BoomTown could not resist posting this photo for posterity’s sake, taken by All Things Digital Webmaster and master photog Adam Tow.
It pictures a quartet of the tech media’s heavy hitters, all attending at the Apple event in San Francisco today.
Last night, “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” aired a piece on “how technology companies are innovating amid the recession by designing popular new smart phone applications.”
BoomTown was to talk about how perhaps not all of the 65,000 apps being created by legions of third-party developers for the Apple iPhone will result in gold, diamonds and unicorns raining down on entrepreneurs.
Oddly enough, I somehow went all Jules Verne at the end and started talking about screens on coffee tables, so I am obviously just as bad.
Longtime Internet entrepreneur Al Warms paid a visit to BoomTown HQ today to show off a new company he has founded called Appolicious.
That is the unusual name Warms–who sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007–has given to a start-up aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the Apple iPhone mobile apps market.
The site is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the app galaxy in the universe of smart phones.
From vacation, that is–an activity that I highly recommend (and getting toasted at Burning Man this week does not count, although that is also apparently highly recommended in order to endure that digital dustfest).
In any case, we begin Yahoo memo-bombing in five minutes.
That is all.
Starting today and through next week, BoomTown is headed south down California’s lovely Highway 1 for as much of a vacation as I can possibly take.
Which is to say, just a week off from posting.
In other words: Partovis, Wenda, Owen, play nice! Yahoos, please hold your internal memos. And I hope Apple’s tablet is not delivered from on high this week while I relax beachside (it won’t be).
This week, BoomTown decided to mash up two different and interesting surveys, both from comScore, about the search market.
When you do this, you find that while the new Bing search engine from Microsoft is showing some impressive growth–up a half-point in July from June to an 8.9 percent share–the software giant still has a long way to go to get some true love from the consumers.
Obsessive love, actually.
As a new weekly feature, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs about tech to send them to me pronto.
I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. A closet pie-charter.
(I also love pie.)
Thus, here are a few comparing some stats about development for the iPhone from Apple and the Android from Google, from Flurry Analytics.
Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.
The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.
Here are some video clips of the event and more.
Yes, that’s Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in shorts, knees and all, in a picture taken right “after signing the papers” to acquire FriendFeed for $50 million. The deal was announced today.
One of FriendFeed’s founders, Paul Buchheit, posted them on his account at the online content-sharing site.
They look like they were taken at night in someone’s driveway in Silicon Valley (nice fence!).
BoomTown has already gotten some very good submissions from readers for a contest to come up with a good moniker for the tablet device Apple is allegedly working on.
In a post earlier today, some of my ideas included: iTablet, iPad, iAmnotanetbook and iAmakindlekiller.
And here are some of the user-generated ideas, via Twitter mostly, and my Paula Abdul-inspired comments in reaction to them.
Despite the spate of recent rants about all that’s wrong with Apple, the pendulum will swing once again, and soon, once the drumbeat gets even louder for the new digital tablet that is slated to be delivered from on high sometime this fall by–in the most likely and juicily dramatic scenario–CEO Steve Jobs.
So, I suggest we move on from the dead-horse issue of the Google Voice app and other sleepy debates to more enjoyable late-August frivolities.
Like trying to guess the name that Jobs will ultimately bestow on the new device. BoomTown will start…
Today, Microsoft tweeted a photo of the wall in front of one of its upcoming retail stores, either in Scottsdale, Ariz., or Mission Viejo, Calif.
Although it is not clear which location it is–frankly, those mall potted plants could be just about anywhere–I am guessing some Foot Locker is right around the corner and an Outback Steakhouse is not far either.
This does not bode well, especially if Microsoft is hoping to one-up the sleek and hip Apple store vibe.
In fact, that’s where BoomTown is off to now, to get an early place in line for an iTablet.
BoomTown is certainly going to be one of the many-so-many who will immediately fork over whatever it takes to get my mitts on the upcoming tablet device from Apple.
And that’s why, according to a new report from Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster–who is monk-like in his devotion to writing down every scrap he can about whatever Apple HQ in Cupertino, Calif., deigns to release–it’s going to be raining money down on the company, just like manna from heaven.
While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.
It included Bach playing ball with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, controllerless Project Natal and Mundie introducing a very creepy digital assistant with more than a passing resemblance to HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
First up at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting today, as you might imagine, is CEO Steve Ballmer, who is as bouncy and braggy as I have ever seen him, probably because he is fresh from getting his mitts on a long-sought-after prize–the search business of Yahoo.
But, while Wall Street thinks Microsoft made out well in the deal, the opinion about Yahoo’s side of the deal has been not so positive, with its shares down another five percent today already, after plummeting 12 percent yesterday.
Thus, Ballmer to the rescue!
“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” said Ballmer. “It’s sort of, like, unbelievable.”
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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