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.

Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat’s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog.

Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and the huge crowd was partying like it was, well, 1999.

Shoulder to shoulder–or, in my puny case, shoulder to stomach–entrepreneurs, PR folks and a healthy smattering of press jammed into the venue, chattering about valuations, venture deals and other vacuous topics of Web 2.0.

Attendees included Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster, blogger Dan Gillmor and Microsoft-man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin (who gave us bupkis info about the deal, as you can see in the video).

Also in the video, in order, Meebo Co-Founder Seth Sternberg (fresh from a big funding); VentureBeat’s new editor of its digital media blog, Eric Eldon; Lewin; Gillmor; Valleywag’s Owen Thomas; and, finally, VentureBeat Editor and Founder Matt Marshall.

Who in the Internet sector hasn’t enjoyed the always amusing stylings of Mr. Ross Levinsohn, the high-profile former head of Fox Interactive Media a.k.a. “The Guy Who Bought MySpace for News Corp.”?

Today, he added another song to his silky smooth repertoire as the “Internet guy who dissed Yahoo.”

In a nice scoop, TechCrunch reported that Levinsohn was going to be a nominee to the board that Microsoft (MSFT) has been forming as part its potential proxy fight to take over Yahoo (YHOO).

That’s true, several sources have told me. Levinsohn, who was recruited by Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, has even filled out paperwork as part of the process.

And once the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed, that makes him the highest profile Internet figure on the board, which is made up of–let’s just say it, shall we?–pretty unimpressive former execs, none of whom has had any substantial Internet experience.

While many well-known Web figures were approached by Microsoft, few in Silicon Valley have been willing to be part of an effort to snuff out an independent Yahoo, one of its most important and iconic brands.

Not so the entrepreneurially inclined Levinsohn, apparently, who has a maverick nature.

He left FIM in 2006, for example, after deciding he wanted to be more than an overpaid employee of Rupert Murdoch and Peter Chernin.

Now, the Los Angeles-based Levinsohn runs an investment fund called Velocity Interactive Group with former AOL (TWX) head Jon Miller. Armed with $1.5 billion, the investment focus of the new enterprise will be on digital media and communications.

Given possible News Corp. (NWS) involvement as a possible partner in the Microsoft deal (more on that later), including a desire by Murdoch to spin MySpace into Yahoo, it’ll be interesting that Levinsohn might now have some power over his former bosses.

Or not. Most expect the board to be a rubber stamp for Microsoft, although several sources say those asked have been told that they can vote in the way they think is best for Yahoo.

Kind of like superdelegates! Except geekier!

Here is a video interview I did with Levinsohn in December of 2007, where he talks about the future of digital media on the Web, as the tech and entertainment industries and its many players seek to figure out how to make the painful digital shift and find new monetization plans that will replace crumbling old-media businesses.

At the end, months before Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo was launched, after I asked him what will be coming, the psychic Levinsohn eerily predicted: “Something happening with Yahoo, I think, this year.”

Something indeed.

Here is the video:

One of AllThingsD.com’s greatest friends–integral to its creation, in fact–has been Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and former president of the Dow Jones Consumer Media Group.

Crovitz knows a thing or two about the transition mainstream media has been making to new media and, more importantly, was never scared of the change. For us, that was critical, since he consistently said yes to our efforts to create a new kind of tech site within Dow Jones.

Tonight, he appears at a Churchill Club event called “Like It or Not, You’re in the Media Business: It’s Time to Make the Publishing Upheaval Work for You.”

Other speakers include: Neil Chase, VP of author services for Federated Media; Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst of Outsell Inc.; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco (CSCO). The event is moderated by Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

A description of the event: “Internet technology has made you a publisher. How can you turn that into a huge win for your career and your business? Well, first you might want to study what traditional publishers have learned, and what they’re doing to transform their business. After all, they ought to know. Then look at all the commercially successful bloggers: how did they do that? Then consider Cisco Systems, one of the world’s most successful tech vendors, and why it is now a successful publisher in its own right.”

It takes place tonight, starting at 6 p.m. for dinner, followed by the program at 7 p.m. at the San Mateo (Calif.) Marriott.

