All Things Digital

In exactly two weeks, Walt Mossberg and I will be hosting Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker, among others, at the sixth edition of our D: All Things Digital conference.

Of course, there will be a lot of questions for the pair onstage, from either Walt or I, and also the audience (and you can ask your own here to either Yang or Decker or any D6 speaker in text or video), given the incredibly eventful year the much-buffeted Internet company has had.

That got even more eventful yesterday with the news that billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn would decide today whether to enter the fray and wage a proxy fight for the company, entering via the vulnerable position Yahoo (YHOO) has put itself in after not coming to terms with Microsoft (MSFT).

The software giant walked away 11 days ago, after repeated rejections of its unsolicited takeover bid by Yahoo and the blowing of its bluff over price with Microsoft.

Now with Icahn hovering–and there will be more opportunistic investors to come, prompted into action by some of Yahoo’s biggest shareholders, including Capital Research’s Gordon Crawford (don’t say BoomTown didn’t warn you, Jerry)–Yahoo is kind of like a town just whipsawed by a tornado and about to endure a flood.

And then some hail. Also, maybe a locust swarm or two.

Unfortunately for Yang, who also co-founded Yahoo, this 10 Plagues of Sunnyvale ordeal is likely to go on and on and, thus, the questions will not end for a very long time.

And, even more unfortunately, the answer to the most important one he should be asking–what to do now?–is the one that might be now entirely out of Yang’s hands.

Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

Actually, it is because we in the ATD brain trust (that would be Walt Mossberg and me), along with our many much-more-intelligent staffers and advisers, wanted to bring even more digital news and analysis to our readers by making more stories available on the front page from us and also from around the Web.

Our aim was simple: Now newsier than ever!

In fact, we hope you will find our new look linktastic, as we try hard to embrace the notion that ATD’s audience wants to be able to find great tech and media stories anywhere and everywhere.

Just fyi, the inside sections remain exactly the same–it is only the front page that has undergone the renovation.

Here’s a quick tour, from the top to the bottom of the page:

Megablog: We combined the BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blogs in one rolling one in the center rail.

We felt that it allowed us to feature a lot more of our stories on the main page longer, up to 20 typically, and also made it easier for readers to find stories before they dropped off the front.

We will be adding more material to this section soon, as we develop our content further.

Walt Mossberg: Walt’s weekly Personal Technology and Mailbox columns and Mossblog, as well as Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution, move up and to the right in a high-profile spot.

As ever, Walt is the site’s amazing anchor and a tech consumer’s greatest adviser, telling it like it is and writing reviews that matter.

Tech Headlines: On the top left, we wanted to bring in the stellar work from our Dow Jones brethren at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, as well as from the Dow Jones newswires, to give readers links to as many stories as we can as news breaks.

This section will be updated every nine minutes to keep it fresh and new.

Voices: This section on the left remains the same, except it goes vertical. We try to hand-select (no stinkin’ algorithm for us) from across the digital blogosphere, so we can feature blog posts we think you need to see to keep up.

Also, expect more guest bloggers who write original posts just for ATD, like one tomorrow from Slide’s Keith Rabois, giving BoomTown a hard time for our problem with juvenile widgets.

The Tech Top 10: Also on the left, just below Voices, we keep our edited Tech Top 10, a list of the stories we think you need to know about every day.

Video: On the right is our featured video. We do a lot of video at ATD and we will feature our latest-posted here.

Tech Around the Web: Also on the right, we are posting, via RSS, the feed from four digital news sources we like and think are useful for our audience.

Two are editorially driven sites, paidContent and GigaOm, who we believe are combining the energy of the blogosphere and also providing readers with trusted reporting that also adheres to the standards of accuracy and ethics we try to operate under too.

This is a big focus for us at ATD and we want to point readers to high-quality material. They say you are judged by the company you keep and we could not agree more.

Both Digg and Techmeme, of course, are the key news aggregators of the sector and we like how helpful they are in surfacing important tech and media stories for readers.

Just click on each tab to get to each section. This section will also be constantly refreshed throughout the day.

More ads: Well, we have to pay the bills, don’t we? We hope you do find them useful and don’t find them too intrusive.

There will be even more to come from us in the coming weeks, especially as we gear up for the sixth edition of the D: All Things Digital conference, which is taking place May 27 to 29.

So, please let us know what you think of our new look, as we would love feedback.

And special thanks to all who worked on the redesign, including Mike Monteiro of Mule Design Studio and especially the tireless and multi-talented Adam Tow, our Web genius.

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:

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

The site officially launched on April 26, 2007, one year and two days ago.

No presents, but your presence over the next year, as we make even more improvements to our work-in-progress site.

Thanks, of course, go first to my amazing partner, Walt Mossberg, as well as our crack staff (click here to see them in all their glory), partners, designers and all the many Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones folks involved.

To mark the past year, BoomTown could spend a lot of time deeply ruminating on how blogging is so very different than mainstream journalism (much more fun, much less sleep).

Or I could ponder the agonizing quest to improve standards and accuracy in the blogosphere (”I am I, Don Quixote, the lord of La Mancha/Destroyer of evil am I/I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory/Forever to conquer or die.”)

Or I could discuss widgets and how they have changed my life (I don’t know what I would have done had Scramble not inspired my empty soul!).

But, no!

Instead, I will just re-post here one of the very first posts I had up on that first day, about…drum roll, please…my worries about the situation at Yahoo (YHOO).

I don’t want to say I am a psychic or anything, but in this piece, called “Terry in Turnaround,” I begin my obsessive coverage of the Internet portal, which I thought a year ago could be headed for trouble.

(Interestingly, my other post that day was about Facebook trying to become more mature.)

Read more »

“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.)

Earlier this week, I visited Dash Navigation, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based car-navigation device start-up that is being backed to the tune of $42 million by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

There, I got a look at the new GPS device called the Dash Express that went on sale exclusively on Amazon (AMZN) today and was also reviewed by my esteemed colleague Walt Mossberg (Cliff Notes on that: he liked it a lot, but it’s not perfect, although he thinks the $400 Dash signifies a leap ahead in the arena).

A longtime user of such devices–make that a longtime disgruntled user–I have always been annoyed that car navigation has been so removed from the digital and connected revolution taking place everywhere else.

Being able to grab information from the Web and also send it to a device seems an obvious move, so I am glad someone has made it. I am also interested in Dash’s use of devices to help inform the whole system about traffic problems, which will presumably work better as more Dash devices are on the road.

In fact, I am in Los Angeles right now–the epicenter of traffic congestion–and I brought a Dash unit to see how well that works. And I also sent a map of the hot spots from the HBO series, “Entourage.” First stop for breakfast after avoiding traffic on Fairfax: Canter’s, the very funky deli the “boys” get food from.

My review: The knishes were delicious and I was not annoyed either, since I was not stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic getting to them.

Here’s a video I did while visiting Dash’s HQ earlier this week:

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:

As you can see from this video, BoomTown should stick to poking at Yahoo’s business plans, rather than talking to its very sharp Sarah Lacy of Yahoo Finance’s new Tech Ticker site.

Some material from AllThingsD appears on Tech Ticker from time to time, linking back to our site. And BoomTown was invited to talk about various topics last week with Lacy, including in this post and video about politics in Silicon Valley.

In the piece, Lacy and I discuss the candidates, as well as issues like ubiquitous broadband access (a critical issue about which I have long maintained the federal government has dropped the ball on spearheading the development of, as it has in the past with other important issues such as the universal telephone service or the federal highway system).

While I am not “longing” for former Vice President Al Gore, as the Tech Ticker post noted, it is still true that he is the most techie of any politician in recent memory.

I Obamapolize, but it’s true! (I also Obamapologize for my weird hair and lack of makeup, but I never appear on camera in BoomTown, so I am not going to when visiting Sunnyvale, Calif.)

Also below it is the hour-plus interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Sen. John McCain last May at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, at a time when he was considered the longest of long shots for the Republican presidential nomination.

So much for predictions!

In our ongoing quest for the perfect Walt Mossberg T-shirt, we are thrilled with this one, now available for purchase here.

They will join our others, such as this classic “Craplets” T-shirt, modeled below by Walt and Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski in our sacred collection.

When BoomTown was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I followed my partner-in-tech-crime Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret around the floor of the famous gadgetfest with my annoying video camera (truth be told, I am the irksome one and the camera simply my tool of choice).

And because Walt is so well known among the geek set, naturally, I dubbed him the “Brangelina of Tech.”

Thus, it is also natural that we deliver the same quality time with Waltgelina at Macworld, which was held yesterday in San Francisco and featured the famous annual keynote by his iLama Steve Jobs.

So, here is the first video of two of Walt visiting Macworld yesterday, trailed by our very brave Associate Editor John “Sully” Sullivan (pictured here), who gamely borrowed BoomTown’s Flip video camera to take on the momentous task, since I was at meetings in Silicon Valley all day (there was, in fact, life beyond the Moscone Center yesterday).

Sullivan also did a most excellent job of blogging the Jobs’ keynote here, as Digital Daily’s John “Patches” Paczkowski was indisposed.

In this episode, Walt introduces Sullivan to the floor of Macworld and then gives a first look and public-Walt-handling of the not-the-iPhone-but-cool-anyway MacBook Air subnotebook.

Is Walt impressed? You’ll just have to wait for his review until he puts it through its paces.

In the meantime, here is the video:

Here is Part 2 of Waltgelina at Macworld.

Here is the second video installment of Walt Mossberg visiting Macworld yesterday, trailed by the very brave Associate Editor John Sullivan of AllThingsD.com, who gamely borrowed BoomTown’s Flip video camera to take on the momentous task.

In this episode, Walt visits various partners of Apple’s, including Microsoft and, apparently, Dr. Seuss.

In the wise words of “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish”: “From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.”

So it seems to me, at least.

Here is the video:

Walt Mossberg and I had a lovely visit with Om Malik yesterday, a get-well-soon summit held at a Starbucks in San Francisco’s Financial District. It was the first time I have seen the well-liked tech blogger of GigaOm fame since he suffered a heart attack during the holidays.

Malik, who will not be smoking cigars any longer as he is pictured here, is newly out of the hospital and in rest-and-recovery mode.

While not ready to subject himself to the withering annoyance of BoomTown’s video–and don’t think I did not ask!–I can report that Malik looked quite spry and as relaxed as one can be, given the circumstances.

Everyone at AllThingsD.com wishes him well and looks forward to his quick and successful recuperation.

What better way to brave the massive canyons of the Consumer Electronics Show than to hike them with the help of Walt Mossberg, along with Mossberg Solution writer Katherine Boehret?

Or, as Walt likes to call it: the Bataan Death March.

But he secretly loves it, as the gathering at the heart of Walt’s universe of gadgets, devices and all things digital.

I jokingly call Walt the “Brangelina” of CES, since he is stopped constantly on the floor by fans who want to meet him in person and those who just want to kibitz with him about the latest and greatest trends in the tech sector.

In this first part of two videos, we see lots of big screens and a pile of other devices at CES, as Walt explains it all for you (Part 2 is here):

Here is the second part of my video of following Walt Mossberg, along with Mossberg Solution writer Katherine Boehret, around the floor of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday:

In this, the second of two videos from the floor of CES, it is more big screens, more fanboys, more gadgets–just a typical day in the life of Walt (Part 1 is here):