO’s intellectual property, System V source code and our copyrights. We’re now fully prepared to do that.”

And they did. SCO subsequently filed suit against IBM (IBM), auto giant DaimlerChrysler and a coterie of other companies, each time sounding the same theme: Our copyrighted UNIX code was illegally cobbled into Linux. You’re using it without a license. Pay up.

But SCO never specified exactly the Linux code it believes infringes on its copyrights, even in the face of repeated calls to do so from its defendants and the open source community. Indeed, it could be said that the company’s legal campaign against Linux was defined by its utter failure to prove that the open-source operating system contains any of its intellectual property. Certainly, that was the opinion of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, which found that the copyright to UNIX and UnixWare was owned by Novell. That decision drove SCO into bankruptcy and ended its high-profile legal attack on Linux.

But only for a time. Because a federal appeals court on Monday ruled that SCO is entitled to a jury trial on its claims to Unix, a ruling that might lead to a renewal of the company’s campaign against Linux. “We take no position on which party ultimately owns the Unix copyrights or which copyrights were required for Santa Cruz to exercise its rights under the agreement,” the court wrote in its ruling. “Such matters are for the finder of fact on remand.”

And so, astonishingly, this six-year battle is headed back to court once again, a development Darl McBride was quick to spin as a vindication in one of his typically pontifical pronouncements. “Today is not the end of the war but it certainly is a key battle that we’ve won,” he said of the decision. “Now it’s time to move on to the next series of battles with our victory in hand.”

Of course, for events to play out that way, SCO must prove that Unix contains its intellectual property, something it has so far failed abysmally to do. Indeed, the judge presiding over the original case compared SCO’s claims to those of a store owner accusing someone of shoplifting but refusing to say what items had been stolen. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds once said, “There really is a reason why nobody believes a word SCO is saying, and it’s because SCO is lying.”

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow… 3-D Digital Ski Slopes Even Cooler

Kara Swisher — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:00:06 +0000

Wishing I had had the foresight to head up into the Sierras in California before they finally got a ton of snow dumped on them this past week, I was fiddling around the Web looking for various ski sites as a way to approximate being there.

And, like all things in mapping, the best way to see slopes is now in 3-D, the technology that is going to become more and more prevalent on the mostly flat Internet in the years ahead–and well beyond the more obvious applications.

Along with touchscreen technologies that will come much sooner to the general computing experience, 3-D is a feature that adds amazing depth and resonance to the online experience, especially as more information is added over time.

If you don’t think so, here are two of the 23 slopes that Ski.com has up now, for example. While they do not show falling snow (yet!), click on through for a very cool experience of looking at and manipulating a mountain before schussing down it–or, in my case, tumbling down it.

Park City, Utah:

Zermatt, Switzerland:

Kara Visits Sundance and Interviews Hurley, Hastings and Kilar

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:29:06 +0000

Here’s a longish video BoomTown did over the weekend at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the famous annual independent film gathering now taking place in Park City, Utah.

I was there to moderate a panel on Saturday titled, “Where Do We Go From Here? Icons of the Digital Age.”

It was a great session, with a lot of insights as to where things are headed in the online video space and how that would impact the movie industry. Main conclusion: Significantly.

The trio of panelists were: Chad Hurley, the co-founder and CEO of the Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube; Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, the premium online video service that is a joint venture of News Corp. (NWS) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal; and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix (NFLX), the largest online DVD rental service, which has been moving into an ever wider range of distribution of movies on the Web. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

I did interviews with each of them, as well as a chat with my only indie celebrity friend, Jane Lynch, some scenes from the festival and an intro and outro from my own little stars, Louie and Alex Swisher.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Sundancing With the (Tech) Stars

Kara Swisher — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:00:50 +0000

BoomTown is headed to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival today, an annual journey I make to moderate panels about the tech industry.

The festival officially opened yesterday in Park City, Utah. And while still largely a confab of independent filmmakers, Hollywood deal types and various celebrities rifling though swag orgies, a lot of geeks are there too.

Since Sundance also has taken a keen interest in all things digital, ATD moves its HQ there for a few days every January, to the New Frontier on Main digs, to talk to those gathered–for what have become standing-room-only events–about whither tech and how and when it is eventually going to eat the entertainment industry’s lunch.

Oh yes, my friend: Silicon Valley will eat lunch in this snowy town again!

And for good reason, given that the entire movie industry has long worried about how digital distribution will impact its business, especially as every year, the encroachment continues at a relentless pace.

This year, we’re going even more futuristic, with a panel tomorrow at noon titled, “Where Do We Go From Here? Icons of the Digital Age.”

In fact, the panelists are that: Chad Hurley, the co-founder and CEO of the Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube; Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, the premium online video service that is a joint venture of News Corp. (NWS) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal; and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix (NFLX), the largest online DVD rental service, which has been moving into an ever wider range of distribution of movies on the Web. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

Here’s the panel description:

“Remember the world before the Internet, email, and cell phones? Now we try and picture it 15 years from now. If we are currently in the greatest information revolution since the printing press, what can we expect next? How will media, entertainment, and our digital lifestyles change? This roundtable assembles visionaries of the digital revolution to discuss the limits of our imagination.”

It should be an interesting exercise in creative prognostication, although I for one cannot remember the world before the Internet, email and cellphones.

I am also dragging my two young sons there, along with ATD majordomo Ed, so expect lots of filming of our own, with my shaky Flip Mino, to be posted all weekend.

Until then, here’s one of the two videos I did last year, including an interview with MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe and a visit to the trendy party he threw on Main Street with my celebrity friend Jane Lynch as tour guide (and she’ll be back this year for another special guest star appearance!):

More States Mull Taxing iTunes, Other Digital Downloads

Eric Savitz — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:24:07 +0000

State legislators look at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other digital download services stealing away business from offline retailers and you know what they see? A piggybank.

News.com reports today that at least nine states this year have considered enacting “download taxes” on digital goods–and five of those states have adopted them, including Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

Read the rest of this post

BoomTown's Thumbs-Up "Weekend King" (But for Appalling Reasons)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:19:34 +0000

Thanks to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington for pointing us to “Weekend King,” a San Francisco-made movie, which sounds just delicious from the trailer below.

It’s about a repulsive but rich computer programmer named Rupert Coleman from Silicon Valley who buys a bankrupt town in Utah and hopes to become its beloved ruler.

High jinks and heart-warming life lessons ensue, of course!

Arrington thought it sounded “sappy,” which it does, but BoomTown went all soft and melty in the middle over the idea of it.

Why? True story: Once, while at a party in 1999 talking with a well-known Web billionaire, sick of the excess, I suggested that he take a ton of his Web 1.0 bubble money and buy a village or town somewhere and dude it up with all sorts of cool stuff like free everything.

The catch? Require the citizens to rename it after him and hold an annual parade dedicated to his glorious accomplishments.

He demurred (No, it was not Mark Cuban, because he’d have totally done it!), much to my disappointment, so you can see why I love the idea of this movie.

(In the latest excessive Web 2.0 bubble, my new request of an Internet multi-billionaire recently was to convince him to try to become best friends with Brangelina and brood by dangling the plane and donations galore to worthy causes and free babysitting forever. Again, no luck.)

Here’s the video:

Kara Visits Sundance: MySpace, Main Street and Our Very Own Celeb Tour Guide

Kara Swisher — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:56:37 +0000

While at the Sundance Film Festival, I took a little tour of Park City, Utah, visiting with Chris DeWolfe and Dani Dudeck of MySpace and Sundance’s digital guru Ian Calderon and trudging up Main Street with my celebrity tour guide, Jane Lynch (who is about as hysterical as you get in “Best in Show” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”).

This is my third year at Sundance, where I moderate tech panels for the independent film festival.

Obviously, issues related to technology are becoming ever larger for the film community and most especially for the independent filmmakers, as they seek to get their material wider distribution than Hollywood’s current chokehold system provides.

The Sundance Film Festival is held annually in Park City and focuses on screenings of new indie films. Still, Sundance has been expanding additional offerings in the digital arena with panels throughout the festival.

The panel I moderated (see video here) was about online video, called “Webolution!–Hollywood Adapts to the Web.”

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Sundance Bound

Kara Swisher — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:02:55 +0000

I just got to Park City, Utah, for my annual visit (well, this will be my third year here) to the famous film festival that takes place in this lovely mountain resort.

While I like a good movie as much as the next person, I am no film aficionado, nor do I have a screenplay stuffed in a drawer, nor do I hope someday to direct. I do like celebrity sightings, of course.

I am here because the Sundance Film Festival has understood early and often that technology is becoming increasingly important to the future of the film industry.

Because of that, they’ve been expanding additional offerings in the digital arena with panels throughout the festival.

The panel I will moderate is a great one about online video, called “Webolution!–Hollywood Adapts to the Web.” It will take place tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. at the New Frontier on Main here.

Here’s the description:

“The writing is on the wall–the industry must adapt to new media or face extinction. Today’s studios and independents are finally embracing the challenge of porting content and revenue to new distribution strategies. Join Hollywood power brokers and new media superstars to discuss their strategies for the Web.”

The panelists include Ted Sarandos (Netflix), Dmitry Shapiro (founder and CEO of Veoh.com), Dan Glickman (MPAA), Jason Kilar (CEO of Hulu.com), Mike Volpi (CEO of Joost.com), Erik Flanagan (EVP Digital Media MTV Networks/Comedy Central/South Park Studios) and tech strategy adviser Phil Lelyveld.

Videos, of course, to come, along with visits with various tech players here, who are increasing in number annually. And, maybe, a Hollywood celeb or two.