That was an overreach, but it’s certainly true that other social and local apps access user contact data, and not always transparently and securely.

Now app makers, including giants like Twitter and Yelp, say they are updating the way they ask for users’ permission to access their contacts.

Twitter told the Los Angeles Times that it plans to change the language in its “Find Friends” feature to “upload your contacts” for iPhone and “import your contacts” for Android. It currently says “scan your contacts,” which would seem to imply Twitter doesn’t store the data — which it does.

To be clear, Twitter does ask for users’ permission to look at their address books. What it does that might be more questionable is store that contact info for up to 18 months.

The main reason for apps to store phone contact information seems to be to connect users with friends who join the service at a later date.

However, many apps could do more to access and store this data in an encrypted and anonymized way, as multiple developers have pointed out. VentureBeat has a nice discussion of matching “hashes” of user contacts.

VentureBeat tracked Foodspotting's transmission of unencrypted address book data (image via VentureBeat)

Many developers and app users have also questioned why Apple doesn’t do more to police contact uploading. Update 1: Two U.S. congressmen are now asking Apple to explain the situation. Update 2: Apple has finally commented, saying it will require apps to ask for explicit permission in the future.

VentureBeat’s Jennifer Van Grove spoke with a group of companies that transmit user contacts about their processes after tracking.

Yelp, Foursquare and Instagram have all updated the latest or upcoming versions of their apps with additional permission prompts around asking for users’ phone contacts. The app makers all said they transmit data securely and don’t store it, but they wanted to be more transparent, in light of what happened with Path.

Other apps are changing more than just a warning message. Foodspotting was transmitting user data over an unencrypted HTTP connection in plain text, as VentureBeat found by using a traffic-monitoring tool. Foodspotting said it would stop doing that in its next app update.

Another social sharing app called Hipster admitted last week that it was automatically uploading users’ phone contacts without asking for their permission, though Hipster said it didn’t store the info.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user ucumari.)

For those who didn’t get a chance to see those chats with Google’s Jason Spero and AOL’s David Temkin, both are now available for your Web-viewing pleasure, so I thought I would do a post pointing you in their direction. (Hey, we’re nothing if not full-service here at AllThingsD.)

If you are really, really lazy, here are the highlights:

In addition to bemoaning missing the Women’s World Cup soccer semifinals, Spero and I naturally talked about the opportunities and challenges on the ad side of the mobile business. On the plus side, Spero said that mobile ad rates have held relatively steady even with a huge increase in volume, something he called a fairly significant accomplishment. The quality of those ads, he acknowledged, remains a top issue for Google.

“If you look backwards, we have made enormous strides in quality,” Spero said. “But it continues to be the absolute No. 1 investment area … Frankly, if we don’t do it, we are going to decrease click-through rates.”

We also chatted about how his view on Apple versus Android has changed since joining Google, as well as the privacy challenges relating to location-based services.

As for Temkin, I began by asking him whether in fact AOL has a mobile strategy (doing my best to channel my inner Kara Swisher). He then quipped that it had something to do with mailing out smartphones with DVDs giving 10 hours of free usage, before getting into the company’s real strategy in mobile.

AOL, Temkin said, has passed Microsoft to become the No. 4 mobile destination on the Web, behind only Google, Facebook and Yahoo. “We’re doing pretty well on mobile,” he said, noting that it is not just about AOL.com but also its subbrands, such as Engadget, Moviefone and Stylelist.

He also talked about some of the company’s new “mobile-first” initiatives, including a music application called Play by AOL and a forthcoming online magazine, Editions by AOL. Plus, I got a chance to abuse him by playing the old AOL dial-up tone a couple times. The video is worth watching for that bit of nostalgia alone.

Jason Spero interview:

David Temkin interview (split into two parts):

Part 2:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110729/talking-mobile-with-googles-jason-spero-and-aols-david-temkin/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110713/paypal-enables-peer-to-peer-payments-on-android-with-nfc/ http://allthingsd.com/20110713/paypal-enables-peer-to-peer-payments-on-android-with-nfc/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:46:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=97629 PayPal has doubled its mobile payments projections to $3 billion this year, and is investing heavily in new ways to make it easy to pay with the phone.

Last week, that meant buying Zong, a carrier billing provider. Today, Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile, demonstrated another way at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.

The new application, which will be available later this summer, will allow users to transfer money using near field communication on the Nexus S, the first Google Android device to have NFC chips integrated. For now, the solution will only work on NFC-enabled phones — a very limited market.

In the demo between Chambers and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Marshall fictitiously sent $1 million to Chambers by entering the amount into a widget on the homescreen. To activate the transfer, he tapped his NFC-enabled phone against Chambers’ phone.

The video below shows the technology in action:

Sprint has argued that the rapid pace of innovation in the wireless industry will slow if the deal is allowed to proceed.

“I think it is quite the opposite,” CTO John Donovan said, speaking at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif.

Donovan reiterated AT&T’s case that the deal offers one of the few short-term ways to improve use of limited spectrum, a key driver for innovation.

However, Donovan noted that many of the factors that are choking wireless networks, including his own, can’t be improved as quickly as people would like. He echoed the observation raised by Verizon network VP Nicola Palmer that one of the big challenges is trying to get city and landlord approval for improvements to individual cell sites.

One of the possible solutions, smaller micro-cells known as femtocells, has some benefits, but is not the cure-all that some would argue.

He also rejected the notion that the company should have been able to forecast the huge surge in demand. Before 2007, Donovan said, it was hard to predict a world in which a group of hedge fund managers would be standing at a Manhattan intersection downloading 20MB of data apiece while waiting for the light to change from “don’t walk” to “walk.”

“I don’t think anybody contemplated that world would be upon us (so quickly),” he said.

“Frankly I expected some speed bumps,” said Nicola Palmer, Verizon Wireless VP of Network Operations. “The surprise here to me is the speed bumps were very few and far between and they didn’t do any damage to the undercarriage.”

Speaking at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit, Palmer said that the hardest part has been the fact that rolling out its LTE network requires renegotiating with all the people that own the locations where it has cell towers. The new network requires all new antennas, base stations and other gear.

“What has been difficult is all the individual negotiations with the land owners,” Palmer said.

The result, though, has been a network that can allow things like high-definition video that weren’t possible before.

Verizon and its rivals are all competing to offer faster networks, but taking different approaches. Sprint was first out of the gate with its WiMax-based 4G network. T-Mobile, meanwhile, is using a faster version of its existing HSPA network, which it is also selling under the 4G moniker. AT&T, though slower to roll out a faster network, is taking a dual approach, with plans for both HSPA+ and LTE.

Palmer reiterated that the company plans to move away from unlimited data toward tiered pricing, a move she said is necessary for the industry.

“Unlimited billing on data is simply unsustainable for the industry,” Palmer said.

“They haven’t shut us down,” Shah said. Apple last week changed its ranking algorithm to downplay download numbers in an effort to crack down on certain cross-marketing practices, including those core to the way TapJoy makes its money. Apple has also rejected certain apps over the last few weeks that include various TapJoy ads, Shah said.

TapJoy was particularly affected by Apple’s changes as its business model works by allowing mobile app developers to essentially pay to get a certain amount of downloads and installations of their apps. Typically, users of one app are rewarded with virtual currency or other inducements for downloading and using another application. In many cases, the goal of TapJoy customers is to get a new application into the Top 25 of an app store category, said Loopt CEO Sam Altman.

The methods used by TapJoy–and similar approaches–have become increasingly important in a world where developers are struggling to get attention amid a flood of new mobile applications hitting the market.

Their comments came during a discussion at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif.

Shah said TapJoy doesn’t yet have total clarity on what will appease Apple, but said it is making some changes, such as guaranteeing that no single app will be used to vault another app into the top of the rankings.

“They (Apple) have rejected certain apps for a certain mechanism,” Shah said. “When we have tweaked that mechanism we have seen apps approved.”

Shah said that his company is committed to making the moves it needs to make in order to ensure its business model is sustainable.

“I think we are very early in the market,” Shah said. “We are going to have to tack a few ways.”

“Mobile is a huge priority for us,” Michael Abbott said, speaking at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif.

Although some of that work is around the mobile Web, much of it is around native apps for various smartphones and creating a more unified experience from device to device. Abbott said that the company sees a lot of promise for HTML5 down the road, but says native applications remain critically important. There are certain things that require an app, Abbot said, such as sending notifications or tying directly into a phone’s camera.

“We just can’t quite get there with HTML5 yet,” Abbott said, noting that he is a big proponent of HTML5, having focused on that in his prior work developing the WebOS at Palm.

Also, he said that mobile apps allow the company to reach more people as the App Store and Android Market remain important ways for people to discover Twitter.

In some ways, Abbott said, the focus on mobile is a return to the company’s roots, noting that it started out that way and that 40 percent of tweets originate from a mobile device.

As for criticisms that the company is just taking over territory once offered to third-party developers, Abbott said that Twitter is working on new ways that outsiders can work with Twitter. Abbott said the company plans to go public soon with “a clearer roadmap of how to build into Twitter versus off of Twitter.”

“There’s actually more things that we can do,” he said. Abbott declined to go into detail, but said that the company will have more to say soon and it is committed to offering not only opportunities to create apps, but also to make money.

Now it looks as if News.me is just about ready for public consumption. I’m basing that observation on a new Web site that spells out, in great detail, how the app is supposed to work, and which instructs users to head to iTunes to download the app.

As I’m typing this, News.me still isn’t available in the app store. So it’s possible that the new web page is simply a new web page. Perhaps it’s just an exercise in positive thinking–maybe this will force Apple into approving our app!

[UPDATE: "Our understanding is that News.me is launching tomorrow", says New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy; the Times is aware of News.me's plans because it helped develop the project in its early stages (see below). I've asked Bit.ly for comment but haven't heard back yet.]

At a minimum, though, we can learn a lot about what Bit.ly has planned when News.me does launch.

The basics:

• News.me will cost $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year. It will be available as an iPad app, using Apple’s subscription service, or as an e-mail newsletter.
• News.me will provide users with curated Twitter streams that highlight “the most popular or interesting news stories” that appear in their own Twitter feeds, and from the feeds of other Twitter users they select. The notion is that users can “read over the shoulder” of people they find interesting.
• Bit.ly does the curating, using the data it culls as it shortens billions of shared links on the Web. Since News.me relies on Bit.ly data, it has a natural bias toward publishers that use the service.
• News.me lets users read those stories in a “streamlined reading view,” which will be familiar to anyone who has used apps like Instapaper: easy-to-read black text on a white background–without the ads users see when they read the same stuff on a publisher’s Web page.
• News.me will share some of its revenue with publishers who license their content to the service. But publishers who don’t have News.me deals but do appear on the Web will still see their stuff show up on the service. It just won’t look as nice, and they won’t get paid. And they won’t get the chance to run “additional promotion for publisher products that might be of special interest to News.me users (such as iPad applications).”

You can get a pretty good sense of how the app works by reading TechCrunch’s “exclusive” from February. Or you could just ask many of the people whose work often appears on Techmeme. A whole lot of writers and bloggers–including me–have had a chance to play with News.me for a while.

When News.me finally does go live, potential users will have to debate whether they want to pay a fee to read stuff they can get for free on the Web.

But to me, the most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. (I believe–but haven’t confirmed–that neither All Things Digital nor News Corp., which owns the site, have a deal with News.me.)

The Times and the Associated Press also work with Ongo, another aggregation subscription service. But Ongo only uses content from publishers it has deals with.

News.me, though, charges money for a service built using other people’s work–even if those people haven’t signed on.

Which is what the Times has complained about in the past–like last summer, when it forced Apple to pull the Pulse newsreader out of its app store. The AP has engaged in similar fist-shaking aimed at Google and the Internet at large.

Here’s News.me’s defense of its model:

Because News.me generally provides a small subset of a publisher’s content, filtered by user actions and News.me algorithms, it is not a substitute for publishers’ own web sites or iPad applications. And, since it exposes users to content they likely wouldn’t otherwise see, it can broaden the audience and, through related-content links, drive new unique users to publisher web sites.

Which is reasonable enough. Everything on the Web gets shared and sampled; if you’re a publisher trying to build or keep an audience, trying to prevent that is counterproductive.

And News.me’s curated browsing conceit–there’s no search function, and you can’t subscribe to a publication-specific feed–makes it worthless for anyone trying to use it to game publishers. This won’t work as a permanent ad-blocker, or a paywall-jumping aid.

I still won’t be surprised to see some publishers who haven’t signed on rattling their sabers when News.me launches–just like the Times and the AP have in the past. Glad to see they’ve come around.

It’s yet another big-dollar buyout for the game industry, which has been in an M&A frenzy for about a year, and one of the biggest investments by a Chinese company in an American digital property.

The transaction was first reported by Bloomberg, and Riot confirmed the deal to VentureBeat, though neither outlet has the financial details. Here’s how they break down, according to people familiar with the transaction:

• Tencent, which had already invested in the game maker, will pay “just south” of $400 million to buy out other investors, primarily Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital, which along with angels had put approximately $18 million into the company.
• The company’s management team will receive some portion of that buyout themselves, but will also retain an equity stake; some will receive “stay packages.”
• The total investment values the company at $472 million.

The chief appeal of Tencent is Riot’s League of Legends game, which is free to play but encourages players to pay for extra goodies via micro-transactions. (Thanks to readers who educated me about what you can and can’t buy with real-world money in the game.)

In that sense it’s like Zynga’s FarmVille and other popular social games. But it’s a much more sophisticated game, with arcade-style action: Think of World of Warcraft, on steroids and amphetamines.

The deal follows a string of Web-based game deals in the last year. Among the more notable ones: Walt Disney purchased Playdom, Electronic Arts purchased Playfish and DeNA purchased Ngmoco.

So, maybe a “Jersey Shore” game, where you get badges for visiting the gym, the tanning salon or the Laundromat? I dunno. Work with me here.

Every big media company is enamored with social games these days, in part because users seem to be–see Zynga–and in part because investors seem to be– see Zynga. Not coincidentally, Social Express is staffed with vets from Zynga, the dominant social game company now valued in the billions.

Wait a minute. Doesn’t Viacom (VIA) have a slew of gaming assets, acquired during the last Web boom? It does! And those help generate 22 million unique visitors a month, says comScore (SCOR). But the first Viacom/Social Express games will show up this fall, so we’ll see what Sumner Redstone got for his money.

The names, credit card numbers and purchases of users of Blippy.com, a site that allows people to share information about their purchases, are appearing in a Google (GOOG) search, VentureBeat reported Friday. On Blippy itself, transactions are reported by user and location only, but a specific type of search on Google reveals actual numbers within the text that appears below the search-result link. The news was spreading quickly on Twitter, with the tag #epicfail being attached to some related posts.

The problem raises questions not only for Blippy but for such sharing services in general. What began with the sharing of information among a relatively small circle of friends on sites such as Facebook and MySpace has grown into ever more public, more detailed releases of data–raising questions about privacy along the way.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The atmosphere last Friday night at the Crunchies, an awards show hosted by three popular and often competing tech blogs–TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm–was downright buoyant, especially compared with last year, and had hints of IPOs in the air.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

In any case, it was held in the San Francisco offices of MySpace and covered such topics such as: How blogging and citizen journalism have changed the landscape, what works in the highly connected digital media space, and, of course, the ups and down of being a woman in the male-choked tech industry in Silicon Valley.

The panelists included former San Francisco Chronicle tech editor Deborah Gage, ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio, Ubergizmo Editor Eliane Fiolet, VentureBeat’s Camille Ricketts and TechieDiva’s Gina Hughes.

It was a lively discussion, with highlights such as Fiolet telling a hilarious story about an encounter of the irksome kind at a gaming conference and jokingly recommending violence as a solution, and Hughes talking about the sometimes trollish commenters of Yahoo (YHOO) when she blogged there.

Overall takeaway: Be loud, be proud and ignore all the noise. That, or make some more–and, preferably, via Twitter.

I also did a short interview at the event with social media blogger and PR guy Brian Solis about his latest book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Natch, here is a lovely video I did–interviewing Solis, Hughes and Ricketts–which also includes yet another cruel “no comment” from Facebook’s talk-to-the-hand PR terror Brandee Barker:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090813/girls-in-tech-journalism-20-panel-speak-loudly-and-carry-a-big-stick/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20090403/web-20-expo-an-%e2%80%9camerican-idol%e2%80%9d-for-startups/ http://allthingsd.com/20090403/web-20-expo-an-%e2%80%9camerican-idol%e2%80%9d-for-startups/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:13:06 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=10163 During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

Read the rest of this post

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090403/web-20-expo-an-%e2%80%9camerican-idol%e2%80%9d-for-startups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090401/video-site-veoh-cuts-staff-boots-ceo-bets-on-browser-plug-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20090401/video-site-veoh-cuts-staff-boots-ceo-bets-on-browser-plug-in/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:30:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5849 Video site Veoh, one of the biggest and best-funded players in the “who will be the next YouTube” competition, is restructuring the company, laying off a good chunk of its staff, and replacing CEO Steve Mitgang with founder Dmitry Shapiro.

Shapiro says the company, which has been primarily focused on playing video and selling ads on its own site, will now be concentrating on a new “Video Compass” player that users will have to download onto their Web browsers.

Shapiro says the company is laying off 25 people and will have a staff in “the mid-40s” when the restructuring is over. That’s less than half its size in June of last year, when the company raised another $30 million, bringing the total capital it has raised to $70 million. At the time, Veoh’s investors–which included Goldman Sachs (GS), Intel (INTC), Time Warner (TWX) and Spark Capital–valued the company at about $125 million, pre-money. VentureBeat first reported the layoffs and restructuring last night.

But Veoh’s video Web browser is one of several players in a field dominated by Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, and now Hulu seems to have established itself as a clear second place.

Comscore (SCOR) says Veoh’s audience peaked in March of last year, when four million viewers watched 33.7 million videos on the site. It says that by February of this year, Veoh’s audience had shrunk to two million viewers watching 16.5 million videos. Every Web publisher disputes third-party measurements, but in this case, Veoh says Comscore’s data are way off: It says it has 23 million unique users watching 200 million videos.

Shapiro insists that the company will continue to support its original video site, but argues that there are more opportunities with its new browser plug-in, which suggests videos to users who are searching for things on other sites. So if a Compass user was searching for, say, “CSI” on Google, it’s possible that the Compass plug-in would offer up a clip or episode of the CBS (CBS) show, via a player that would launch on top of the site.

“The website is extremely mature. It’s been around for 3 and a half years. It’s extremely successful,” Shapiro said. But “quite frankly, there are a lot of things like that. We love it and will continue to invest in it. It’s just that we also see that we have something that no one else has in Compass, and we’re saying we are going to be investing in and supporting that.”

Mitgang came to Veoh in July 2007 from Yahoo (YHOO), and shortly after that the company became enmeshed in a high-profile copyright lawsuit with Universal Music Group. The suit is still ongoing, and though Veoh has won several recent points, people familiar with the company tell me that the legal bills have been significant. I asked Shapiro if the cost of the suit had anything to do with the restructuring, but he declined to comment.

Here’s the press release:

VEoh NETWORKS TO Intensify FOCUS ON ITS SUCCESSFUL
VEOH VIDEO COMPASS™

Company to Streamline Efforts around Omnipresent Video Discovery

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 1, 2009) – Veoh Networks, one of the leading innovators in the online video arena, announced today that the company will be focusing its efforts around its highly successful Veoh Video Compass™ application.  Video Compass is a browser plug-in that makes video discovery a truly seamless experience, enabling video to be played while on every major search engine, portal and commerce site.  It enhances the browsing experience by surfacing recommended videos that are relevant to a consumer’s search terms.  These video recommendations – based on the viewing behavior of millions of online video users – make it easy for consumers to discover and watch videos from an index of millions of videos from around the Internet.  Veoh adds over 25,000 new Video Compass users daily and supports millions of recommendations each day on major web sites such as Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Ask, MSN, Amazon, IMDB, Craigslist, eBay, Wikipedia, etc.

Meanwhile, Veoh.com, the company’s popular video portal, continues to generate more than 200 million video streams each month from a wide range of independent and traditional content publishers such as ABC, CBS, ESPN, Viacom, and Warner Bros.  The site reaches over 23 million unique users each month with average engagement time at more than 100 minutes per user, and helps dozens of blue chip advertisers reach a broad and highly targeted audience.

As part of Veoh’s continued focus on innovation, Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh’s Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, will be stepping in as CEO.  Shapiro replaces Steve Mitgang.

Shapiro stated, “Veoh was founded in early 2005 when video on the Internet was at its very beginnings.  Today after four years of being a pioneer in the online video space, we know a tremendous amount of what viewers, publishers, and advertisers want.  We have always believed that video discovery and personalization are ultimately the important problems to solve in the world of billions of videos, and have invested heavily in technologies to support that belief.  Video Compass is the latest innovation from Veoh that makes video discovery omnipresent.”  Video Compass can be downloaded at http://www.veoh.com/videocompass/.

As part of this new concerted effort, Veoh will be streamlining its organization to better enable the company to focus on providing compelling offerings to consumers, partners, and advertisers.

About Veoh Networks
Veoh Networks is an innovative Internet Television company that delivers broadcast-quality video programming via the Internet. Veoh has more than 100,000 content publishers – from CBS, Viacom’s MTV Networks, ABC, Warner Bros. Television Group, ESPN and Lions Gate to thousands of independent filmmakers and content producers.  For advertisers, Veoh offers compelling ways of engaging with a targeted audience and measuring performance of their ad buys.

Veoh Networks is a privately held company that is backed by leading technology and media investors, including Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner Inc., Intel Capital, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Gordon Crawford, Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen. The company’s principal offices are in Los Angeles and San Diego, California.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090401/video-site-veoh-cuts-staff-boots-ceo-bets-on-browser-plug-in/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090303/kara-visits-demo09/ http://allthingsd.com/20090303/kara-visits-demo09/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:00:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=10611

There was no doubt, given the continuing economic collapse and all the joy that brings, that Demo09 was going to be a much tamped-down and sober affair this year.

But there are still a lot of interesting start-ups being featured in the main ballroom and demo “pit,” such as a cool “touch book” offering, a strange hooking-up-in-a-bar smartphone app and a plethora of ideas that obviously got their inspiration from the iPhone from Apple (AAPL).

As in: touch, swipe, interact! (Which is the official BoomTown motto, in point of fact.)

Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley is still running the show. But VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall will take over the longtime, semiannual conference–where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd–in 2010.

Here is the video I did of the event, which was held in Palm Desert, Calif., and ends today. It includes serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, PR guy Brian Solis and All Things Digital Co-Executive Editor Walt Mossberg.

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090303/kara-visits-demo09/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090225/demo-duo-chris-shipley-outgoing-and-matt-marshall-incoming-talk/ http://allthingsd.com/20090225/demo-duo-chris-shipley-outgoing-and-matt-marshall-incoming-talk/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:26:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=10301

This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peet’s Coffee in Fremont, Calif., to the exact spot where Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley proposed that VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall take over the longtime, semiannual conference where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd.

Shipley will still be running the show at Demo09 starting Sunday in Palm Desert, as well as the next Demo in the fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010.

(Shipley will remain on the advisory board, but will mostly be focusing on her consulting firm, Guidewire Group. She has run Demo for 13 years.)

Shipley and Marshall talked about it all in a video interview, as well as the fake controversy ginned up last year by champion ginner-upper TechCrunch–which, big surprise, runs a competing conference–about Demo’s longtime (and transparent) practice of charging a large fee to presenters.

“It was a false argument created as a marketing tool by a competitor,” said Shipley flatly.

What will be more pertinent and interesting in the Marshall era will be the integration between his VentureBeat Web site and the IDG-owned Demo conference, which could be a good way to take the conference and make it a year-round community of interest.

“We want to turn from a five-day affair into an ongoing conversation 365 days a year,” said Marshall, who also said the Demo model still works well. “It’s not that broken, so we will be tweaking it more than fixing it.”

Here’s the video of the pair chit-chatting about it all (sorry about the coffeeshop noise, but it was very festive):

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090225/demo-duo-chris-shipley-outgoing-and-matt-marshall-incoming-talk/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081105/yahoo-rumors-rumors-all-around-but-not-a-drop-correct/ http://allthingsd.com/20081105/yahoo-rumors-rumors-all-around-but-not-a-drop-correct/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:08:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=6106

Inevitably, in the wake of the collapse of the controversial Yahoo-Google search advertising deal, there would come the next shoe to drop–that Microsoft (MSFT) was swooping in with a bid to buy the company and that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was on his way out on a rail.

Maybe that should happen, but according to my many sources, a report in VentureBeat of this development is dead wrong.

And, said sources, Yang will keep his scheduled stage appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco.

The culprits of the bad information? Surprise, surprise, those wishing to make some money on the stock market on the swirl of uncertainty around Yahoo. These stock manipulators have tried to spin BoomTown many times, and they are appalling.

More later, but the Yahoo (YHOO) train-wreck story, with its latest Google (GOOG) crash, is exciting enough without specious rumors.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081105/yahoo-rumors-rumors-all-around-but-not-a-drop-correct/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20081031/googles-plea-to-publishers-please-keep-using-us/ http://allthingsd.com/20081031/googles-plea-to-publishers-please-keep-using-us/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:55:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=375 Yet another sign that even mighty Google feels unnerved by the slowdown: A “Hey! Don’t Forget About Us!” note sent out to its AdSense customers.

Those would be the Web publishers, large and small, that hand over some of their ad space to Google (GOOG), which generally fills it with its ubiquitous text ads. Kim Scott, who runs AdSense sales, would like those publishers to know that Google knows times are tough, and that it wants to help, and that it’s improving AdSense all the time, and that they should hang in there.

Nothing wrong with the note–it’s always good form to send customers a little pick-me-up. But since most publishers we know use AdSense as an ad solution of last resort–because they have extra space to sell, or because they have no way to sell space, period–it’s hard to imagine a missive like this will be very persuasive.

Here’s the note , courtesy of VentureBeat’s MG Siegler:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043″

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081031/googles-plea-to-publishers-please-keep-using-us/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/ http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:32:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5850

Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

Thus, here is the i-will-survive take from Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that makes the WordPress blogging software, Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions and Max Levchin of Slide.

As an added bonus, Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, also weighs in. And, of course, the inevitable blogger Robert Scoble gives his two cents (and also freaks me out once again!).

Here’s the video of the entrepreneurs, and below it, for your viewing pleasure, two versions of “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor (the classic) and Cake (the weirdly good one):

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/ http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:29:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5821

Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn.

Doerr gave out the advice at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event, which took place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto yesterday morning.

The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC got a lot of attention for his list, which he culled from a survey of 18 of the companies his firm has invested in.

Doerr didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

Doerr was on an investors panel with Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

I moderated the second panel of entrepreneurs, including: Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that makes the WordPress blogging software; Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo; and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions. Video of interviews with them and also Shriram to come later today!

But here’s Doerr reciting his 10 tips:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20081028/how-to-manage-your-start-up-in-the-downturn-well-come-to-this-event-and-find-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20081028/how-to-manage-your-start-up-in-the-downturn-well-come-to-this-event-and-find-out/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:05:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5764 Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.

It will take place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto from 8 a.m. to noon.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic (the company that makes the WordPress blogging software) will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (“Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a panel of investors, moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, which features: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

Oh, it is sure to be a festival of Web 2.0 pondering.

Said Marshall in a post about the gathering:

One goal of this event is to provide context and advice for start-up CEOs and founders facing the recession. We’ve handpicked the speakers for their remarkable records and experiences in the previous downturn. …

While the Sequoia [Capital] ‘RIP Good Times’ presentation gave a broad overview of the economic problems facing the tech world, it provided mostly a macro analysis, and a general prescription for companies.

Now is the time to take the analysis one step further, and discuss the variety of situations we see among valley investors and their start-ups: How cleantech companies are different from Internet start-ups, and how under certain conditions, a profitable company may actually be poised for aggressive growth, hiring and M&A–and not necessarily ideal for cost cutting. We intend to explore all of this and more.

Given the fairly predictable ‘Silicon Valley is in circle-the-wagons mode’ story line we’ve been seeing so far in the media, this event is also the Valley’s opportunity to help dispel this myth and explain how the area’s start-ups are actually quite diverse and that there are a mix of strategies at play.”

The event is sold out, but it will be streamed live.

And, as usual, look for a shaky video report of the roundtable from me later!

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