All Things Digital

Today, Mike Homer, as well as many others suffering from incurable degenerative brain disease and dementias, will get a new video-sharing channel on YouTube (GOOG), along with a Web site and an interactive widget.

Last year, BoomTown wrote about the struggle of Homer, the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur (pictured here; I met him in the mid-1990s, when he was an exec at Netscape).

Unfortunately, Homer continues to suffer from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), for which he is under treatment at the University of California at San Francisco.

“The Fight for Mike” has raised $7 million for CJD at UCSF, where Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner–who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering the prion protein that causes CJD–is working on a major project aimed at defeating neurodegenerative diseases.

Now comes a unique collaboration between YouTube and the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, organized by two well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Ron Conway and Bill Campbell, with the help of YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley.

Conway and Campbell, along with the Homer family, have led the efforts to help find a cure for Homer.

Naturally, given Homer’s background, a digital initiative was inevitable.

Thus, the new project is the kick-off of the Memory and Aging Center’s “Defeat Dementia” campaign at UCSF, which is trying to use the Web and other digital technologies to help find new ways to get information out about public health issues.

Along with CJD, the YouTube effort will also focus on Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Parkinson’s, ALS and Alzheimer’s and try to engage the public and the medical community in a search for the causes and cures of these debilitating neurodegenerative conditions.

On the channel: videos of clinical-researchers and physicians discussing characteristics of the diseases; personal stories of patients and family members; and videos featuring advice and coping strategies from health-care professionals.

There is also now a Defeat Dementia Facebook group on the topic, and UCSF also has a partnership with Veodia.

Here is a video I did with Conway this week about the effort:

Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.

They include a stop at angel investor Ron Conway’s Pacific Heights (San Francisco) apartment, where we talked to Ron, entertainer and entrepreneur MC Hammer, blogger Om Malik and The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney.

Then, a visit to investor Ram Shriram’s home in Woodside, Calif., where VC James Joaquin and YouTube’s Chad Hurley are harangued by our Flip camera.

And also, a sojourn at the downtown San Francisco abode of Google’s Marissa Mayer, where we interfaced with her, as well as Google’s Sergey Brin, WSJ’s Rob Guth and, yes, someone we can only call Hot Santa.

No surprise, but BoomTown just could not resist that one.

Here’s the video:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Last night, Walt Mossberg and I co-hosted our annual holiday gadget fest for the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.

Now in its fifth year, it was called “Making a List: The Fifth Annual What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” and took place in Palo Alto, Calif. Our guest were Marissa Mayer of Google and tech consultant Greg Harper.

Walt and I typically show off several devices we think are interesting and try to identify some important trends.

Here’s a video of Walt, Greg and Marissa at the event:

(I still am having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded the video to YouTube.)

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At the end of the night of the first day of the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace threw a party at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, where the No. 1 social-networking site showed off its Beverly Hills style and planted a flag (in the form of a new office about to open in the city soon) to counter Facebook’s much-hyped popularity with Silicon Valley types.

It was quite a fancy shindig, with more Web kingpins than you can shake a third-party app at, including YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley, News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch (owner of MySpace), VC Ron Conway and, of course, a clutch of Facebook execs (who are deep in negotiations over new funding and deals, but managed to travel an hour north for a free drink).

Here’s the video:

Here is the parody video used to introduce YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen at D5.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).

While they might seem a tad laid back in this video, the founders of YouTube–Chad Hurley and Steve Chen–are definitely on the hot seat for sure this year.

While it is always nice to get a $1.6 billion payout for a company started only recently, as the explosive online video service did from Google, the future direction of the company is still uncertain.

Besides the $1 billion lawsuit being waged by media giant Viacom over alleged copyright infringement by YouTube, it must come up with a way to help prevent such illegal copying and also a lucrative way to serve ads.

Naturally, Walt prods the pair of founders on these and other issues.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

Here are Hurley and Chen:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).

I will admit it–I thought Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman would go over like a lead balloon with the D5 audience, given the media giant had just sued Google–the digital arena’s biggest power of late–for $1 billion for alleged copyright violations at its YouTube subsidiary.

While not everyone in the tech space is cheering for the search giant, no one likes the litigious tactics of the old-media entertainment industry either, which have in the past–witness the music industry versus Napster–centered on deploying legions of lawyers rather than finding ways to cope with digital realities.

But I thought Dauman, who was sandwiched between YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, made cogent arguments for his side (he is, after all, a lawyer by training, too), making the case for the need to stand up to the stealing of content online. At the same time, he also seemed ready to deal with the changes wrought by new technologies on Viacom’s business.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview from the conference.

Today, we’re showcasing Dauman. As I said, a fine performance, helped too by a very funny intro video by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central, made especially for D5.

Both are below:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).

I will refrain from making may-the-force-be-with- you puns here, except to say famed film director George Lucas has some pretty powerful things to say, as you will see in the video below.

D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Everyday, I am going to highlight a different interview from the conference. And, today, we bring you George Lucas, who describes Internet sites like YouTube as a circus (and not in a good way) and compared its content to throwing a puppy on a highway.

(Better still, Lucas had spent the night before at the opening party slapping around YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, which they seemed to enjoy coming from their icon.)

We also liked his advice to hedge-fund guys investing in Hollywood: “The last thing you want to do is invest in the film business. The hedge-fund guys want to, but they just want the producer credits and the girls. And there are cheaper ways of getting both.”

And there are also some very cool demos from Lucasfilm and his video game unit.

Here it is:

Starting Monday, we’ll be posting all of the interviews from D5 in their entirety. I will be posting and commenting on each interview here in this blog, but the videos will also reside in our video player.

