All Things Digital

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”:

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:

Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.

Before I interviewed Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, the crowd at D5 got to see a very funny video Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert did as an intro for his boss, whom he dubbed the “Dough Man.”

The Dauman interview took place the morning of May 31, 2007 at D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference that Walt Mossberg and I host. The next conference takes place in late May 2008.

I dare you not to laugh when Colbert puts a piece of cable into a piece of cake and starts sucking.

Here’s the video:

Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.

Here’s the interview Walt Mossberg and I did at D5 with George Lucas.

In it, he describes Internet video-sharing sites like YouTube as a circus (and not in a good way) and compares the quality of its content to throwing “puppies on a highway.” And there are also some very cool demos from Lucasfilm and his video game unit.

The discussion took place the afternoon of May 30, 2007 at the fifth D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference that Walt and I host. The next conference takes place in late May 2008.

Here is the interview in its entirety:

Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.

To kick it off, here’s the interview Walt Mossberg and I did at D5 with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, a truly historic interview with the tech industry’s two main legends.

The discussion took place the evening of May 30, 2007 at D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference that Walt and I host. The next conference takes place in late May 2008.

We also made the popular interview with Gates and Jobs available for download on iTunes (where it is among the most popular video podcasts ever for download).

Here is the interview in its entirety:

And here is our highlight video of the interview, which is much shorter:

And here is the very funny historic prologue we played before Gates and Jobs came onstage:

News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin made a funny last week in a video interview on FT.com.

At first, it was all business when Chernin said while he had a “healthy” level of respect and paranoia for Facebook–which is the hot-on-its-heels-second social network breathing down the neck of News Corp.-owned MySpace–that in most countries MySpace continued to set the growth pace.

And then Chernin, who is quite a bit sassier in person, showed a little bit of that humor when he noted: “Assuming we’re [MySpace] worth significantly more than they are, I think they’re worth at least $15 billion.”

That’s right, MySpace, You’re No. 1 and don’t let that Harvard/Silicon Valley geek make that look like No. 23!

Sounds like Chernin has joined the Mark Zuckerberg School of Pick-a-Silly-Number-out-of-the-Air Mathematics Club, which we at BoomTown look upon with such respect!

OK, using that logic, let me sharpen up my pencil here and make an estimate of the worth of this News Corp.-owned site, AllThingsD.com.

Hmm. Hmmm. Throwing in a few free subscriptions to the print Wall Street Journal, a stale box of Walt Mossberg’s Cohibas and noodling over Henry Blodget’s latest riff on someone else’s asinine analysis that TechCrunch is worth $100 million, we are prepared to declare that ATD is worth $654 and some change John Paczkowski has in his pocket.

Why so low? You might say lack of self-esteem. We’d say it’s our lack of lack of shame.

In any case, if you want to hear him talk more, I got to interview Chernin at D5 this year, where we talked about MySpace and the social-networking business, as well as other issues like the then-still-undone deal to buy Dow Jones.

See here:

Can’t be in a multibillion negotiation with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer?

Well, you can see him in action–and in fine form–in this video of the interview he did at D5 this year with Walt Mossberg.

Here, Ballmer talks about a variety of things, such as how to foster innovation at a big company, Windows Vista, immigration, the brownness of the Zune, even as Walt forces him to say the word “Google.”

He also shows off Microsoft’s Surface table, which debuted at the conference. (Also check out the very funny Surface spoof below the Ballmer chat.)

Here are the videos:

Since you did not get to experience the stylings of Steve Jobs at your corporate confab, as the troops over at Yahoo did last Friday, BoomTown will be happy to provide you with the Apple icon unplugged.

Here is an interview he did at this year’s D5 conference in late May with Walt Mossberg:

And as a special added bonus, here’s a post of the historic joint interview Jobs did with Microsoft’s Bill Gates at the conference, too, with Walt and me.

In a you-hurt-my-feelings post on his blog earlier this week, entrepreneur Marc Canter (pictured here) turned my one little quip to his bellowing question at the recent iLike party into a huge deal about why he was not invited to the D: All Things Digital conference that I co-produce with Walt Mossberg.

At the party, Canter got up and asked a question (and it was a good one about developing iLike apps for platforms other than Facebook). It came in the middle of a very short speech iLike co-founder Ali Partovi was giving, essentially thanking everyone for coming, most especially Facebook, where the social music site has seen great growth.

Canter had every right to ask a question in his usual unique style (let’s just say he is not a shrinking violet).

To be fair, neither am I, so I think it fine that I said: Someone get out the Canter Taser! It was a joke, however funny you might find it or not.

But I did not say it because I thought he was being rude or because I thought he should not DARE (his caps in his post) to ask a question. He can dare and I don’t care.

Nonethless, Canter took the ball and barreled down the field at full bore, first by incorrectly saying I did not want him to ask the question:

“But I don’t play by those rules. So no wonder I don’t get invited to AllThngsD [sic]. And why Kara never videotapes me. Clearly I have nothing to say!,” he wrote. “Kara knows she can’t control me and that I don’t play by the ‘be nice to the VCs and high level execs and maybe they’ve invest in you’ rules.”

Here’s the problem: D is not an invitation-only event and never has been. Anyone can sign up for it, much like any other tech conference, as long as they buy a ticket.

But, since its inception, D quickly sells out, and we have a long, long wait list. And we can’t offer more seats because of restricted space in the hotel we throw the annual event in.

This a good problem to have, but it means not everyone can get a seat. The same is true for the huge amount of press and bloggers we let in for free–another long wait list.

That’s why we have posted the entire D5 conference–every interview and every demo–in its entirety on this site, located here. At the conference, we also immediately posted short highlight videos immediately after sessions were over. We also have much of the other four conferences there, too.

As to videotaping Canter–I would be happy to, so I would prefer he not make it up that I will not. I simply have not gotten to him. I think of Canter as an interesting figure in Silicon Valley and an important inventor.

So I urge him to contact me when he thinks I should be covering something. I won’t always cover it, but I will always listen to what he has to say.

Also, Canter might take a gander at the videos from all the D conferences I referenced above. While we might not pass Canter’s tough test, I think they are pretty good.

In addition, any reader of this blog will know that I have not been a wet noodle to either Facebook or Yahoo of late.

At end of his post, Canter noted: “I’m not interested in pre-canned, shilled company pitches.” Well, you can Taser me if I am lying, but neither am I.

On a lighter note, if you did not see it, here is the post and below is the video I did from the iLike party. By the way, Canter might notice I headlined the post, “iLike Kisses Up to [Facebook Founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg,” which is exactly the point he was making:

Charles Simonyi was out of this world onstage, literally.

The early top Microsoft exec, who more recently founded Intentional Software, boldly went where few had gone before, by taking a ride into space. As one of the first space tourists, he spent 11 days on board the International Space Station earlier this year.

Oh, also, good friend Martha Stewart was there to see him off (and also watched him at the conference).

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 live-blogged D5, and we 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 have been highlighting a different interview or demo from the conference and this is the final one, although all are still here for good for your perusal and enjoyment.

Here’s Simonyi:

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers came to talk about consumers, a shift from a company better known for selling the plumbing of the Internet rather than its bells and whistles.

With a number of consumer-facing acquisitions of late and the Web 2.0 buzzword on his lips, we talked about a range of things for the tech company, from social networking to online video to cable boxes.

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 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 live-blogged D5, and we 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’s Chambers:

Whatever his current chances to nab the Republican presidential nomination, you’ll want to see this video of our interview with Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

He talked a bit about tech, but the really riveting stuff is about Iraq and his controversial backing of keeping the U.S. presence there.

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 live-blogged D5, and we 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’s Sen. McCain:

Have you ever wanted to save that dumb dog-skateboarding video airing on YouTube to your own computer? That’s the premise and promise of RealPlayer 11, which RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser demoed onstage.

Using the software, you can download online videos from Web sites with one click, organize them and burn them to DVD and CD. Copyright issues are interesting here, of course, but Glaser said protected material would not be able to be sucked up by the technology. We’ll see.

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 live-blogged, and we 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’s the RealPlayer 11:

Sure, we’re not Laguna Beach and we’re not going to eat slimy bugs and we have no Tim Gunn and we’re definitely not going to do any ballroom dancing. (Well, maybe a waltz now and then.)

But I got such a good response to the movie I made about my home-based office for the AllThingsD.com site and also the D: All Things Digital conference (though I suspect it was the addition of singer Jill Sobule to the video that made it work), that I thought: Why not just egregiously take every aspect of our start-up experience and use it to feed the blog beast?

Oops, let me rephrase that more cogently: We’re experimenting with radical transparency here, showing you traditional media company types trying really hard to digitize their work and livelihoods and commit great journalism in the process.

We have already posted all the interviews and demos from D5 on the site, which I am highlighting daily, because we think–despite the conference being a tough ticket to get–that it’s important to deliver our content to as many people as possible and however they like it.

So we’re here on this site. And in email and RSS. And now on Facebook. And soon to be on iTunes and YouTube and who knows where else? Thank goodness we haven’t widgetized ourselves yet–like USA Today announced yesterday, but we’re open to all kinds of options.

Given that I wasn’t shooting video at nascent stages of the site or the conference–although I did several video posts behind the scenes at D5 in May that are also reposted below–I thought I would introduce you to the crew at our first annual D/ATD BBQ and Rodeo event.

Not much happens in this first episode, although you can meet the team D. But keep hoping for a future catfight between the Johns (Paczkowski and Sullivan) on our staff over email names or perhaps a major meltdown from Lia Lorenzano-Kennett over what kind of scones to serve at D6 breakfast or perhaps a staged smackdown between me and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas.

And maybe the creation of even some new forms of high-standards reporting and analysis will be depicted, delivered in innovative ways. We hope so.

Sorry if I get a bit too party-swirly with the shooting (vertigo anyone?), but I am testing out the new version of my tiny video camera. So hold on, it might be a bumpy ride!

Les Moonves is getting into the Internet in a big way, it seems, if you watch this onstage interview with the CBS CEO.

While it used to be that big old-media companies, including the powerful television networks, always seemed to display disdain for the online space, but these days they are talking it up like they invented it.

At the conference, in fact, Moonves unveiled CBS’s acquisition of Last.fm, the Internet social music platform, and spoke a lot about getting the company’s content everywhere.

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 live-blogged D5, and we 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 is Moonves: