All Things Digital

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted our speaker list for the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital, which will take place in a few weeks–May 27 to 29, to be exact–in Carlsbad, Calif.

The annual gathering of tech and media luminaries was created and is run by my partner Walt Mossberg and me.

D6 tech and media speakers include: Microsoft Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT); News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch; Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX); Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Michael Dell of Dell Computer (DELL); IAC’s (IACI) Barry Diller; Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos; Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE); and TiVo’s (TIVO) Tom Rogers.

Also: Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters (TRI); Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation; FCC Chairman Kevin Martin; Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ); Activision’s (ATVI) Robert Kotick; and former Microsoft tech guru Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures.

Just recently, we added Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder of Yahoo (YHOO), and now he is being joined onstage at the conference by Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured here in a lovely Wall Street Journal dot-drawing).

The pairing should make for a lively session, given all the heat around Yahoo of late, largely related to the scuttled attempt by Microsoft to buy the company.

What would you like to know about that and anything else about Yahoo?

As it so happens, you can ask!

While the conference is sold out, you can submit questions that you would like answered to Yang and Decker or any of the speakers via text or video. Walt and I will pick the best ones and let loose.

Ask early and often here!

In addition, the whole conference will be online at AllThingsD during the conference, via live blogs and reports of breaking news (and there will be breaking news, as there always is), along with video highlights.

And videos of all the interviews will be posted soon after it is over.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT). News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch. Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX). Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang.

All of them engaged in roiling Internet deal-making of late and all of them in just three weeks on the same stage–but not, thankfully, at the same time, or we’d need a professional negotiator–at the 6th D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

The annual gathering of tech and media luminaries was created and is run by my amazing partner Walt Mossberg and me (see us here at D5) and will take place May 27 to 29.

The conference, as we describe it on our Web site, is “unlike any other executive conference.” What we mean by that is that we try to determine the next direction of the digital revolution via unscripted and informal, but pointed, conversations about the impact of digital technology with industry leaders.

In other words, Walt and I needling at the major players of the digital sector, until they give up the good stuff.

The other digital and media leaders coming? That would be: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Michael Dell of Dell Computer (DELL); IAC’s (IACI) Barry Diller; Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos; Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE); and TiVo’s (TIVO) Tom Rogers.

Also: Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters (TRI); Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation; FCC Chairman Kevin Martin; Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ); Activision’s (ATVI) Robert Kotick; and former Microsoft tech guru and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures.

To say our timing is impeccably planned would be undeserved–we had no idea so much news related to all these companies and their leaders would break out, from the tough economy to takeover battles to court face-offs to mergers to trying to create a whole new way of reading.

Also, there will be some–as yet under wraps–amazing demos onstage too.

While the analog conference has been sold out for many months, the action will be on the AllThingsD.com site throughout the conference with round-the-clock live blogging by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, as well as video highlights from stage.

In addition, we’ll be pointing all over the Web to important tech and media news that breaks at D6.

And we will also stream the entire conference in the weeks after the conference takes place, so ATD’s audience can experience the whole thing, even if they cannot all attend.

But anyone’s questions can be there, though–this year, you can submit questions to any of the speakers via text or video that you would like answered. Walt and I will pick the best ones and let loose. Ask early and often here!

Walt and I are very excited for D6, even after last year, when we brought together industry legends Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, for an historic joint interview.

At the time, Walt and I joked that we would not be able to top that amazing event (the video of the entire interview is below).

That interview was nearly unbeatable, but we also think that with the top-level interviewees we have assembled for D6, that it is game on.

Until then, here’s the Gates/Jobs video from D5:

“Demo needs to die,” said TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington yesterday.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. Not more bloody tangoing!?!

The pugnacious tech blogger–who was last seen slapping around other tech bloggers who deigned to also raise money for their ventures, much as he has been doing–made this classy statement in an interview with Daniel Terdiman of CNET’s Geek Gestalt yesterday, about scheduling his TechCrunch 50 conference at the same time as the fall conference of the longtime leader in the start-up conference space, Demo, run by Chris Shipley.

(Shipley’s response is here.)

DemoFall is September 7th to the 9th, while TC 50 is September 8th through 10th.

“It’s just an old-school model,” continued Arrington to Terdiman. “It clearly involves pay to play, and what we’re offering is better.”

Not satisfied to just schedule his event at the same time as Demo–which is fine, I guess, given this is America and we all have the right to be aggressively, and even pointlessly, competitive–the second shot is at the $18,500 fee that Demo demonstrators pay, once they get invited to that conference.

TC 50 does not charge, which, to be fair, would be my choice too.

Still, given his inaugural TC 40 conference sold out and was, said Arrington to Geek Gestalt, profitable, the channeling of the Corleone Family in the online tech space seems a bit much to me.

After all, despite the fact that Arrington recently characterized tech blog sites as competing gangs (”You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking–by linking early and linking often–if they can join the big Gang.”), let’s be honest.

The whole group of us together would lose badly in a fair fight with my son’s kindergarten class.

Of course, they bite. We should know better.

(Full disclosure: Walt Mossberg and I have been running a conference, called D: All Things Digital, for many years. D6 is in late May and is sold out. Nonetheless, full coverage of the event and also full video of the interviews with tech and media players on stage–including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bewkes, Howard Stringer, Mark Zuckerberg and many others–will be on this site. We also do a few demos, so until then, we fervently hope to find no horse heads in our beds.)

Yesterday, I was a judge on a three-person panel at the Under the Radar: The Business of Web Apps conference, held at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Mountain View, Calif., campus in Silicon Valley.

The event, sponsored by Dealmaker Media, was a very good version of many such conferences held often around the region, where start-ups come to show themselves off in what amounts to a geek version of “American Idol.” There were just over 30 companies there yesterday.

In other words, entrepreneurs come to make a PowerPoint pitch before the panel and the audience and then we get to ask questions and make comments, a la Simon Cowell.

(I tried to channel Paula Abdul, but 10:45 a.m. is much too early to start drinking–um, it’s just Diet Coke!–for me!)

The companies I judged–with Stephen Stribley of Microsoft Office-Live and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ Prashant Shah–were in a category called “Manage Up.”

That meant they were all essentially in the enterprise-software-as-a-service arena that has gotten–and will get–increasingly hot.

The group I judged included: Act-On Software (an on-demand Internet communication and collaboration service), Magento (an open-source e-commerce), Mumboe (an online document-management service), and NetBooks (a Web-based business-management system).

All were interesting and promising, although all had issues, from security to marketing challenges to, of course, bigger competitors.

I did a video of snippets of the presentations of all four in a row, starting with Act-On, as well as a little interview with one of my favorite VCs–but only because he is funny–Mitch Kertzman of Hummer Winblad. He was there to support several of his investments, including SlideRocket (an Internet presentation application).

Here’s the video:

My head hurts from a full day of geeky wonkery in San Diego, at O’Reilly Media’s overlapping conferences, Graphing Social Patterns West and its ETech or Emerging Technology Conference.

The pair of conferences are slightly different, although both cover what most conferences cover–the Next Big Thing.

GPS, of course, drills in on the business and technology of social-networking platforms, which has been the most hyped arena of the last year, as its proponents push the idea that everything in computing is going social.

I agree with the larger picture, of course. But I also remain dubious about the insane valuations that persist in the sector, which go hand in glove with the fact that business models remain in their infancy.

Still, it is interesting to debate important issues like widget development, data portability and changes in user engagement and consumer behavior.

By contrast, ETech, which takes place through tomorrow, is far less brass tacks, focusing on the kinds of technologies coming down the pike from hackers. That includes things like body, brain and genomics hacking, ambient data streaming, green tech, open source robots and bionic software.

Here’s a video I made Monday, which includes an interview with GPS West host Dave McClure, some clips from sessions and Tim O’Reilly’s opening speech for ETech:

How far ahead of the political curve is our D: All Things Digital conference?

So far that we put all those bendy-straws-in-the-wind television pundits to shame!

Case in point: At D4, we invited former Vice President Al Gore to come just before everyone decided he was the best thing since organic whole-wheat sliced bread.

And at D5, held last May, we invited Sen. John McCain of Arizona to talk about things like tech policy and Iraq, during a time when most had written him off in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Not so, it seems, after Comeback Jack’s big win in New Hampshire last night.

Given our powerful psychic political skills, we are keeping our next political selection sealed in a mayo jar in the back of ATD HQ.

But to see what McCain is all about, here’s an hour-plus interview with McCain by Walt Mossberg and me:

While we subjected our stalwart John Paczkowski of Digital Daily to the onerous and potentially mind-numbing task of live-blogging Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, BoomTown broke some news (on the Yahoo-Zimbra $350 million deal), wandered around and basically schmoozed.

In addition, cupcakes were had.

(The day also included a pricey payback lunch for a bet I lost about News Corp.’s acquisition of Dow Jones.)

Thus, here is my video on the event that featured tech start-ups, Web start-ups and–did we mention?–more tech and Web start-ups.

And, as usual, Scoble!

According to our video interview with Valleywag’s Owen Thomas that we posted last week, “money is the sex of Silicon Valley.”

If so, watch out for a new conference from blogger Paul Kedrosky (pictured here), planned for next year called Money:Tech.

Set to take place in February in New York (this dead-of-winter-and-thus-grimy-in-Manhattan prospect loses the conference immediate sexy points) and in partnership with longtime conference pro Tim O’Reilly, the event will focus on “near and dear to my heart: the confluence of money and technology (hence the name),” wrote Kedrosky on his also aptly named “Infectious Greed” site.

Also noted Kedrosky ominously:

Hedge funds, unbeknownst to most people, are actually now havens for geeks and software sorts, with all the consequences you might expect, from Moore’s Law’s power, to the potential for catastrophic system failures. … And what does that make hedge-fund managers? It makes them Wall Street’s hackers–technology-fueled usurpers of the financial status quo.”

Yipes, pretty scary, which is kind of sexy again!

In any case, our deeply unsexy D: All Things Digital (unless you consider a demo of Microsoft’s Surface coffee table enticing) welcomes Paul to the conference game.

BoomTown has long been a big fan of Martha Stewart.

And we like her 25% more now, after seeing the new pictures she took for Wired’s latest issue, as well as a particularly sassy interview she did with the magazine.

The homemaking empress is on the cover of Wired, pictured here making a Wii-shaped cake. It looks delicious, but apparently is not from these recipe instructions that leave out the baking soda for architectural reasons.

And another picture here by Jill Greenberg has her pruning a robot hedge, along with this interview with Mark Frauenfelder on her gadget-freak status.

That’s been easy to see for many years. I ran into her first more than a decade ago at a Microsoft party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and she has shown up at a variety of Silicon Valley events from time to time.

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Here is the fourth video about the possibility of launching an international version of our D: All Things Digital Conference.

After visiting Dublin Castle and then perusing fancy hotels in the city of Dublin and then strolling the streets, Walt Mossberg and I head out to the Wicklow Mountains to see a bit of the lovely Irish countryside.

It’s the last stop on venue visits for us, to see a different kind of experience that is out of the city in a more rural setting. So we visited the construction site for a new Ritz-Carlton on the Powerscourt Estate, near the adorable village of Enniskerry, about 40 minutes south of Dublin.

Walt and I are here in Ireland, because our D conference might be going international.

After our success with our annual flagship version, which just took place for the fifth time in late May in Carlsbad, Calif. (D6 is scheduled be held in late May of 2008), we are deciding whether to expand by adding a new conference outside the U.S.

If we do it, we hope to hold the first one next fall and are strongly considering Dublin as the location of the event, which we are calling EuroD. We like Dublin for a lot of reasons, including its fast-growing tech sector.

Here’s the next video:

Here is the third video about the possibility of launching an international version of our D: All Things Digital Conference.

After visiting Dublin Castle and then the fancy hotels in the city of Dublin, Walt Mossberg and I take to the streets of the city to check out the scene and also sample the local fare.

Walt and I are here in Ireland, because our D conference might be going international.

After our success with our annual flagship version, which just took place for the fifth time in late May in Carlsbad, Calif. (D6 is scheduled be held in late May of 2008), we are deciding whether to expand by adding a new conference outside the U.S.

If we do it, we hope to hold the first one next fall and are strongly considering Dublin as the location of the event, which we are calling EuroD. We like Dublin for a lot of reasons, including its fast-growing tech sector.

Here’s the next video:

In our laborious quest to consider sites for an international version of our D: All Things Digital Conference, Walt Mossberg and I move from the historic environs of Dublin Castle (our visit there is chronicled here in text and video) to the fancy hotels in the city of Dublin.

So we sucked it up and headed to see the recently renovated and quite historic hotel, the Shelbourne, as well as the Four Seasons, where we are staying. (Our annual flagship D conference has been held for five years at the Four Seasons Aviara in Carlsbad, Calif., and will be again in late May of 2008.)

Both luxury hotels are obviously lovely, and present different experiences–one more urban and the other slightly out of the city center.

Walt and I are here in Ireland, because our D: All Things Digital conference might be going international.

After our success with our annual flagship D, which just took place for the fifth time in late May (D6 is scheduled be held in late May of 2008), we are deciding whether to expand by adding a new conference outside the U.S.

If we do it, we hope to hold the first one next fall and are strongly considering Dublin as the location of the event, which we are calling EuroD. We like Dublin for a lot of reasons, including its fast-growing tech sector.

So, here is our second video of our efforts to decide where to hold EuroD, if we end up doing it.

And, as at Dublin Castle, the venues are much fancier than we are:

So Walt Mossberg and I are here in Dublin, Ireland, and in my last post about our trip, I neglected to explain why:

Our D: All Things Digital conference might be going international.

We have had a lot of success with our annual flagship D, which just took place for the fifth time in late May in Carlsbad, Calif. (D6 is scheduled to be held in late May of 2008.)

This past year was particularly memorable, especially because of the joint interview Walt and I did with longtime rivals and tech legends, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of Microsoft (pictured here, but you can see the highlights video of the interview here).

Thus, we are on what you might call a fact-finding mission, to see if we should make the leap and expand our successful conference brand by adding a new conference with a focus outside the United States.

So, here’s a longish video, with others to follow, of our quest (along with D staffers Lia Lorenzano and Jill Pendergast) to decide on where we would hold EuroD.

First up, a visit to the historic Dublin Castle (circa 1204), where we might hold part of the event and where we are woefully outclassed by the tony surroundings:

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I went to a dinner last night hosted by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 Summit, and it was one of the more schmoozy events I have been to in a while.

The event–this year at Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco–is held to elicit feedback from the Internet’s movers and shakers about the new directions the conference, set to take place in San Francisco in mid-October, should head in.

Except Battelle and O’Reilly already came up with a theme: “The Web’s Edge.”

I am not entirely sure what that means. Is it that it is at an edge? Or that we need to look at the edge? Or just that things just feel all pointy lately? Big thoughts all!

In any case, the party was a lot of fun and filled with digital personalities, like Mitch Kapor and Ann Winblad, as well as a few folks I interviewed like ex-AOLer Jon Miller, ex-Fox exec Ross Levinsohn, VC David Sze, Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain.

Here’s the video: