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 [...]
Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.
Here’s my personal favorite, which I call “I Heart Mark Zuckerberg.” It is a short and–let’s just say it, shall we?–deeply uncomfortable encounter BoomTown had with the Facebook founder and CEO.
(To be fair, we caught him completely unaware when he [...]
Why does the idea of a marriage between Hollywood writers and VCs make me slightly queasy?
But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags [...]
On my journey through the Europe Web scene, a stop at the Paris offices of Netvibes is a must, as it most resembles a Silicon Valley start-up. It has aimed at becoming the personal Web aggregation play and is among the more interesting and entrepreneurial in Europe.
The company was founded by former journalist Tariq Krim [...]
What can we say about investor Peter Thiel, when it is much better to listen to him talk?
Here’s a longish video I made at Thiel’s office on San Francisco’s Presidio (no Sand Hill Road mundanity for Peter!) yesterday with the man who has become Silicon Valley’s most interesting venture capitalist and all-around great character of [...]
Well, we’re glad it’s done, our conflict of interest shoved aside by the hey-big-spenders at Microsoft and we can again resume our incredulous analysis of the insane $15 billion valuation of Facebook.
No matter who would have gotten to make nice with founder Mark Zuckerberg in the hefty ad-investment deal–Google or Microsoft–we will be sticking to our guns on this ridiculous roundelay of hype and circumstance.
“Why,” said a sharp Silicon Valley figure to me last night, “would Facebook give away the cow for the price of a quart of milk?”
Why, indeed, although it would be a $15 billion quart of milk.
But it was an interesting point he was making about the situation the hot social-networking site finds itself in right [...]
An interesting new site debuts today called Global Grind–an aggregation and destination site aimed specifically at the hip-hop community–that combines what looks like the widgety NetVibes home-page approach with a hipper version of Digg plus a lot of curated content-pointing.
It’s not so different in its technology or even its look (see below)–you could swap out [...]
Oh, my.
Oh, my.
Dig a hole and hide. The end is nigh. And how do you spell Ponzi (as in scheme) again?
When I reported in this column two weeks ago that Facebook was looking to raise a new round of funding and that software giant Microsoft was a prime contender as an investor, I suggested a big number was being bandied about to create a giant war chest for the trendy social-networking start-up.
Here’s an interesting idea if you don’t want to get bought and you can’t quite IPO yet and you need to have a tidy war chest for expansion or perhaps a choice acquisition or two: Bring in more investors and raise more money at a huge valuation.
That’s a concept that the top dogs at Facebook are seriously mulling over now, according to sources, after getting so many inquiries from investment funds and several bigger companies–such as its ad-serving partner, Microsoft–about grabbing a stake in the fast-growing social networking Web site.
I have known Simon Levene for a long time–he’s been working in the European operations at a handful of Web companies, such as @Home, Time Warner and Yahoo, over the years and is now working as a venture partner at the European branch of Accel Partners, the Palo Alto, Calif., backer of Facebook and other [...]
In my post–OK, diatribe–yesterday about Facebook and the dangers of it getting so much of the wrong kind of media attention, I neglected to also mention an interview its ubiquitous founder, Mark Zuckerberg, did with the “Today” show’s Meredith Vieira in mid-June.
Since NBC will not let me embed it and it has not hurtled over [...]
So I was at a lunch of the AllThingsD.com staff in Palo Alto, Calif., Wednesday–at Il Fornaio, natch, where we pretended to be as important as its usual dot-com mogul and VC customers, but failed miserably–when Accel Partners VC Jim Breyer stopped by to chat about some stuff.
Unexpectedly, he brought along Mark Zuckerberg, the 20-something [...]
While Walt and I will come up with our own questions for Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who will be appearing in an historic joint interview at our D conference next Wednesday night, I was curious what others–some tech folks and some not in the industry–would ask the tech legends if they could [...]
In what seems like a showy look-at-me event this afternoon in San Francisco, Facebook will host the “unveiling of the next evolution” of the No. 2 social-networking site, including the introduction of the “Facebook Platform.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that it will let third-party developers have a crack at annoying–oh, I am sorry, helping–its 23 million users.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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