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:

Incredibly, it is the 25th anniversary of Martha Stewart’s first big splash with her iconic book, “Entertaining,” which pretty much ushered in the boom in lifestyle content.

While Stewart is known for her focus on home-making skills, some might not know that she is also a bit of a geek, who has been a fixture at many tech events over the years.

For example, she has been an active audience member at our D: All Things Digital conference over the last two years (here she is at D4, grilling Sony CEO Howard Stringer about why there had to be so many wires with her devices).

In this interview with WSJ Online, she talks about her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, including its many forays into the Internet area.

That will soon mean a new site she has dubbed “Marthapedia,” or–as BoomTown likes to call it–”All Things Martha.”

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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Even with Abu Dhabi buying up shares of tech firms like Advanced Micro Devices and the bubbly euphoria in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 sector, the tech picture is getting less pretty, according to a report by Barron’s Eric Savitz on the downgrading of software stocks by Goldman Sachs.

Noting a softening in capital spending, Savitz quotes Goldman’s report that said, “with software a typically back-end loaded sale, if there is any concern on budgets in the early part of 2008, we would expect CIOs to hold off their purchases until later in the year.”

So Goldman cut estimates slightly on Adobe, Autodesk, BEA, BMC, CA, Check Point, Citrix, Cognos, CommVault, Informatica, Macrovision, McAfee, Oracle, Quest Software, Red Hat, RightNow, SAP, Secure Computing, Symantec and Tibco.

Could ad-supported or commerce-driven Web sites be next? To say nothing of the spate of pre-revenue–our kind way of saying none to speak of–Web 2.0 start-ups.

Below is a video interview with Amazon’s majordomo Jeff Bezos conducted by The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the new $400 Kindle wireless electronic-book reader that the online retailer unveiled last week.

So far the reviews have been less than whelming–too clunky, too pricey, too wonky, to name a few of the complaints–but it’s interesting that tech types keep at their seemingly futile effort to replace the very useful device known as the book.

At D4, for example, Sony head Howard Stringer (pictured below) declared its $350 eReader was going to be a big hit. It was not. (Well, to be fair, he did not give an exact timetable on the success of the gadget, but we’re still waiting.)

So far, the meek little book still seems to be the winner over all e-book challengers.

Why is that, given the relentless digitization of every bit of content on the planet and the inevitable march in that direction?

I’d say it’s pretty simple. Books work fine–they are portable, cheap, easy to read, their batteries never die and they’re kind of pretty.

The pluses of an electronic version of a book are not so much of a plus. It’s portable, but not more so than a book. It’s expensive. It’s complex to figure out and sometimes not so easy to read. Its batteries always die. Also, let’s be honest: Not so pretty.

And, though you can hold more books on them–the big selling point–who usually is reading more than one or two books at a time? The same is true for searchability–unless it is a textbook, I can’t think of a time when I really wanted to search a book.

Still, the efforts to storm the castle of reading continues, as you will see here:

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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John covers the $100 price cut of Sony’s PlayStation 3 today here, which comes only days after the struggling electronics giant said it had “no immediate plans” to drop the price. But John’s still not opening his wallet (now empty from his iPhone purchase) until they throw in a George Foreman G5 Grill in Platinum with Interchangeable Plates!

We are savvy buyers here at AllThingsD.com!

Also today, in his Digital Daily column, John looks at the continuing dubious nature of Steorn’s perpetual-motion effort and Google’s purchase of Postini, which puts it ever more in competition with Microsoft.

His daily video on all this can be found here, or you can watch it below.

When Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski (right) got word of Microsoft’s enormous repair bill for the faulty Xbox 360 (which Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret reviewed here), he also discovered that the defect–the so-called red ring of death–may affect as many as a third or more of the video-game consoles, a fact the tech giant says will cause frustration for “some” of its customers. Read the spin antidote John wrote about the $1.15 billion warranty headache or watch his video, which is also available below.

John also unspins the verbiage from Sony about what it calls “refinements” to the price of its Play Station 3, and he deconstructs Universal Music Group’s decision not to renew its long-term contract with Apple’s iTunes, a move that one insider considers an ill-advised ploy that could alienate Steve Jobs just when the music company needs him most.

Posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski does a most excellent job in his Digital Daily posts and video, but here is some stuff I have found interesting perusing the Web at the start of what is already a busy week. While most were opining on Yahoo’s acquisition of the rest of Right Media (it bought 20% of the online ad exchange last October) for $680 million in cash and stock, it had to be one of the least surprising deals, in the wake of Google’s $3.1 billion payout for DoubleClick earlier this month.

So I was more interested in the Washington Post’s follow-up of NBC’s controversial decision to air the self-made video of the Virginia Tech gunman in an interview with NBC News President Steve Capus. Written by media reporter Howard Kurtz, it gives a lot of background of Capus’s career and, of course, hashes over the reasoning for putting on TV the rantings of an obviously disturbed killer, for which NBC was assailed from all sides. “I’m stunned that people bang down our door at one moment,” he told Kurtz, “demanding we release it uninterrupted and without filter–then question whether it should have been released in the first place…I’m just stunned at the depths of absurdity and hypocrisy.” Welcome to the new digital world, Mr. Capus. In fact, there was likely not even a decision to be made for the longtime television pro–in the age of YouTube, that video was going up no matter what.

The New York Times brought tears of joy to my eyes with the news that Sony Television will soon be airing something called “minisodes” on a new Web service called, wait for it, the Minisode Network (log-in required). The shows will distill old shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker” and “Starsky and Hutch” to three- to five-minute clips, which somehow seems perfect given their hokey formulaic perfection. The mini-shows will be offered exclusively on MySpace at first, which is about the most perfect audience for dumbed-down dumb shows.

Speaking of short and sweet, Om Malik’s got a great mini-essay on why Hollywood needs to embrace the plethora of video-downloading services springing up on the Internet–its DVD business is waning. But it might not go so well for the studios in the end, writes Malik quite correctly: “Imagine if you could rent a movie, decide you don’t like it that much, and decide to forego the DVD purchase. Now that would be an oh-s— moment!”

And there are plenty of those kind of moments in the short, rough and oddly compelling mini-movies that Rosie O’Donnell has been posting recently on her unusual blog. Once a lot of text haiku-like ruminations of the controversial television personality, the movies bring you up close and personal with O’Donnell, who sometimes is half out of the frame getting her hair done as she answers reader mail while using only her iSight camera. “It’s working, it’s working,” she says as she taps on the keys of the computer. Indeed, it does work and makes me wonder if O’Donnell really needs any TV network (except, of course, for that big bag of money they offer).

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

This BoomTown column was first published in The Wall Street Journal on November 19, 2001. All rights reserved.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year, Sony Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nobuyuki Idei pondered the future of the world’s largest consumer-electronics company caught in the maelstrom of the heady Internet age.

What technology or online company, he wondered, would be the ideal partner that would allow Sony to take full advantage of its many assets in the digital arena? And how should Sony use its famed brand name, rich content, high-quality hardware and strong consumer relationships to become a key Internet player?

He tossed out some partner possibilities: Yahoo, AOL Time Warner and Microsoft. He didn’t let on what he considered best for Sony.

Last week, at the giant Comdex show in Las Vegas, Sony’s thinking became clearer. Sony announced a series of deals, including an ambitious, if vague, plan to work with AOL on developing easy-to-use high-speed home networks, innovative online content and devices, and even a new Internet browser. It also announced new initiatives related to cellphones and unveiled several new Net-enabled electronic products.

More important, in his keynote speech at the show, Sony’s president and chief operating officer Kunitake Ando made the company’s firmest declaration yet that it intends to become a “ubiquitous value network,” providing a range of consumer-friendly interactive services to any device anywhere.

It’s about time.

Despite its enviable digital assets, Sony has been the Hamlet of the interactive stage — unable to decide “to be” — largely due to an internal culture that kept its many independent fiefdoms from working together as a powerful whole.

The company has promised to fix the problem before. Last year, after the merger of AOL and Time Warner was announced, Sony said it was reorganizing management to better take advantage of the rapid convergence that was going on. “If they ever accomplish this, Sony could really make a big difference in the power dynamics of the industry,” said one Silicon Valley player last week. “The problem is, we have all gotten tired of waiting for it to happen.”

Sony execs claim things are different now that Internet mania has calmed and the world is on the cusp of a broadband future perfectly suited for their company. “We have taken a lot of heat…but we seem to be getting beyond the issues of how to cooperate among ourselves,” said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony’s U.S. holding company, in an interview last week. “There is no one at the company–in Toyko or here–who does not understand now how this all has to be interrelated.”

It certainly is a tough time for Sony to step up its profile. The weak economy world-wide is limiting. Sony itself has felt the impact, especially in its flagship consumer-electronics area, reporting a $107 million loss for its recent quarter and forecasting that profits for the full year will be cut in half from the year before.

Still, it may not be such a bad time to begin striking out. Since the Internet bust leaves huge opportunities for stable players, companies like Sony may be in the best position to benefit when the next chapter of the interactive revolution begins.

To its credit, the company never jumped heedlessly into the frothy period, as other large media conglomerates, like Walt Disney Co., did. Now Sony’s conservatism has turned out to look pretty smart.

“While we are not entirely blameless, we definitely didn’t go charging in,” said Mr. Stringer, who credits managers in Japan for Sony’s restraint. “They were rightly suspicious of the business plans and found the bubble to be a bubble.”

While it considered a range of moves, such as investing heavily in both the Excite and Yahoo portals in their heyday, it didn’t do most of them in the end. “I definitely was nervous since everyone was getting rich but us,” recalled Mr. Stringer. “But we held back and as a result did not get as burned.”

Now that the interactive space has been “whittled down to make sense,” Mr. Stringer thinks Sony has the right stuff to prevail. He may be right, given that Sony holds many impressive and wide-ranging interactive assets.

In hardware, it offers well-made digital cameras, music players, hand-helds, computers and the leading game-player unit, the PlayStation 2, that has many other interactive possibilities. It is developing potentially promising interactive subscription services in music, games and movies, and holds licenses for interactive television applications. And its media unit holds important parcels of entertainment content.

What it doesn’t have is distribution, an impetus behind its push into broadband with AOL, and the reason for an earlier marketing deal with Yahoo to hawk its products, content and services online.

Indeed, the AOL broadband alliance, if done correctly, holds a lot of potential, especially since it will help ward off challenges from Microsoft, which is battling both companies in a number of consumer and home entertainment markets. The software company is spending prodigiously to launch a game-player competitor to PS2, called Xbox. Both products have aspirations well beyond games, hoping to use such devices to deliver a range of online offerings over high-speed lines in the future.

That’s why Sony is developing technologies such as Feel, which aims to join all kinds of devices in a high-speed wireless home network. With open standards and the link with the popular AOL, Mr. Stringer thinks Sony is “traveling at the right pace with the right partners.” He doesn’t believe the company needs to make many major acquisitions to realize its goals.

Of course, Sony’s success here depends on the rapid roll-out of broadband and getting consumers to pay for more interactive subscription services — a dream still not realized. It would also help if the economy turned around, too.

When it does, Mr. Stringer thinks Sony will be ready. “After all this talk about the promises of synergy,” he said, “we hope to begin to see the advantages.”

Or, in more literary terms: To be or not to be, that is the question.