AllThingsD » WSJ.com

WSJ.Com's "Digits": Is Wal-Mart's Future Bright With Kosmix?

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:11:16 +0000

Yesterday, from the back of the official All Things Digital minivan, BoomTown donned the official ATD Ray-Ban Aviators to talk on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online news show about the $300 million acquisition of Kosmix by Wal-Mart announced earlier this week.

The deal for the Silicon Valley site, which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic, will be interesting to watch, since the retail giant has tried a number of digital moves in years past that seem to have had negligible impact.

Such as its Vudu movie service, which Wal-Mart bought last year for $100 million, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka also noted on the program.

(By the way, it goes without saying, I do not pontificate and drive–at least not on a Skype video connection.)

Here’s the video:

BoomTown Talks About Privacy and Steve Jobs's Health on WSJ.com's "Digits"!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:38:21 +0000

Here’s a video of an appearance I did this morning on the WSJ.com’s “Digits” online daily tech show about a post I did yesterday titled “Steve Jobs Asks for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time.”

In it, I tried to make the controversial case for why the Apple co-founder and CEO should get some personal space from the endless media frenzy during his medical leave of absence from the company.

As “Digits” asked, “But as chief executive of the world’s most valuable technology company, how much privacy will he be granted?”

None, of course, since he is the most famous techie in history, but that’s my story and I am sticking to it.

I was on “Digits” with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, who did not agree with me (his boss!).

Here’s the interview video:

Putting Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Through Its Paces

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 22:17:34 +0000

In the continuing tug of war between apps and the Web, Microsoft offered a little bit of both last month in its beta release of Internet Explorer 9, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular Web browser. IE 9, as it’s nicknamed, is designed to make websites look richer, respond faster and behave more like the apps installed on your PC so you forget that you’re browsing the Web.

[ See post to watch video ]

Alas, you are still browsing the Web and the occasional sluggish behavior doesn’t always magically abate after downloading a shiny new browser.

I tested IE 9 against its rivals, including speed tests with stopwatch in hand, as well as overall use tests to see how this new browser handled websites with complex graphics.

Fast, Sometimes Faster

I found my experience with IE 9 to be fast, and in some tests, faster on average than Google (GOOG) Chrome, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It also handled graphically rich websites with no trouble. (IE 9 is free for Windows PCs at beautyoftheweb.com.)

I used two Windows 7 PCs for testing, and though one performed without any problems, the other crashed two times while I used IE 9.

After a thorough analysis of the PC, a Microsoft (MSFT) spokesman attributed this to a graphics-driver problem and suggested a work-around of switching settings in IE 9 so it would use software rather than hardware graphics acceleration, which this new browser uses to improve speed and performance. This switch would cause the browser to perform slower than if it had used the richer hardware-accelerated graphics.

Using the four major browsers, I measured the average time for how long it took each to completely open five typical websites: Facebook, Google Gmail, Twitter, WSJ.com and my sister’s WordPress blog. IE 9 opened Facebook fastest and tied with Chrome in opening WSJ.com fastest. Firefox clocked the best time for opening Gmail and Twitter, and Safari opened my sister’s WordPress blog the fastest.

Handling Intense Graphics

But most of these time differences were within tenths or even hundredths of a second. What interested me more were how these browsers handled intense graphics on certain websites written in a rich format called HTML5.

I opened and interacted with websites including Livestrong.com, BMW’s joydefinesthefuture.com and IMDB.com. All the browsers could handle these sites except for Firefox, which couldn’t open the BMW site—a Web page that shows interactive diagrams of car designs. Videos played smoothly in all browsers, but seemed to start a smidge faster, on average, in IE 9.

If users aren’t impressed with IE 9′s enhanced speed and ability to handle graphics-filled websites, they’ll have a harder time ignoring the way this browser melds with Windows 7 to do some pretty cool things. For example, to automatically create a shortcut to a website, click on its representative icon, whether from the browser’s address bar or from a New Tab page, and drag it down and pin it to the task bar.

This pinned site is represented with its own unique icon and can work as a notification feature for a site’s content. Facebook, when pinned to the task bar, displayed a red asterisk when I had new notifications, messages, or friend requests waiting for me.

A Microsoft spokesman says there should be more sites that take advantage of these notification capabilities in coming weeks.

Once pinned to the Windows taskbar, the Livestrong.com site gets its own jump list, or set of commands that can be selected from the task bar.

Getting Pinned

Like anything pinned to the task bar in Windows 7, each of these pinned sites gets its own jump list, a set of commands that can be previewed and selected right from the task bar. Other functions also work from here, like playback commands for websites with videos. And any opened site can be previewed in thumbnail view by mousing over it in the task bar.

IE 9 is visually enjoyable thanks to some small but helpful tweaks.

The browser’s back button, an arrow in a circle, is much larger than other browsers, making it easy to find and use when you want to navigate back to the last page you were on. This back button and the forward arrow button beside it change colors according to the dominant color used in the opened website.

For Gmail, the arrow buttons are red, on AllThingsD.com, the buttons are green and on my sister’s WordPress travel blog, they’re light blue. This artistic touch makes the overall page easier on the eyes.

IE 9 lets people drag website icons down into the task bar for one-click access.

Many sites look the same on IE 9 as they do on other browsers, but some sites look better, filling the screen with slightly bigger illustrations and larger fonts that are easier to digest. I noticed this when viewing Twitter.com and several news websites.

The Birthday Slip

But I missed some of the visual pluses of other browsers. For example, you can’t close one of several opened browser tabs just by clicking on its red “x” icon unless you select—and, thus, view—that tabbed webpage.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari all allow closing of tabs by just mousing over a tab to see an “x” to click to close the website.

Handy shortcuts like this are especially helpful if you’re browsing online for a birthday gift, the intended recipient suddenly appears beside your PC and you need to slyly close a tab.

I’m also not crazy about the New Tab page in IE 9. This uses tiles with names of websites and small icons on each to represent your 10 most visited websites so you can quickly select one of them rather than typing out the page’s URL.

But I prefer the way Google Chrome displays the eight most visited sites as mini web page representations, which are easier to quickly recognize and select.

Likewise, the click of a button in Apple’s Safari browser shows mini representations of your 12 top websites in a concave view that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a round room. And though IE 9 has a handsome translucent border, when I had it opened in front of Google Chrome, I could see Chrome’s tabs behind that translucency, showing just how much more computer screen real estate Chrome offers.

Aside from my unusual PC crashes, IE 9 worked quickly and is smartly designed to handle websites with intense graphics. The Web will continue to fill with more and more of these visually rich, interactive sites, so people will benefit from using a browser like IE 9 that can take the heat.

Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

WSJ.com's "Digits" Show: Yahoo/Foursquare, Silicon Valley Hiring and More!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:30:06 +0000

Here’s a video of BoomTown’s appearance Friday on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online tech show.

In it, we discuss my post on the machinations about whether Yahoo (YHOO) can get its mitts on social geolocation phenom Foursquare or if venture capitalists will swoop in with a bag of cash.

Also on the dock: Tech hiring has returned and tricked-out buoys.

Here’s the video:

Wham! "Firewire" on WSJ.com's "Digits" Show: Here Comes the iPad, and When Will Twitter Make Money?

Kara Swisher — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 06:49:27 +0000

BoomTown’s plot to take over the world via honking big Skype headphones is working.

Barron’s blogger Eric Savitz and I will be appearing weekly on Fridays at 10 am PT on WSJ.com’s “Digits” daily online tech show, in a segment called “Rapid Firewire.”

Get it?

In our inaugural effort, we spouted off on the launch of the Apple (AAPL) iPad in one week, wondered whether Twitter can come up with a profit-making business plan, what will happen to Google (GOOG) and its China choice and, finally, the fate of gadget retailer Radio Shack.

The 1980s musical selection from this week, in honor of the headphones, is–natch–Wham!

Enjoy the video, and tune in next Friday:

[ See post to watch video ]

Everybody Wang Chung Tonight: BoomTown and Giant Earphones Talk Apple iPad on WSJ.com's "Digits"

Kara Swisher — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:19:31 +0000

BoomTown and my giant Skype 1980s-style headphones will be making regular appearances on WSJ.com’s daily “Digits” tech show going forward, and here’s the latest video.

Besides making musical recommendations from the era–this week, Wang Chung!–and looking like I just rolled out of bed (I did!), I talked with “Digits” geek-lady-in-charge Stacey Delo earlier today about the hype around the April 3 release of the Apple (AAPL) iPad to stores.

My take: Hype front coming in from the land of Apple fanboys will grow exponentially as more hot air enters the system due to the magic tablet.

Definitely expect possible nerd camping in front of Apple stores nationwide and numerous images of people exiting stores waving the iPad as if it were made of unicorns and rainbows; so dress appropriately.

Until then, here is today’s “Digits” video:

And, for those interested, here is Wang Chung, with its catchy hit song, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”:

Next week: Wham!

The Next Big Thing in Tech: BoomTown Sporting Giant Headphones on WSJ.com's "Digits"

Kara Swisher — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:33:58 +0000

Today, I appeared on WSJ.com’s daily online show, “Digits,” talking about the “next big thing” in tech, on the 10th anniversary of the tech stock bubble high.

Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d always end.

In the video, I am wearing a pair of honking big headphones that work well on Skype, to give it that year 2000, nonmobile feel.

So what do I talk about? The importance of mobile, of course!

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

One Obvious Question for HTC CEO Peter Chou at D8: How About Them Apple (Patents)?

Kara Swisher — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:15:13 +0000

Before Apple lobbed a patent infringement lawsuit at Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC yesterday, we were lucky to get its CEO, Peter Chou, to agree to appear at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June to talk about its work making smartphones for Google and others.

That interview with Chou (pictured above) obviously got a whole lot more interesting with the epic legal action by Apple (AAPL) alleging that HTC infringed some 20 patents related to the iPhone’s graphical user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

Wrote Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski:

“The company is asking for a permanent injunction barring HTC from importing or selling infringing phones in the U.S., along with triple damages and maximum interest.

‘We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,’ Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release announcing the action. ‘We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.’”

HTC denied the allegations, not surprisingly, and was backed up in a statement of support by Google (GOOG). That is also not a surprise, since its Android operating system, which is in the HTC-made Nexus One phone, is mentioned prominently in the lawsuit.

Whatever happens, it all makes for what is likely to be a head-spinning technology rumble over the next months and underscores how important the burgeoning mobile arms race and the fight over innovation will be.

Until we get Chou in an onstage interview at D8 to talk about this and much more, here is a video of MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka talking about yesterday’s Apple action on the new Digits Live Show on WSJ.com:

Prankster Jason Calacanis Talks About His Apple iPad Hoax (Warning: Cute Baby Alert!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:05:30 +0000

While in Los Angeles for a brief second on Friday, BoomTown motored over to the Brentwood home of puckish entrepreneur Jason Calacanis to talk to him about his prank tweets the night before the introduction of the iPad last week.

On Tuesday night before the much hyped launch of the newest device from Apple (AAPL), Calacanis let loose with a series of over-the-top posts to Twitter, claiming he had been a beta tester for the iPad tablet computer for 10 days.

Unfortunately, these were assertions that some in the mostly mainstream media took too seriously.

So was it a jump-the-shark moment for journalism?

It was certainly sloppy, given that Calacanis is well known for slapping Apple around and that the secretive computer giant does not even give its own employees access to new products.

All this might have sent off alarm bells.

But he followed up with a series of tweets on a myriad of features of the new iPad–one nuttier, pricier and heavier than the next, such as a built-in HDTV tuner, a solar recharging pad and more.

For example: “Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of u.”

The problem was that a few big media outfits, including CNNMoney.com and WSJ.com, posted reports on the tweets without much of a raised eyebrow or first checking on their veracity with Apple or with Calacanis.

While anyone can get caught in a prank–and this was a pretty elaborate one pulled by Calacanis, who claims he was just trying to point out how ridiculous Apple hype had become–it’s still an instructive moment for journalism.

Here’s my interview with Calacanis, explaining it all (with a little shot of his new baby girl at the end), as well as images of his faux iPad tweets below:

[ See post to watch video ]

HuffPo Needs Ad Dollars. Can Yahoo Sales Vets Deliver?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:30:13 +0000

The Huffington Post has a newish CEO, a big pile of investors’ money and a lot of readers. Time to turn it into a business.

That’s the idea behind a brace of new sales guys, brought in by sales head Greg Coleman, who is himself a newish addition to the site.

The hires:

Andy Wiedlin, formerly at News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, and Yahoo before that, will run West Coast sales.
Phil Cara, formerly at AOL, and Yahoo before that, will run East Coast sales.
Peter Cherukuri, the former publisher of Roll Call, will run sales in Washington, D.C.
Brian Kaminsky, formerly at Reuters, and Yahoo prior to that, will run sales operations out of New York.

Note the connection for three of the four new guys? Not a coincidence.

Coleman was the longtime Yahoo (YHOO) sales head until he got pushed out in 2007. He resurfaced last year as head of AOL’s (AOL) sales group but left less than three months into the job when new CEO Tim Armstrong brought in his guy.

At the new gig, Coleman’s plan is to use his new/old team to convince advertisers to start spending significant money. The site was on track to do something in the $10 million range last year, but CEO Eric Hippeau wants to goose that number to $100 million in the next few years in order to justify the $37 million that investors have sunk into the company.

Coleman came to the site last fall when it already had a good traffic story to tell–comScore (SCOR) counted 6.8 million unique users in September, which is more than WSJ.com’s 6.7 million. And that story will get better very soon, as comScore rolls out its new “hybrid” measuring system. Coleman says the new numbers will push Huffpo above the 17 million mark.

His team still needs to battle the perception that Huffpo is an all-politics (and lefty, to boot) site, since advertisers are often leery about anything political.

Sure enough, as I’m typing this Monday night, the site’s front page is dominated by Washington coverage–a banner headline about the Republican Party’s opposition to something called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. And no matter what Coleman and his guys say, no one’s going to confuse the site with, say, Fox News.

Still, the site has long argued that it isn’t dominated by political coverage, and Coleman now says less than 25 percent of its traffic comes from that stuff. A heavy dose of entertainment/media coverage–did you know the dude from “300″ now has man boobs and a paunch?–helps make that claim plausible.

Will advertisers buy it? People who aren’t Greg Coleman tell me marketers were already warming to the site this year, a result of work done by the previous regime. And in large part due to interest from entertainment companies pushing new movies and TV shows.

But if Coleman and his employers want to hit their $100 million goal, they’ll need to do a lot more work. For more on Coleman’s strategy, check out his conversation with Kara Swisher from last fall.

As Traffic Booms, Is HuffPo Ready to Make Some Real Dough?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:21:53 +0000

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

How to help marketers to better understand the site and, therefore, spur this significant monetization will be his main focus at the Huffington Post, said Greg Coleman to BoomTown in an interview over the weekend.

Coleman–a former Yahoo (YHOO) advertising exec, as well as one for Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL–was named president and chief revenue officer a month ago by Huffington Post’s new CEO, Eric Hippeau.

Hippeau, who was himself just appointed in June, is another well-known online media exec and has been a big investor and board member of the Huffington Post. (You can read a thorough interview by Staci Kramer with Hippeau on paidContent.)

“It’s important for advertisers to know how big we have gotten, while also highlighting this amazing audience of influencers we have gathered,” said Coleman, in his first media chitchat since taking on the job. “I think it is the beginning of a tipping point.”

Well, of course, Coleman would say that, as the guy looking to drum up interest among marketers in spending their money on the Huffington Post.

But stats seem to indicate that consumers are increasingly liking what the Huffington Post is creating, because it is starting to surpass some well-known media icons on the Web in traffic.

While more of this increase is going to be due to a socialization of the news–the Huffington Post has an aggressive deployment of Facebook Connect called HuffPost Social News–the growth is more about building a brand people trust and seek out.

According to recent reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online, for example, the site just became larger than several online brands of big media companies, such as the Washington Post (WPO), in terms of unique monthly visitors.

In its September report, Nielsen clocked the Huffington Post at 9.47 million uniques, up 26 percent, while the Post site was at 9.2 million–a drop of 30 percent.

According to the Nielsen, the Huffington Post is within spitting distance of USA Today’s Web site (9.9 million), a Gannett (GCI) property.

And, it is bigger than Hearst Newspapers Digital (7.9 million) and the BBC (7.2 million).

For September, comScore has the Huffington Post (at 6.83 million) besting the Post (6.77 million)–as well as WSJ.com (6.7 million), a unit of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS).

(The Wall Street Journal site, to be fair, makes a chunk of its revenue from subscription fees, rather than relying solely on advertising from traffic like the Huffington Post. And full disclosure: Dow Jones owns this site.)

In any case, big traffic is key for most news sites, and internal numbers from Google (GOOG) Analytics that Huffington Post execs cite are higher, as is typical for most sites, pegging traffic at about 27 million monthly uniques with more than two million reader comments per month.

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging icon Arianna Huffington attributes the recent boost in traffic to the site’s proclivity to “start conversations” that interest readers, such as her recent suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should resign.

“We are aiming to go beyond just facts, to create a narrative,” said Huffington, who thinks the speed of news helps attract visitors to the site. “We think bringing journalism to a new level is exactly what people are looking for.”

Perhaps. But, even if traffic increases continue to bear her theories out, she and others have said that the Huffington Post still has not been regularly profitable despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

While the site is aiming to invest rather than focus too hard on showing profits, Coleman said he would like to make revenue seven times larger in the next years, building on the performance of the site to vaunt past old media giants online.

“This kind of thing is a milestone for the marketing community,” he said. “Our goal is to be the top Internet newspaper, and this points out that we are on our way.”

To do that, he will have to spend some of the $37 million in funding that the Huffington Post has raised from venture investors.

While the edit side is using the money to expand the number of news categories, Coleman said his focus will be on building a higher caliber team of sales and marketing execs with deeper relationships to big clients.

“Unlike selling an auto page on Yahoo (YHOO), our site has a more complex sales process that takes some time for people to understand,” said Coleman. “But once they get it, it should be an easier sale.”

Until then, check out the video of the entire interview I did at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Huffington and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth in which they talk about the future of journalism and more:

[ See post to watch video ]

Lonely Planet Names New U.S. Head as Its Digital Strategy Escalates

Kara Swisher — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:33:28 +0000

Lonely Planet, best known as a traditional travel guidebook publisher, is announcing a new U.S. head tomorrow, as it increasingly moves to reposition the company as much more of a “cross-media” platform.

John Boris–set to take over today as new managing director of Lonely Planet Americas, based at its Oakland, Calif., office–comes to the company from Zagat Survey, where he was the SVP of marketing and interactive.

Previous to that, Boris worked at 1-800 Flowers and Fresh Direct.

“I’m thrilled to be joining one of the world’s best-loved travel brands at such an exciting time, with Lonely Planet rapidly evolving as a cross-media travel player,” he said in a press release.

As the paid versus free content online debate gets louder over the next year, how well known brands like Lonely Planet–which has a strong reputation among consumers–handle the fallout will be more and more interesting to watch.

Indeed, in recent months, Lonely Planet has been escalating its digital content efforts, which was the initial promise when BBC Worldwide bought 75 percent of the Melbourne, Australia-based company for about $200 million in late 2007.

But the digitization of Lonely Planet’s business, as with many traditional media publishers like it, has been slow going, with 75 percent of its revenue still in print.

While that business remains profitable, the breakdown between print and digital will be changing sooner than later, since digital is where much of the growth is coming from, said CEO Matt Goldberg to me over a recent dinner in San Francisco.

Goldberg–who came to Lonely Planet early this year from Dow Jones, where he was SVP of digital strategy and operations, including for WSJ.com–noted that Lonely Planet’s digital businesses have doubled their revenues to $20 million this year via premium pricing and advertising.

Besides the obvious use of Twitter and Facebook, Goldberg flagged a number of the more promising and innovative digital initiatives now at work at Lonely Planet, especially in its key U.S. market.

They include:

* Leveraging the 700,000 registered members of Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree community,

* The announcement this week of putting all or part of 600 of its travel guides on the international release of the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle e-reader.

* Work on collaborative trip planning for its “Trippy” gadget, as part of the Google Wave beta launched last week.

* A compass application for Google (GOOG) Android handsets that make use of augmented reality technology to highlight points of interest in cities. As Goldberg described it in an email, travelers will be able to “pan a city destination using the video on their handset and see Lonely Planet recommendations (points of interest from our City Guides) as virtual sticky notes above real live points of interest.”

* Over 500,000 downloads from around 70 premium-priced apps on the iPhone from Apple (AAPL), as well as various location-based guide apps for Nokia (NOK) and BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

* Travel music collections featured on Spotify and other online music services.

Goldberg highlighted other interesting ideas, such as an online travel video contest and even a “hack” day in Australia recently, which will be followed by one in the U.S. in the late winter.

While not all of it is going to work, this kind of endless experimentation at Lonely Planet is probably the right way to keep figuring out how to deal with the seismic media shifts that show no sign of abating.

The Financial Times Strengthens Its Pay Wall With Stern Words

Peter Kafka — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:15:41 +0000

As more (and more!) newspapers look to put some of their content behind a pay wall, the Financial Times is running a victory lap, noting that it is already asking customers to pay for Web news, and that this approach has been successful.

Fair enough. But if you’re that confident in your model–which, in short, allows Web surfers to look in on the FT.com site 10 times a month for free but demands payment for anything more than that–what’s with the following message at the bottom of each story?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Anyone else think that strikes a weird tone between pleading and chiding? I’m told the note started showing up on FT stories about three weeks ago and that staffers at the paper are a bit confused about it as well. Here’s how FT spokeswoman Darcy Keller explains the message, via email:

The FT copyright simply protects our ownership of FT content. There is obviously a distinction between third parties referring to FT articles and linking back to FT.com and those that reuse and distribute our content without attributing it to the FT.

Obviously there is! But there’s also an obvious distinction between friends and colleagues who pass along an interesting article and, say, people who run sleazy “scraper” sites that publish other people’s copy in the hope of gaming Google’s (GOOG) search engine. Right? And more important: The people in the second category won’t be deterred by a copyright note–even a sternly worded one. Right?

Obligatory to-be-sure grafs: News Corp.’s (NWS) Dow Jones, which owns this (free) Web site, also charges for access to (some of) its Wall Street Journal. And it also tells people not to distribute WSJ.com stories without its permission. But in order to find that boilerplate language, you’d have to seek out the “Subscriber Agreement & Terms of Use” page, and slug your way through legalese until you got to section 6 (b)–“Limitations on Use.” Or you can just trust me. Does that make you less likely to copy and paste this story?

Yahoo Renovates Its Home Page

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:02 +0000

Makeovers are always fun to watch. Someone swoops in on an unsuspecting fashion “don’t,” improves him or her with a new hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe, and presents the finished product to overjoyed friends and family.

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

[ See post to watch video ]

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Software That Makes Twitter So Much Tweeter

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:02:03 +0000

Most people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are eager to list the reasons why they don’t use this social-networking service. It’s for narcissists. It’s for teenagers. It’s for people who have nothing better to do. It’s a forum for oversharing. While all of these things may be true in some cases, I find Twitter’s 140-character messaging network to be an incredibly useful tool in my everyday life.

I use Twitter as my personalized news feed by following people who “tweet” (write updates) about things that interest me. In one glance I can read White House correspondent Mark Knoller’s tweets about President Obama’s activities, a recipe tweeted by Martha Stewart and WSJ.com tweets with links to news stories.

[ See post to watch video ]

But Twitter works best with a little help from its friends, namely those programs that are designed to make it more customized and useful with minimal work on the user’s behalf. Here’s a rundown of just some of these helpers. I’m focusing only on ones that run on your computer, either in Web browsers or as stand-alone programs. There is also a plethora of Twitter applications that work on mobile devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry, too many to go into here. A few Twitter programs let you lurk and read tweets without a Twitter account, but in most cases these programs require a Twitter user name and password so they can better organize tweets of the people whom you follow.

To get a Twitter account in the first place, you will need to sign up with a user name and password at Twitter.com and start following people—or subscribing to read someone’s updates. These may be friends or people you simply find interesting, like journalists whose work you read (my Twitter user name is kabster728). You can see whom one person follows, and then opt also to follow those same people and the people those people follow and so on. Though it’s possible to lock your account so it’s private, very few people do so because Twitter encourages open communication throughout the Web.

That said, you can always choose to block someone from following you or stop following someone’s Twitter feed. You can comment on a tweet by sending the person who wrote it an “at reply,” named because the reply starts with the “@” sign followed by the user name of the person to whom you are replying. You can also send direct messages to another Twitter user as long as he or she is following you.

All-Purpose Programs

TweetDeck and Seesmic are two programs that do a good job of filtering others’ tweets and aiding the process of writing tweets. Both use Adobe Air, a tool that lets the program work in the background while continuously refreshing its content. This increases productivity because the programs can be set to display pop-up notifications whenever certain tweets appear.

TweetDeck (a free download at TweetDeck.com) organizes tweets into columns that you designate, such as a column of all tweets that mention your name, your company’s name or the word “Wimbledon.” It eases the process of writing tweets by building in ways to shorten Web links, post photos or translate a tweet into one of 35 languages. TweetDeck also integrates with Facebook so that one TweetDeck column displays your Facebook friends’ latest status updates.

The most recent version of TweetDeck enables synchronization of accounts with an email and password. This means that you can download TweetDeck on several computers, log into your account and see the same columns and settings on all platforms. The new version also includes fun extras like search within each column and the option to show how many followers a user has by displaying that number below his or her tweets.

Seesmic (a free download at seesmic.com) is another all-purpose Twitter program. It works much like TweetDeck, but has a few differences. Seesmic also integrates with Facebook, but does so in a more robust way, showing when Facebook friends share photos or Web links and letting you comment on or “like” someone’s status; TweetDeck only shows Facebook status updates.

Seesmic lets you drag photos into a small window for sharing via Twitter. But its overall look isn’t as visually appealing as TweetDeck’s and it lacks some of TweetDeck’s extra features.

Twhirl (twhirl.org) also runs on Adobe Air, working in the background as you use your computer for other activities. Like the aforementioned programs, it also enables easier tweeting with built-in tools for photo uploading and URL shrinking. Unlike TweetDeck and Seesmic, which focus on Twitter and Facebook, Twhirl enables logging into four types of accounts: Twitter, FriendFeed, Laconi.ca and Identica. But Twhirl shows only one category at a time, like a screen of replies, rather than showing all of these categories at a glance like TweetDeck and Seesmic.

Browser Power

Some Twitter programs run in browsers, not as stand-alone programs. This saves you from downloading a program on multiple computers because you can simply log into your account on any computer using its Web browser. But these programs won’t use the helpful pop-up notifications of Adobe Air; instead, you will need to look in your browser to see new information—like opening Twitter.com.

One such browser-based program is HootSuite (HootSuite.com), which uses an owl as its mascot. HootSuite’s unique features include its ability to set tweets to send at a later time or date, giving your followers the illusion that you are tweeting when you’re actually not, and a built-in statistic-tracker to measure how many people opened a link you posted using its ow.ly URL shortener. Like Twhirl, HootSuite shows only certain categories at a time rather than one overall glance at many categories of tweets.

Twitter.com is getting better, though it’s still weak compared with these other programs. I’ve used add-ons in my Firefox browser to enhance Twitter, and one called Power Twitter is like steroids for Twitter.com, adding photo uploading and link shortening right into the Web site. It also makes friends’ tweets richer by displaying details about any Web links that they share.

No Sign-Up Necessary

If you’re just curious about Twitter and want to see what people are talking about without signing up, try sites that are open to everyone. Twitterfall.com, for example, displays tweets about trending Twitter topics and custom search results in a waterfall-like visual with new tweets spilling over the top every half second. TwitterVision.com cleverly displays tweets around the world on a global map as they are posted, showing where the tweets are from, geographically.

Twitter isn’t limited to Twitter.com, and I wouldn’t likely use it as much were it not for programs like the ones I’ve mentioned and others. So give them a try and find out what makes Twitter useful for you.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

The Swiss Army Knife of Portable Videos

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:50:04 +0000

Every once in a while I watch an online video that’s good enough to send to a friend, share on Twitter and Facebook or save its URL so I can watch it again later. The final piece of the puzzle would be moving the video onto a mobile device to have it with me wherever I went.

Enter RealPlayer SP beta (realplayer.com), the latest in RealNetworks Inc.’s (RNWK) long line of media players that the company has churned out since 1995. RealPlayer SP—the SP stands for social and portable—is a free download that, once installed, grabs videos from the Web, converts them to the right format and transfers them to over a dozen portable devices. While other software programs perform two or just one of these tasks, the RealPlayer SP’s trio of talent makes it like a digital Swiss army knife.

[ See post to watch video ]

After using the RealPlayer for moving several videos of all kinds to an iPhone, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Palm Pre, I felt like I had more control over my portable devices and the media they held. And the freedom of knowing that this player is compatible with almost anything—including Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) devices, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerrys, T-Mobile’s G1 and Sidekick, Nokia’s (NOK) N97 and certain basic cellphones—is a major plus.

Behavior Problem

My biggest problem with using the RealPlayer SP has to do with my own behavior. Most of the videos I watch online and share with friends are less than five minutes long. This means that grabbing, converting and transferring videos to a portable device using the RealPlayer SP—albeit a relatively quick process—could easily take more time than the length of the video, itself. And many of the longer videos that I would want to move to a BlackBerry or iPhone are copyright-protected and thus can’t be downloaded by the RealPlayer SP.

Another factor is that more devices now have their own built-in app stores for downloading content to the device, without plugging into a computer for transfers like with the RealPlayer SP. The iPod touch, for example, can now download movies, music videos and TV shows over Wi-Fi thanks to a recent $10 software upgrade.

Mac Version Coming Soon

The RealPlayer SP works only on Windows PCs right now; a Mac version is due out by the end of this year. Likewise, it doesn’t work on Apple’s Safari browser but does work on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome browser; I used all three with success.

If you’re not interested in using the RealPlayer SP for transferring videos to portable devices, you can still use it for downloading videos, saving them onto your computer and sharing them with friends via Twitter, Facebook or email. Tiny icons representing each of these sharing options appear in-line beside freshly downloaded videos. I shared videos of last week’s Congressional Luau at the White House via Facebook and Twitter, but the icon to share videos via Twitter doesn’t automatically shrink URLs to fit into a tweet. I shrunk the URLs myself, but this took an extra step¹.

And though I’ve mostly focused on the RealPlayer SP’s ability to grab, convert and transfer (RealNetworks calls these tools the Downloader feature in the player), it also works as its own media player or helps you discover new content.

RealPlayer SP Beta downloads, converts and transfers videos from the Web to a variety of portable devices.

A premium version called RealPlayer Plus SP is available for $40. Premium features include DVD burning, DVD playback (if your computer can’t play DVDs) and video conversion to a special format called h.264—though the free version performs these conversions for videos being moved to Apple devices.

I jumped around the Web visiting sites and playing videos, which prompted the RealPlayer SP to display a small “Download This Video” message above videos that aren’t copyright-protected. Downloading videos worked on most sites, including AllThingsD.com, Slate, YouTube, Salon and CNET. As expected, I wasn’t so lucky with videos from the New York Times, BBC and Hulu, which hosts loads of TV shows and music videos. That’s because videos from these sites were copyright-protected and didn’t allow for downloading.

A Glitch

In one instance with a WSJ.com video, only the short ad that played before the video was downloaded, even though the download prompt indicated that the WSJ video was obtainable using RealPlayer SP. RealNetworks says this is a glitch it knows about and plans to correct.

The RealPlayer SP’s ability to download videos and transfer them to devices, rather than just copying them onto computers, forced me to be choosier about the videos that I downloaded due to the limited memory of the devices. Because of this, I wished the RealPlayer SP Downloader had a better built-in way to discover downloadable content. Currently, a link to something called the RealGuide pulls up suggestions, but I had a hard time finding clips there that I wanted to download. RealNetworks says it plans to improve the video-discovery process in the future, including adding things like YouTube keyword searches built right into the Downloader.

The Downloader Window

When I did find videos I liked, I clicked on the prompt to download the clip, found the clip in a tiny Downloader window, and chose to move the clip to a device (there’s a list of all available devices) or share it via Twitter, Facebook or email. Transfer times depend on the length of the video.

RealNetworks provides simple instructions on making sure your device is set to transfer when plugged in. For example, BlackBerrys must be set to mass-storage mode, Palm Pres should be set to USB mode and Apple devices synchronize with the iTunes library, where RealPlayer’s converted videos are sent for transferring to iPhones and iPods.

RealPlayer SP can be a real help when it comes to putting the content that you want on your portable device. Its ability to assist from start to finish—finding videos, converting and transferring them—saves time and avoids confusion. To succeed, RealPlayer SP needs to do a better job of helping people find worthwhile videos to transfer, or they’ll stop using it after just a few tries.

Corrections and Amplifications

¹ Real Networks says its RealPlayer SP Beta’s Twitter video sharing capability has an automatic URL-shortening tool built in. This week’s Mossberg Solution product said the product lacked such a feature, because it never activated itself in our tests.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Social Networking Returns to China

Sky Canaves — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:35:16 +0000

Yesterday, while China Web watchers were digesting the latest bit of news on the requirement that PCs sold in China include government-mandated Internet filtering software, the Web as we knew it a week ago quietly returned.

Last Tuesday, at around 5 PM, Internet users across mainland China began reporting problems accessing popular social networking sites, such as Twitter.com, the Yahoo (YHOO)-owned photo-sharing site Flickr.com, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live.com, Bing.com and Hotmail. The sudden unavailability of these sites led many Internet users to suspect that they had been blocked due to sensitivities over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4. And on Wednesday, dozens of Chinese Web sites also announced that they would be closed for technical maintenance for several days.

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Wall Street Journal Promises New Pay Sites, Someday

Peter Kafka — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:52:42 +0000

My colleagues over at The Wall Street Journal have been able to convince more than a million people to pay for full access to the paper’s Web site. Can it find even more people who are willing to pay for even more online stuff?

Yes, says WSJ.com Executive Editor Alan Murray, who alluded to his plans in an interview with Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Murray doesn’t go into any level of detail about what he has up his sleeve except to say that he’s thinking about niche products that might focus on energy, or a “news service for chief financial officers.”

In other words, trade newsletters, which have proven to be a very resilient business for the likes of McGraw-Hill (MHP).

The video of the interview is embedded below, and you can see a full transcript here. But here’s the relevant text:

Murray: We’re working on a premium initiative to launch a series of, as you say, niche or narrower information services that we can sell at a premium to smaller groups of subscribers on subjects that they care most about.

Question: What sort of subjects?

Murray: Oh, I mean, there are potentially thousands of them. Energy might be an example. Obviously a lot of our readers are deeply interested in financial subjects. Perhaps some sort of a news service for chief financial officers. There are a lot of ideas that are on the table. We’ve started prioritizing them–got a few that will probably come out first. But I’m not going to break that news on your video.

I’d complain about the Nieman crew not following up on this (and burying the lede, too–what are they teaching over there at Harvard?), but the fact is that Murray has been talking about this stuff internally for a while. So has his boss, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson, so I’m not sure whether this qualifies as new news.

But it is worth noting that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who was just forced to take a huge write-down on the Journal, has sounded increasingly disenchanted with advertising-based businesses, period. You may recall that when Murdoch acquired the paper in 2007, he was geared to take down the pay wall surrounding the Web site altogether, as the New York Times (NYT) had done with its flagship site. Now it looks like News Corp. (NWS) is willing to put up even more walls.

Also, while I’m at it, the disclosure: The site you’re reading right now is owned by Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal. But as far as I know, we’ve got no plans to charge for it. Enjoy, gratis!

Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

CES Economist: Gadgets Are Necessities Now

Christopher Lawton — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:27:19 +0000

Yes, this may be the worst recession America has seen since World War II. But the people who are bringing us the Consumer Electronics Show would like to point out that sales of tech products are actually faring pretty well when compared to what happened during previous recessions.

The evidence suggest that people’s views on devices such as televisions, notebook computers and mobile phones are changing, says Shawn DuBravac, economist for the Consumer Electronics Association. Through November of 2008, 17.22 percent of total durable good purchases were tech goods, the highest share in 50 years, he says.

“While these are typically discretionary purchases, consumers are treating them like nondiscretionary purchases,” says Mr. DuBravac.

That doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t making cutbacks. In fact, in many categories, consumers seem to be gravitating toward lower-priced items for varying reasons. For example, coming out of the 2007 holiday season, nearly 50 percent of all flat panel sales were over 40 inches. Today, Mr. DuBravac says, that numbers stands closer to 35 percent.

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Twitter Off to a Rough 2009

Ben Worthen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:38:01 +0000

You might be familiar with phishing attacks, those messages sent by criminals that look like they’re from a bank or Nigerian prince. But what about Twishing?

The term may enter the tech lexicon this week, thanks to an attack targeting the Web site Twitter, which runs a popular service that lets people share short updates about what they’re doing. (Blame Brian Krebs of the Washington Post if it sticks.) Over the weekend, cyber baddies sent phishing messages via Twitter’s service to other account holders. The message directed people to a Web site that looked like Twitter’s homepage, but was really operated by the bad buys. As people logged in to the fake Twitter site, the bad guys captured their user names and passwords. Twitter warned account holders Saturday about the scam in a post on its blog, and advised those concerned to change their passwords.

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HP Printers: Big in Iran?

Justin Scheck — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:27:44 +0000

There’s lots of talk in the tech industry these days about capitalizing on growth in “emerging markets,” countries like China, Vietnam and Brazil where people are rapidly buying computers and printers.

A story in Monday’s Boston Globe says Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking that strategy one step further: Its printers, writes Farah Stockman, “have become a top seller” in Iran–a country whose economy the U.S. government wants to prevent from emerging.

Since 1995, the U.S. government has had an on embargo on trade between U.S. companies and Iran due to the Iranian government’s “sponsorship of international terrorism and Iran’s active pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,” according to a U.S. Treasury Department fact sheet.

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HTC Can't Disguise Windows Mobile Flaws

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:20:02 +0000

New iPhone competitors continue to crop up, though most are mobile devices from companies that simply slap on a touch screen in hopes of fooling consumers. The real key to the iPhone’s success is its software, and finally, signs indicate that other companies are starting to pay more attention to making good software to go along with their hardware.

One welcome sign is an effort by companies trying to improve Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile operating system, which has a reputation for confusing navigation and hasn’t had a major update recently. Kinoma Inc., for example, recently released an application called Kinoma Play that runs on Windows Mobile devices and gives users a markedly better way of handling photos, videos, music and Web browsing.

The HTC Touch Diamond, due out this month from Sprint, tries to hide Windows Mobile software.

This week, I tried yet another software program that is designed to run on top of Windows Mobile software. But this time, the software is at the heart of a device designed by the same company: HTC Inc. I tested the HTC Touch Diamond, due out from Sprint (S) sometime this month for $250 (after a $100 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract.

Taiwan-based HTC started out in 1998 as a maker and designer of mobile devices for other companies. A year ago, HTC launched the first device under its own name in the U.S., and now, Sprint, AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (DT) sell HTC-branded devices. The Diamond incorporates HTC software, as well as software from Sprint, MobiTV, TeleNav and others. But it isn’t a stretch to imagine HTC trying to create a fully end-to-end model (hardware and all software) in the future.

The Diamond has a touch screen, but it’s smaller than Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — 2.8 versus 3.5 inches. This screen lacks the iPhone’s multitouch functionality, and its smaller size robs space used for touch gestures like flicking or scrolling with a finger. Yet like the iPhone, it relies solely on an on-screen keyboard for all text entries. Even with the Diamond’s stylus, the keyboard felt small and cramped. Using just your fingertips was next to impossible.

After using the Diamond for a week, I can say that despite its handsome TouchFLO 3D software and animated icons like photos that flip from one to the next with a flick of finger, this device failed to disguise the frustrating interface of Windows Mobile often enough for my taste.

It reminded me of the brown paper bag book covers my Dad helped me make for schoolbooks when I was a kid: They looked great on the outside, felt sturdy and clean and created a blank canvas for homemade doodles that were often more interesting to me than the books they covered. But my book covers couldn’t change what was underneath; pages of frustrating algebra were just a flip away.

HTC’s sleek software tries to hide Windows Mobile, but menus from the Microsoft operating system are constantly popping up. HTC’s email program, for example, is represented by an animated envelope icon that, when selected, cleverly flips twice before sliding an email message half-way out and giving you a three-line peek at what’s inside. If only reading and responding to email were half as entertaining. Selecting the animated envelope opens the old, cumbersome Windows Mobile email program.

Also, the touch capabilities of the Diamond’s screen didn’t work as well as they should. Finger flicks that should have scrolled through lists instead seemed to select individual items in a list, as if they were sticky.

The Diamond isn’t all bad, of course. Plenty of people will like its smaller size because the iPhone and RIM’s (RIM) BlackBerrys seem too large and brick-like to hold up to an ear for phone calls. Next to my BlackBerry Curve, the Diamond was of comparable thickness but measured smaller in width and length.

Despite its size, the Diamond is packed with features. It has a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus that doubles as a camcorder, and comes with four gigabytes of internal memory and a removable battery. I taped short videos — something the iPhone can’t do — and found the sound and video footage to be adequate.

HTC touts the Diamond’s browser, which is based on the Opera browsing engine but is designed for HTC. It opens Web pages in views that fit the screen and text is automatically resized as users zoom in or out, though this resizing was sometimes slow.

Unlike the iPhone, Web sites that are opened on the Diamond’s browser don’t resemble the actual site as you would see it on your computer. I opened CNN.com (TWX) and WSJ.com (NWS), two sites that are packed with text and graphics on a regular browser. On the Diamond, they quickly were rendered in list format with mostly text-only. I easily touched the screen to follow links to full stories.

Like the iPhone, the Diamond has an accelerometer, though it’s called the “G-Sensor.” When it worked, this feature flipped the screen to match the horizontal or vertical direction in which the device was being held. Photos flipped instantly, but the Diamond’s G-Sensor took almost three full seconds to respond as I flipped from vertical to horizontal while using the browser. And some Web sites didn’t respond to the G-Sensor flips at all.

A special YouTube application developed by HTC was easy to find on the device and worked quickly. My videos were organized into categories for All, History, Bookmarks and Search, though this last category required using the finger-fumbling keyboard. In one step, I emailed a link from a YouTube video to a friend using the device, with a still shot from the video included in the message.

Overall navigation on the Diamond isn’t as intuitive as on the iPhone or iPod Touch, nor was it as easy as on a touch-screen Windows Mobile device running the Kinoma Play application. The iPhone and iPod Touch use quick double-taps on touch screens to zoom in or out, and multitouch capabilities resize images with pinching gestures; Kinoma Play uses a long touch to zoom in. The Diamond used double tapping on some screens, but not enough for me to grow comfortably reliant on it. A small, circular pad beneath the device’s touch screen provided a more dependable method for zooming in or out of screens: tracing the perimeter of this circle clockwise with a finger zoomed in; counterclockwise zoomed out.

The HTC’s software animation is put to good use on its Weather screen. Here, animated illustrations of each day’s weather appear on the screen: suns spin, clouds move in, rain appears to fall. Even moons appear on the device at night to accurately reflect the weather in a city at a specific time.

It is exciting to think about other mobile-phone companies giving better software a real try, especially those that attempt to improve Windows Mobile. But HTC’s Touch Diamond doesn’t hide the outdated operating system well enough or often enough for a user to want to buy a whole new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

MarketWatch Video: Steve Jobs Unveils Apple's 3G iPhone

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:31:57 +0000

Here’s the classic stylings of Apple’s Steve Jobs, showing off the iPhone 3G, from the keynote today at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Yes, those are actual oohs and ahs from the audience, which includes a massive passel of press, as if Jobs was showing them the secret to eternal happiness (which is, by the way, not a new iPhone, but a dozen tasty donuts).

Here’s the video from MarketWatch on WSJ.com:

Microsoft Surface Surfaces at AT&T Stores

Kara Swisher — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:05:46 +0000

Don’t miss this video below from WSJ.com last week about AT&T (T) stores using Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface table-sized touch computer to help customers, which is one of the first commercial applications of the device.

Surface actually got a demo at our D5 conference last May, but BoomTown has been partial to this very funny video spoof on the “big-assed table”:

Hey, We Like Our Soothing Marimba Intro Riff!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:23:50 +0000

I meant to get this very funny video about the Web sites of financial publications–from Current TV, by Viral Video Film School–posted sooner, as it made me spit up my coffee several times.

The shaggy Brett Erlich perfectly reviews the sites for the Web 2.0 crowd, making fun of WSJ.com’s soothing video intro music, and the online video stars on Forbes and Fortune (one of whom, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer is an old classmate of mine, in fact).

The best bit is his take on the “Information Highway Traffic Jam” at the end among all us MSM types, driving like teens gone wild on the digital freeway.

Here’s the video: