BoomTown » Voices

Meet Drake Meeting Brizzly: A Spanking New ATD Feature

Kara Swisher — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:03:48 +0000

Today, All Things Digital debuts a new feature called “Almost Famous” in our Voices section.

No, it is not about Kate Hudson and nascent rock stars.

Well, you might meet geek rock stars to be.

Focused on innovative, interesting or just plain odd start-ups, we thought it was a good way for ATD readers to get a gander at some up-and-coming ideas and trends.

We cover start-ups, of course, on the site, but–given that we have a small staff that breaks a lot of big-company news–not on a regular time frame.

So, while we are no good at predicting what will work and what will not and who will make it and who will fail, every Friday, Drake Martinet will be paying a video interview visit with, asking some questions of and gleaning a few pertinent stats about a wide range of companies.

Here’s our first effort: Chris Wetherell, creator of Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.

The San Francisco start-up, which just rolled out support for Twitter lists last night, is also just wrapping up a new $600,000 round of funding, according to Jason Shellen, CEO of Thing Labs, from which Brizzly sprang.

Brizzly had already raised $1.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners last year. Now it is getting more cash from investors such as Ron Conway to further its software and other efforts.

But don’t rely on BoomTown for info about Brizzly–check out Drake’s take.

The AppleTwitter-Equals-iBrangelina Experiment*

Kara Swisher — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:05:43 +0000

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* Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple (AAPL), was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:

“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”

I wrote that because the pair rivet the tech press and digital fanboys as no others do, fomenting an obsession normally reserved for, say, Brangelina.

And since I imagine that a marriage of Apple and Twitter would be covered a lot like those two are–Red alert: Someone just sighted Evan Williams with a giant iPod getting a scoop at Fraiche Yogurt for Steve Jobs!–I thought I would get started early, just in case.

(Finally, given the epic Twitter diss of last year, let’s all just assume that Facebook will be playing the Jennifer Aniston role.)

Welcome to ATD, Therese–and a Belated Welcome to Eric

Kara Swisher — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:39:09 +0000

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti (pictured here) to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz (pictured here) of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

We added these two very talented voices from other publications within Dow Jones (owner of this site), because we want to bring more cogent and useful news and analysis about tech and media to our readers. Also, they rock.

In all seriousness, the tech blogging arena is one with a lot of players–some great and some not so much–so we are especially proud of the high standards, accuracy and quality that each of these writers represents.

We will be adding more writers soon, so watch this space.

Of course, we also don’t believe in only cross-promoting Dow Jones brands, and publish a half-dozen major links to other sites daily in Voices, along with our tabbed front page feeds that link directly to CNET, paidContent, GigaOm and Techmeme.

We admire the work those sites are doing and, most of all, want to give our readers as many ways as possible to access the best posts being done across the digital landscape.

Of course, BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily remain the anchor of the main rail, while the work of Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret gets its own place at the top of the main home page of ATD.

In all, we hope readers find our commitment to giving you high-quality and incisive work–from scoops to analysis to reviews–helpful and we welcome any feedback.

A Renovation for AllThingsD.com!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:53:20 +0000

As you can probably see today, we have rejiggered the look of the front page of our AllThingsD.com site, as well as turbocharged our Voices section.

We hope you like it.

So what’s new? Find out after the jump!

First, the photo heads of Walt Mossberg and I on the front page have been greatly reduced–and please, we know the jokes you could make, so let’s move on quickly, shall we?–in order to move the mug of Senior News Editor John Paczkowski and also his most excellent Digital Daily column up to the top too.

Paczkowski–or, as we like to call him, “Patches”–does an amazing job in both text and video of analyzing the day’s important tech stories with both insight and humor.

Sometimes using puppets! And those patented arched eyebrows! All kidding aside, Paczkowski has many fans all over the Web and deserves as much prominence as we can give him.

Second, we have added a regular new daily feature, an obligatory list called the Tech Top 10, which is compiled and written by our lovely Associate Editor John Sullivan. A geek-in-training, Sullivan will point readers all over the Web to the most important tech and media stories of the day, updating it as news breaks.