While we have already posted the joint interview of Microsoft’s Bill Gates-Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as a solo turn by Jobs and also one with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now you can watch lively discussions with film legend George Lucas, YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Viacom chief Philippe Dauman and many more, as well as seeing our demos and other special video.

And you had no idea what you were going to watch in the midst of the summer doldrums. Now, let Cisco’s John Chambers liven up your day!

Another week, another legal battle for YouTube.

This time, the National Music Publishers Association is adding its name to an existing lawsuit over whether the video-sharing site–big surprise–violated copyright laws. The group owns copyrights to lyrics and melodies for songs, rather than the songs themselves, which are mostly owned by record labels.

And while the four big labels have struck their Faustian bargain with YouTube, betting perhaps that ad dollars are their future and convinced of the need for the marketing power on YouTube, the NMPA is not buying that story quite yet.

Naturally, Google, owner of YouTube, can’t believe anyone would refuse its kind offers of promotional help in exchange for putting up with some intellectual-property infringement.

You can just hear those techies from their nerd version of Willy Wonka’s factory in Mountain View, Calif.: Can you imagine, those ingrates–can’t they understand our big brains will get to their puny concerns when we are good and ready!

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our show. Walt and I certainly did, and I think we both felt it was our best D thus far.

And that’s without what was clearly the blockbuster joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple, which got a mountain of attention, as it deserves for both its historic implications (the two icons of tech in a rare analog appearance together) and its sheer drama (PC guy meets Mac guy, except in real life!).

While it was not the WrestleMania some would have preferred, I thought it was riveting to see two people with very little left to prove about anything in their professional careers and who will be in the history books willing to go out on a bit of a limb and talk from a more personal place.

In addition, watching these longtime rivals and also collaborators kibitz about their tech-war stories, each correcting the other’s memories, was really interesting. Here is a great comic strip from the Joy of Tech Web site about the interview that says it all.

But outside of the glare of the pairing, there were a lot of highlights and insights I gleaned from the other onstage interviews.

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We’re all in Carlsbad, Calif., now, getting ready for our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, which will begin tomorrow night.

So here’s one of my movies to show you how we prepare for the annual conference, which is highlighted this year by a joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, the twin icons of the tech industry.

We’ll kick off the conference tomorrow night with an interview with Sen. John McCain, who is in the race to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. We will talk to him about that, as well as the war in Iraq, but also hope to discuss a plethora of digital issues with him. McCain is one of the few politicians who knows a thing or two about the media, telecom and Web sectors.

Other interviewees on Wednesday and Thursday include: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; CBS CEO Les Moonves; News Corp. President Peter Chernin; Cisco CEO John Chambers; former AOL CEO Steve Case, who will talk about his new company, Revolution; famed director and producer George Lucas; Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley; Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom; and space tourist (and former Microsoft exec) Charles Simonyi.

We’ll also have demos from tech players like Palm legend Jeff Hawkins and others. And we are also excited to have singer/songwriter Jill Sobule, who will perform several times throughout.

We’ll have full coverage of D5 on our site, starting tomorrow night, including liveblogging by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, pictures, video excerpts and more.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).

Of course, Washington politicians–most of whom never met a camera they did not mug for–are concerned with the future of video, especially as it leaps increasingly to the Web. With potential for access to even bigger audiences and, more importantly, for upsetting the order of the universe (where, since the Nixon-Kennedy debates, television has reigned unchallenged from a political point of view), it’s a natural topic for a congressional hearing.

And so it was late last week, when big-tech poster boys–including YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley and always voluble entrepreneur Mark Cuban, now of HDNet–appeared before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. Both discussed the impact of Web video on the watching public.

The self-effacing Hurley, no surprise, said YouTube was no TV-killer, and, in fact, was a different beast altogether with its short-form offerings. In addition, as YouTube execs keep repeating in the vain hope that it might make the $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom disappear, he also stressed that YouTube and its ilk were actually helpful in getting the word out about existing programming on television.

Is it just me, or do such reassurances feel like that famous “Twilight Zone” episode, “To Serve Man,” when the aliens who seemingly came in peace to help mankind were actually chefs looking for new ingredients (”It’s a cookbook!”)?

Speaking of surprises, Cuban actually did not use the opportunity to question YouTube’s valuation, prospects or strategies, as he did in a recent post on his blog called, of course, Blog Maverick.

But, being Cuban, he did swat at the state of broadband access–specifically, its glacial speed compared to most countries (the U.S. actually lags behind Luxembourg in this regard). Pointing to bandwidth constraints, Cuban was entirely right when he said that it would be a long time before Internet video was ever a threat to television, noting it was a more of a complementary sidelight.

Of course, that’s just what a hungry alien would say.

Here’s Hurley:

Here’s Cuban:

So Carson Daly, of all people, turns out to be an unlikely geek–but he sounded pretty sharp onstage interviewing a clutch of tech figures last night at the opening of AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, the Tony Perkins-led event being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood through tomorrow.

The late-night television host is involved with Demand Media, the user publishing-and-content platform, in its new .tv initiatives, and he talked about the state of the video market with Demand’s CEO Richard Rosenblatt, MP3tunes CEO Michael Robertson, Sling Media head Blake Krikorian and YouTube Co-Founder and CEO Chad Hurley.

Their chat was mostly about the massive impact video is making and will continue to make in the coming year, especially related to giving consumers a lot of leeway and control via tech tools. “You have to give [users] everything they want, anywhere they want,” said Robertson. “… But just because everyone has a Webcam, it does not mean it will result in good content.”

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