Best of all, friends of AllThingsD.com can save $15 off the general rate of $82 by using the discount code here when registering in advance. After inputting your name badge information, you will be shown a payment screen where you can input the discount code: gAllThingsD. If you encounter any difficulties in registering online, email your name, title and company to the Churchill Club at registration@churchillclub.org.

BoomTown video on this interesting topic to come, of course!

Was it just me or did you also get a bit of déjà vu upon reading a story today by the New York Times’s Laura M. Holson about yet another mash-up of a Hollywood talent agencies with Silicon Valley VCs.

That’s apparently what is happening with a new investment venture that includes the William Morris Agency, Accel Partners, Venrock and–filling out the unlikely foursome–AT&T (T), as a limited partner.

The focus of the investment fund will be to hand out cash–and, presumably, expertise–to digital media start-ups in Southern California.

While the Times drilled in on the presence of a big cellphone carrier–just the kind of company that my partner Walt Mossberg has dubbed one of the “Soviet ministries” for stifling innovation with overly controlling behavior in the mobile space–I am more focused on the rocky road of many such deals that have been struck in the past.

Now, I think all the players involved are very smart, including Accel’s Jim Breyer, Venrock’s David Siminoff and also William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt (as well as Morris’s Paul Bricault).

That said, a lot of sharpies have gotten sucked up in the past into the this-has-to-be-a-marriage-made-in-heaven dreams of the perfect Hollywood-Silicon Valley pairing.

Today, there are a number of interesting efforts, such as Comedy Central’s deal with the creators of “South Park” to create a joint-venture digital studio, as well as the better-known pairing of Sequoia Capital with the Will Ferrell-led Funny or Die comedy site (see my video interview with Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme about the site below).

And, of course, although nothing was actually settled, the recently ended writers’ strike was all about content revenues that might–or, perhaps more accurately, might not–be coming from digital sources in the future.

But if the past is prologue, this new group of investors might have to learn to be a bit patient.

Breyer acknowledges as much in the Times’s article. “There is always a fear, I know, that the bubble is about to burst when a parade of actors and actresses comes through my door,” he said, before noting, “this time the discussions are much more rational.”

I guess that is why the funding is in the tens of millions of dollars, the article noted, rather than the larger sums that have been spent in previous attempts to forge these kind of tech and entertainment alliances.

In fact, Holson herself penned a very good piece in 2002 about the failure of one much-touted experiment in such an integration–LivePlanet–between celebs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Redpoint Ventures.

That company was supposed to be a multimedia wunderkind, straddling the tech and media worlds with all sorts of gizmo-content wonders. One of its debut press releases in 2000 was, in fact, titled: “LivePlanet Unveils Integrated Media Concept–Entertainment Experiences that Span Traditional Media, New Media and the Physical World.”

Now, it is a shadow of that. According to a January article in Variety about the shuttering of its film unit, “LivePlanet evolved into a satellite company that [partner Sean] Bailey, Affleck and Damon would return to when not engaged in their own projects.”

In the 2002 piece, after a series of problems, including the bust of the dot-com bubble, Affleck himself got it dead right.

”If we stick around long enough and convince people we can do these things, we will matter in the new economy. I’d like to slip to the last page to see how it ends. But who knows.”

And, even six years later, who knows?

Here is the Kvamme video, in which he discusses Funny or Die:

And can they ever get along?

At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:

We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent some time with Google engineers. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. I don’t think [Semel] understood the engineers’ language, so he couldn’t challenge them. I suspect that’s one reason he didn’t last.”

Auletta is right, and it is an increasingly interesting issue as we move forward with the hyper-digitization of content.

While, for example, the use of online video increases exponentially, how big an audience can be created for any one property without the kind of intense programming and marketing that the entertainment industry is famous for?

On the other hand, is an increasingly massive reliance on e-metrics–the ability to minutely tell and even predict what an online audience wants by their clicking and being perfected by engineers at widget companies like Slide–the right direction?

I have no idea, but the delta is one that needs bridging.

When last we checked in with NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, he was merrily trashing Steve Jobs and Apple.

What a difference a three-month-long writers’ strike in Hollywood makes.

Yesterday, in an interview in the Financial Times, Zucker said: “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple,” he said. “We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”

Hmmmmm.

It was only at the end of last October when Zucker (pictured here) was slapping the digital media business, and especially Apple, in an interview with New Yorker writer Ken Auletta at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.

In it, Zucker blamed Apple for ruining the music business.

To be fair, Zucker did add “in terms of pricing” to the idea that Apple was the villain, noting that NBCU only had $15 million in revenue for its video fare on iTunes in its last year (a service it had just pulled off of to do its own thing).

He wanted NBCU to have the ability to raise prices on some shows it was selling to get better returns, even though Apple’s Steve Jobs has stuck to his guns on keeping pricing lower.

The entertainment industry, long used to controlling all the action, has long hated this, of course, since Apple’s iPod device has essentially been the only one widely embraced by consumers.

“We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side,” said Zucker, in what is admittedly a very good metaphor for the fast-changing situation for old media caught in the new media tsunami.

But then he stepped right into it by suggesting Apple should pay back media companies like his. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he said.

At the time, I noted: “That’s sort of like Britney Spears asking the tabloids to hand over a big bag of Benjamins for making such bank covering her riveting high jinks and crotch emergencies. Frankly, she has a better argument than Zucker.”

Nonetheless, NBC has been fast-forward on its efforts with its Hulu video sharing site, a joint venture with News Corp. (owner of this site).

And, quite correctly, in the FT piece, Zucker noted that the strike has spurred him to begin cutting back on some old television traditions, like the pilot season and the once-glamorous upfront presentations to impress advertisers.

“Things like that are all vestiges of an era that’s gone by and won’t return,” said Zucker. “I think there were a tremendous number of inefficiencies in Hollywood and it often takes a seismic event to change them, and I think that’s what’s happened here.”

Seismic, indeed.

So yesterday I posted my first of three ruminations of what the leap from old media to new media has taught me.

In it, I noted that “I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.”

And that, my friends, was a prime example of truthiness in action!

Nonetheless, the statement of that glaringly obvious fact caused a little bit of a stir around the Web, almost as if I was saying something amazingly freakish, such as: I have decided that forthwith I will bake my scribblings into delicious frosted donuts and readers can literally eat all my tasty bons mots up.

In fact, the shift I am making is perhaps one of the more normal and logical things I have done (which are acts you can count on one hand, in my case), essentially responding to a dramatic change in consumer habits by trying to provide the best offering I can in that new venue.

Which brings me to my next point about the nature of the blogosphere, which demands from its contributors a level of clarity and, dare I say, intimacy.

That is much easier to avoid in the print medium, where it is simple to distance yourself from readers and rely on on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand back and forth that leaves them with little idea of what is actually going on.

Of course, the best of journalists don’t do this–their prose is as clear as a pane of newly washed glass, through which one can see everything, even as they maintain a level of fairness and accuracy that is always required.

But I have found writing a blog that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.

Of course, that can often result in blabby and flabby online writing that comments and reacts and has no underpinnings of actual reporting and is too often simply untrue.

That was a common complaint in the early days of blogging from mainstream journalists. Of course, many of them had made their fair share of mistakes too, but they correctly felt that the Web was lacking in the kind of checks and balances that would temper this problem.

At the time, I thought that was mostly the case. But I also believed blogs would inevitably get better and better, adding on the kinds of standards and practices that are important for credibility and then combining them with the valuable immediacy of the Web, its sassy energy and, perhaps most importantly, its proclivity to tell it like it is.

Thus, while being a columnist offline or online definitely gives me more latitude, I can now offer scoops and news along with analysis and observation in what I think is a much more useful combination.

That’s what I have been trying to do, for example, in my coverage of Web companies like Facebook and Yahoo, where I break news often, as well as begin conversations about everything from their valuation to strategy or lack thereof.

And, in the Web’s ability to offer instant video, I have found it even more helpful and relevant to take the audience where I go too.

While some might not like the rawness of this approach, I feel it offers a much clearer perspective and gives people more of an ability to make their own judgments on what I am showing them.

This more transparent approach that blogging at its best can offer is not a mind-blowingly new concept, but it is a key one going forward.

When it all works right, it results in a virtuous circle of information that is created between professionals and nonprofessionals and, hopefully, where a new level of respect and credibility is achieved.

And, if that doesn’t work, there is always the donut option.

As the new year begins, it’s probably past time to assess what the jump from old media to new media has taught me.

I know what it sounds like–old lady print reporter starts a gen-you-wine blog and goes all gaga about new media or else makes a tsk-tsk list of what needs to change to make blogs as good as mainstream media.

Well, I will try my very hardest not be too navel-gazing in a series of three posts I will make this week about the key things I have learned so far.

Thus, as they say in one of mainstream journalism’s favorite cliches–let’s not bury the lede:

First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.

Read more »

On our recent trip to sunny Southern California, we had a lively lunch in Brentwood with the ever-sassy Ross Levinsohn.

In the dullish panoply of Internet moguls, Levinsohn stands out as one of the more colorful characters, no small thing since he comes from a big company, News Corp. (owner of this site), where he played a big part in its on-the-cheap MySpace acquisition in 2005.

But big company no longer for Levinsohn!

Just before the holidays and four months after launching their digital media roll-up firm Velocity Investment Group with private equity firm General Atlantic, the former Fox Interactive Media president and his partner, former AOL head Jon Miller, announced a new and improved deal.

This time, it was a merger with ComVentures with its $1.5 billion in assets (with more fund raising to come) and a new name, Velocity Interactive Group. The investment focus of the new enterprise will be on digital media and communications.

Here’s Levinsohn talking about all that and more (excuse the noisy ladies about three minutes in):

Read more »

BoomTown was the opening keynote for SDForum’s conference in Silicon Valley last week called “The Business of New Media II,” which was about–well–the business of new media.

Here is the speech I gave, in which I discuss everything from how this AllThingsD.com site was created to the financial prospects of Facebook to how Marie Osmond was robbed on “Dancing With the Stars.” (And she was, my friends, she was!)

It’s in two parts, which should be plenty of material to bore just about anyone except my mother:

Part 1:

Part 2:

If you are a glutton for punishment, here is the entire video from the Public Relations Society of America’s Silicon Valley chapter’s annual “Media Influencer” dinner, held at the Computer History Museum last week.

BoomTown was one of the tech writers on the panel, which was talking about what the big trends in tech in 2007 were and what they would be in 2008. The others were: Victoria Barret of Forbes, CNBC’s Jim Goldman, Business Week’s Rob Hof, The Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark and Robert Scoble of Scobleizer. (USA Today’s Jon Swartz could not attend.)

Venture capitalist Ann Winblad moderated the event.

Here is the whole thing:

And here is my video of the event too (and here is the post):

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

Last night, the Public Relations Society of America’s Silicon Valley chapter held its annual “Media Influencer” dinner at the Computer History Museum, which featured a spate of tech journalists pitching a large room full of PR people about what’s hot in the sector.

Turning the tables this year–and apparently getting “honored” by the group–were: Victoria Barret of Forbes, CNBC’s Jim Goldman, Business Week’s Rob Hof, The Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark, Robert Scoble of Scobleizer and BoomTown. (USA Today’s Jon Swartz could not attend.)

Venture capitalist Ann Winblad moderated the event, which seemed akin to trying to herd cats.

Some of the topics included: Facebook (of course, and whose PR head Brandee Barker appears in the video below after a harrowing day handling Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes,” which is doing a piece on the social-networking site with an apparent focus on–also, of course–privacy); the impact of the possibly looming recession on tech; Apple’s iPhone (of course, of course); Google (triple of course); the resurgence of the enterprise space; and the fate of Yahoo.

Here is video of the event:

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

And on the seventh day, at least we did not get another lump of Sugar.

After a year of manic site creation, Brian Sugar actually bought his first company, rather than extend his name further in the online women-focused arena.

Yesterday, Sugar’s San Francisco-based Sugar Publishing–which includes the flagship PopSugar (celebs), GeekSugar (tech), CasaSugar (home), YumSugar (food), well, we could go on but won’t for fear of lapsing into a diabetic coma–changed its name to Sugar Inc. and also acquired ShopStyle.com.

The all-equity deal for the Los Altos, Calif.-based social-shopping site will give Sugar a nice bit of technology to play in the Web commerce space more aggressively, with features that allow the quick creation of shopping widgets using products grabbed from all over the Internet.

Think of a digital version of one of those massive kitten-heel shoe spreads in Lucky magazine that also allows you to instantly buy stuff you see and you’ve got the right idea.

We sat down with the jumpy (really, he is) Brian Sugar and made a video interview recently, after noticing the tear he and his wife Lisa have been on since they founded their mini-empire last year.

Their activity has caused notice–last year, Yahoo almost bought the network of sites. The Sugars were probably glad they missed that bullet now, as their sites seem to be growing faster without a big partner.

The start-up is backed by Sequoia Capital and also NBC Universal, which have both sunk $15 million in total into the company, which uses a unique cross-pollinating style to grow its audience to about 5 million unique visitors a month.

NBC, via its iVillage subsidiary, sells the Sugar Network’s ads in a guaranteed deal for the company.

While it is a crowded space in all of Sugar’s subsidiaries, it’s also nice to see a sassy effort from the Sugars, who use a sweeter (sorry!) approach to coverage–some might call it saccharine (sorry again!) even–in the blog genre.

In other words, Lindsay Lohan is still a drunken, drug-addled mess, but don’t those super white nails look amazing!!!

The new buy is in keeping with Brian Sugar’s background of online commerce (top stints at J. Crew online and also Kmart’s ill-conceived BlueLight.com) and give Sugar sites another tool in an interesting arsenal.

“We’re aimed at an ADD culture,” said Sugar to me yesterday, and he is not kidding.

Each of his more than a dozen sites–yes, there is also a social network called TeamSugar, as well as a tagging site called, yep, Sugarlicio.us–has from 15 to 25 posts a day, with the user-generated content numbering upward of 15,000 items.

It all makes us feel like we’ve gained five pounds by just lingering on the sites. (Sorry once again, but these sugar puns are hard to resist!).

See Sugar in action:

I thought that Blake Krikorian was onto a great idea when I first saw his Slingbox several years ago, which he showed me at my house. Now, so does satellite giant EchoStar, to the tune of $380 million in cash and options.

EchoStar grabbed ownership of the start-up that makes devices and software that allow a user to move media to a variety of other locations. Hence, the Sling name.

I have always thought the concept of being able to take content and send it to any device at any time was a critically important one. As it turns out, it turned out to be the precursor to a lot of the moves toward the more distributed, widgetized Web model developing now.

In fact, Walt and I demoed Sling at D2 in 2004, pictured above, right after the device launched. Since then, Sling has morphed into much more than simply a hardware play to encompass software services related to media delivery in a number of ways.

But the basic concept remained the same: Media Must Move.

I hope the deal putting Sling into the hands of one particular part of that raging river of information and content does not hinder this important mission for Sling and Krikorian, its chairman and CEO.

That’s especially important in this critical time, when big media companies finally seem to be coming around to the notion that ubiquitous distribution is the only way to go.

That was not always the case. At the time Sling was launched, I got a call from a major network exec who asked me all about the company, which I had written about several times.

At first, I was pleased he had some savvy about a cutting-edge technology, but then realized he was only interested because the media giant was considering suing Sling out of existence.

Apparently, increasing the number of screens its content could be seen on exponentially took a backseat to unfounded fears of copyright infringement.

In this interview on the PaidContent site with Staci Kramer, Krikorian promised the company would remain operator-agnostic, noting, “We expect very little change to our business except that we have even deeper pockets, and access to other core technologies.”

The company struck the deal as it was looking for a new round of funding. It had already raised a pile of cash–introducing a new hardware concept does not come cheap–totaling almost $57 million.

That came from traditional VCs like Mobius Venture Capital (in a deal born at D2, in fact), as well as other power players like Liberty Media and Hearst Media. EchoStar has also been an investor.