Third, we’ve added video–the kids love video, we hear–to the front page, which will rotate depending on what the latest video we post–from Digital Daily, BoomTown, Walt Mossberg or wherever–might be.

Fourth, on both the front page and inside the section, we hope you like our souped-up Voices, which we know has been much too quiet since our launch. Now, it is a veritable blabfest!

To accomplish this, we are pointing daily to many tech and media articles and blogs all over the Web, featuring great posts, videos, cartoons and graphics that we think you need to know about.

As I said before, no soulless algorithms here, as our editors try to choose stuff we think is amazing, challenging, controversial or just plain fun.

Our goal is to give those interested in tech and media all the information they need to be fully informed, all with the kind of taste and high standards all Dow Jones properties aim for.

As I also noted before, we will also be soliciting and publishing more quality original blogs too–in text and video–from the top echelons of the digital industry, trying to bring the same sort of high-level debate and insights that we present annually at the D: All Things Digital conference.

Fifth, you can learn more about the terrific (and growing) staff that is responsible for both D and AllThingsD.com on the refurbished About Us pages.

In addition to the staffers we have featured since our April 2007 launch, now meet Adam Tow, Christine Mohan, Jill Pendergast, Natalie Fonseca, Meg Burns and my long-suffering assistant Ed Daly (who better be snappy with that coffee this morning or my holiday cheer will turn ugly fast).

As I said, we hope you like it and there will be even more stuff to come soon, to keep you coming back for more.

That includes new tools too, to let you get our content anywhere you like, such as a new way to put your RSS feed from the site on your My Yahoo! page.

Can a juvenile Facebook widget be far away? I think not, if those slackers at RockYou get cracking!

Big thanks for the changes go to our whole staff, but especially to the Web savant Adam Tow, without whom, well, we’d be techless.

(Yes, I completely made that word up.)

A New Look for AllThingsD.com: We Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:21:33 +0000

Because this is the fast-moving Web and we are a bunch of hip, hopping hep cats, we’re doing some renovation to the AllThingsD.com site and also turbocharging the Voices section too.

The site is still powered by those lovely folks over at WordPress and keeps the amazing style created by the truly intelligent designers over at San Francisco’s Mule Design Studio. And it is still all free, all the time.

But, on Monday, as if by magic–the magic of our Web genius Adam Tow, that is–we will have moved the digital furniture around on our front page, adding our occasional Tech Top 10 every day by our own John Sullivan and also a featured daily video.

And we will be rearranging all the pieces–BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Walt Mossberg’s many columns (including Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution) and Voices–to make it prettier and easier to use, in our ongoing attempts to give readers more, more, more.

And who doesn’t want more? Those grumpy folks who are never satisfied, that’s who (and you know who you are and so does BoomTown and how we wish you would just learn to live, live, live and join our noisy circus, which is what you know you want to do)!

We think even the glummest of the glum will like our new iteration of our Voices section–which we have admittedly not paid enough attention to since our spring launch. All that will change, as we try to provide you with new viewpoints from important players around the Internet every day.

Culling from the mountains of content from the Internet, we’ll be pointing to lots of tech and media posts, videos, graphs and cartoons from the most interesting and reliable sources to bring you information you need to know about.

No soulless algorithms here–we’ll try to choose the best stuff for our readers, to give them what they need to be fully informed, all with the kind of taste and high standards all Dow Jones properties aim for.

Plus, we will be soliciting and publishing more quality original blogs too–in text and video–from the top echelons of the digital industry, trying to bring the same sort of high-level debate and insights that we present annually at the D: All Things Digital conference.

What else? Well, we’ll be adding more information about our crack D and ATD staffs on the About Us pages.

And we’ll be bringing you extensive and sassy coverage by our team in 2008 from exciting upcoming tech and media industry events like the Consumer Electronics Show, MacWorld and Sundance, to name a few.

Of course, there is more stuff to come soon, but we’ll keep it to ourselves, as we don’t want this exciting news to turn into Geeks Gone Wild.

Well, maybe just a little bit–here’s that great Maria Sharapova “I Feel Pretty” video for Nike that we so love and for which we thank the universe for providing to us via the miracle of the Internet: