BoomTown » Arianna Huffington

Former Yahoo and AOL Ad Exec Coleman Poised to Join the Huffington Post as President

Kara Swisher — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:40:28 +0000

In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman (pictured here), who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

And it is not clear what the role of current Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith will be going forward.

The Coleman hiring is most likely the work of Hippeau, who has known him from Coleman’s days as head of ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO). Hippeau has been on the board of the Internet giant for many years.

Hippeau was also a key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

He has also been a director on its small board, which also includes co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer, as well as Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, which is headquartered in New York.

The money will be used to expand the site into the local arena, investigative news, and verticals such as tech, a section set to debut Sept. 21.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Presumably, goosing that revenue is what Coleman is being pegged to help do–and he certainly has a lot of online advertising experience, having made stops at a lot of Internet companies in the past few years.

He was head of advertising sales at Yahoo for seven years, after another long stint at Reader’s Digest. Yahoo’s ad business grew strongly under him.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

He was soon running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

He then headed to AOL in February to run its Platform-A division.

But when new management was suddenly put in place by Time Warner (TWX) in the spring, Coleman left after only a few months on the job.

After taking the summer off, several sources said, he has recently been looking at a variety of jobs.

That included MySpace, where former Yahoo colleague Wenda Harris Millard–now with Media Link–was hired recently as an outside consultant to help the News Corp. (NWS) social networking site rejigger its ad business.

The Huffington Post spokesman declined to comment when BoomTown inquired about Coleman’s hiring.

Huffington Post and Facebook Go "Social News," With Connect on Steroids

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:00:21 +0000

In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.

While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their Facebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this use essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids.

“We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.”

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic.

“This is a natural way to expand into the Facebook community and give users who desire to engage and comment with friends more privacy,” said Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, with whom I also spoke earlier today. “And, like a lot of other sites, we are trying to make our site more attractive to marketers who want to engage with engaged users.”

Hippeau said he hopes that will lead to more advertising spending, although the first focus is to get people using it.

Such a move is an interesting one for Facebook too, since it is getting unusual prominence and much deeper integration on a popular news Web site, well beyond how other sites are using Facebook Connect.

If it works, HuffPost Social News will give it even more content flowing into its service, a direction that was also underscored by Facebook’s recent $50 million purchase of FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

Goosing interactivity and engagement is a big aim for Facebook and also lots of news sites, such as the Huffington Post.

While there are about 1.7 million comments on the site monthly, for example, if users sign up for HuffPost Social News at large rates, that could expand a lot.

This will be done via the special page, as well as a large module on every Huffington Post page you visit showing what your Facebook friends who also sign up for HuffPost Social News are posting, what’s most popular in your network and on the site itself.

As is usually the case with Facebook Connect, you can decide what is sent back to Facebook and can also hide your movements from HuffPost Social News by going into a “stealth” mode.

If left turned on, though, it captures your every click on the site, including what you are reading–which means my social site should constantly be filled with news of Britney and LiLo.

“HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best,” wrote Huffington in a blog post to readers of her site, which you can read in its entirely below. “The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in.”

You can see that in action below on a page I created and also my module (click on the images to make them larger):

Main Personalized Page

Module

And here’s the official press release from the Huffington Post, as well as two blog posts on the subject by Arianna Huffington, one for her site and one for Facebook:

THE HUFFINGTON POST LAUNCHES NEW COLLABORATION WITH FACEBOOK–HUFFPOST SOCIAL NEWS

SOCIAL NEWS PLATFORM COMBINES POWER OF FACEBOOK WITH HUFFPOST CONTENT AND COMMUNITY

Aug 17, 2009–(New York, NY)–The Huffington Post (”HuffPost”) announced today the launch of HuffPost Social News, a collaboration between HuffPost and Facebook® that connects HuffPost users with their Facebook friends, the news they are reading and the stories they are commenting on. Through its integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News seamlessly combines the news and opinion of HuffPost with Facebook’s user experience and power to connect people.

“I’m excited to announce the launch of HuffPost Social News,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. “This new platform lets our community of engaged users easily share stories and post comments for friends to see–it’s HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler, enriching and deepening conversations around the day’s news. Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse. HuffPost Social News makes this more dynamic than ever.”

Said Eric Hippeau, CEO of The Huffington Post: “Our goal is to make HuffPost Social News the go-to place for Facebook users to share news–both the stories they love and the stories they hate–with friends. It should also appeal to marketers interested in reaching passionate, savvy readers who care about the news and who want to share their interests with friends.”

Said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook: “The Huffington Post has led a revolution in how people discover and consume news. With the integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News is now leading the way to make news even more of a social experience, giving people new ways to share and filter news and current events through their networks of friends on Facebook.”

HuffPost Social News allows users to increase their presence on The Huffington Post by automatically creating personalized profile pages that keep track of all their HuffPost Social News friends. At the same time, users retain complete control over what stories and comments are shared with their Social News friends, as well as what is posted to their Facebook Wall, and into their Facebook stream. Users can also see how their friends are voting on HuffPost polls and their contributions to “Eyes & Ears,” Huffpost’s citizen journalism platform.

Said Paul Berry, Chief Technology Officer of The Huffington Post: “From the first brainstorming session in Facebook’s office to the integration of Facebook Connect, it has been truly exciting to collaborate in building this product. The future of news is social, and I’m tremendously proud that HuffPost has been so early in reaching this important milestone in how news is shared online.”

Your HuffPost Experience Is About to Get a Lot More Social!

I’m excited to announce the launch of HuffPost Social News–a collaboration with Facebook that connects HuffPost users to their Facebook friends, the news they are reading, and the stories they are commenting on.

When you sign up for it–and I hope you will right now–HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best. (But don’t worry, you’ll still have complete control over what stories and comments are shared with your friends, as well as what goes on your Facebook wall, and into your friends’ news feeds.)

The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become an important element of community–something around which we gather, connect, and converse. And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now–expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of views.

HuffPost Social News makes this easier and more dynamic than ever. It takes social news to a whole new level. It will turbo-charge your online conversations and connections, and allow you to build and develop a community that follows what you read and care about.

Thanks to your passion and commitment, HuffPost has an incredibly active and vibrant community. You posted over 1.7 million comments on the site last month alone–with many stories attracting more than 10,000 comments. The one drawback: it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all.

With HuffPost Social News, you can be sure that your comments won’t get lost in the mix–and that the people you care most about will see what you have to say about the stories you love or are angered by, delivered in real time. And you’ll be able to easily and immediately see who is replying to any of your comments. Of course, your comments will still appear on the full thread, so anyone reading HuffPost will be able to see them.

HuffPost Social News also taps into the other coming big trend in news: personalization. People connecting to each other using their real identities and having real conversations.

HuffPost Social News allows you to have a greater presence on our site by automatically creating personalized profile pages that keep track of all your HuffPost Social News friends–collecting all the comments you have made and the stories you have read, as well as the comments made and stories read by your friends. Think of it as HuffPost’s new digital water cooler.

HuffPost Social News is just one early piece of the social transformation of the news industry. We will be adding more social features and personalization in the coming months. The news is simply more interesting and engaging when we experience it with friends. It is an exciting change and we are thrilled to be part of it.

Sign up here to get started. And let us know what you think. HuffPost Social News is your Huffington Post.

The Future of News Will Be Social

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of 12 books. With HuffPost launching a new social news feature today using Facebook Connect, we asked her to share her perspective on the ways social media is shaping the future of news.

Despite all the current hand-wringing about the dire state of newspapers, we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers. We can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and interact by commenting and forming communities.

The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating to us what’s important and what’s not are over. We now can get the news we want, when we want it, how we want it and where we want it. The Web has given us control over the news we consume. Now the explosive growth of online social networking is fundamentally changing our relationship with news as well. It’s no longer something we passively take in.

We now engage with news, react to news and share news. News has become an important element of community–something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now–expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of views. In short, the news has become social.

And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community, and conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

I’ve always been obsessed with news. As the daughter of a newspaperman, I grew up with the smell of newsprint and the buzz of breaking news. I’ve also always enjoyed bringing people together from different parts of my life and facilitating interesting conversations.

In the past, these have taken place around dinner tables, on group hikes or at book parties. Now, via cyberspace, those conversations have gone global. And they are happening in real time.

One of the reasons we launched The Huffington Post was to enhance and facilitate those conversations. While our goal was to create a one-stop spot for news and opinion with an attitude, community has always been a key element of the site. The launch of HuffPost Social News today brings together my two loves:nonstop news and the passionate discussion of the news with my friends.

Using Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News weaves the news and opinion of HuffPost with the social capabilities of Facebook. It connects HuffPost users to their Facebook friends, the news they are reading, and the stories they are commenting on.

Want to know what your friends are reading? Check out their Facebook-powered stream on HuffPost and the personalized Social News widget that appears as you navigate the site. Want to see your friends’ comments above the thousands of strangers commenting on a story? Log in to HuffPost Social News using Facebook Connect and that happens automatically.

HuffPost Social News also taps into another big trend I see emerging in news: personalization. People connect to each other using their real identities and have real conversations. HuffPost Social News is just one early piece of the social transformation of the news industry. We will be adding more social features and personalization in the coming months, and I expect to see news organizations around the world doing the same.

The news is simply more interesting and engaging when we experience it with friends.

Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth: The Full D7 Session

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:20:24 +0000

It’s an opportune time to see this interview, in which Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington talked about the future of the news media.

The pair were interviewed at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference only a month before Weymouth landed in hot water for trying to organize an off-the-record gathering of D.C. power players and journalists at her house, underwritten by sponsors.

In the interview, Weymouth discussed the struggles the Post–one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers–has had of late as the Internet pummels its business model.

One of those hammers has been Huffington, whose site has grown like gangbusters, led by its political blogs and aggregation. Though not regularly profitable, it recently got a huge slug of funding to keep up the competition.

The pressure was apparent last week when Weymouth got in trouble for offering the exclusive sessions–although the controversial marketing flyer about it went out by mistake, before her approval or that of the Post newsroom.

Here’s the video of the full D7 interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Arianna Talks About New CEO, New Local Sites and Paying for Content

Kara Swisher — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:34:46 +0000

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington was in Berkeley this past weekend, keynoting at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp 2009.

So, BoomTown took the opportunity to motor over the Bay Bridge to catch Huffington on video between sessions, talking about all the big changes at the news Web site of late.

The interview includes the replacement of its CEO with well-known media exec Eric Hippeau, the launch today of another of its local sites–this time, New York–in an effort to move beyond politics, and what she thinks about the controversies around paying for content on the Web.

Here’s the interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Interviews Arianna, Ken and Eric About Huffington Post Exec Changes: BAM!!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:18:43 +0000

Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them this afternoon, after news of the change got out–even as they praised Morgan for the strong work she had done in the 18 months she had been in charge.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the Web news site (and pictured above).

“Things are going great, but things could be going even greater,” added Lerer, who is chairman of the Huffington Post, noting that a more experienced exec was needed at this juncture to take the business to the next level.

“Eric is a peer at all the big companies we need to partner and deal with…and right now, while things are difficult in the economy, is the time when you can really build a company and we had to take advantage of that opportunity.”

So, ipso facto, Morgan was out in favor of Hippeau, who was the key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

Hippeau is a director on its small board, which also includes Huffington, Lerer and Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman. Morgan will be vacating her board seat.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, money that Lerer and Huffington said had not been used yet.

But it soon will be, both noted, with the site expanding aggressively into the local arena, investigative news and verticals such as tech.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, said Huffington, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Hippeau (pictured here) has a lot of experience working at a panoply of early online media businesses, including as CEO of Ziff-Davis.

He has also been a longtime Web investor, pushing for SoftBank’s early investment in Yahoo (YHOO), where Hippeau remains a board member.

That should not present a conflict for Yahoo, said Hippeau, which had a short-lived publishing partnership with the Huffington Post.

Hippeau, who has been a managing partner at SoftBank, will become a special partner and adviser to the investment firm. In this capacity, he will continue to work with three start-ups–Buddy Media, BuzzFeed and ThumbPlay.

Hippeau, who is now diving back into an operating role for the first time in almost a decade, said it was hard to pass up the chance to run the New York-based Huffington Post.

“I could not pass such an opportunity, especially with the explosion in the delivery of the news and opinion on the Web,” he said. “This is really the place to build the next really big brand.”

To get to that level, Hippeau said that a lot of things have to happen at the site going forward.

“Clearly we have got to make the revenues commensurate with traffic of the site and size of the opportunity,” he said. “At the same time, we have got to make sure we are very community-focused and using all kinds of new tools to increase engagement.”

Hippeau noted that journalism was changing radically, and “what people want to know is what are people thinking and how can I contribute and we are just at the beginning of this phase.”

Of particular interest to him are real-time data and real-time communications–on sites like Twitter–and the growth of smartphone usage.

“We are getting into a situation in the U.S., where it is so much easier to access all kinds of information and so much more portable,” said Hippeau. “Everyone has talked about convergence for a long time and it is finally here and we are poised to take great advantage of that.”

The moves at the Huffington Post were first reported by paidContent.org.

Huffington appeared onstage at the recent D: All Things Digital conference with Washington Post (WPO) publisher Katharine Weymouth.

Here is a highlights video of the interview I did with them:

[ See post to watch video ]

Twitter's a Big Baby! Apple iPhone's AT&T Problem! MySpace's Blues! No One's Gonna Pay for This Blog! Poll-Crazy at D7

Kara Swisher — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:48:06 +0000

Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!

Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.

For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.

PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.

One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)

Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)

Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)

Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)

In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.

Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:15:55 +0000

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Arianna Huffington Talks About New Managing Editor Singh!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:12:01 +0000

While in Los Angeles today at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, BoomTown ran smack into blogging empress Arianna Huffington.

She was there to give a speech called “Video Killed the Radio Star…But Can the Web Actually Save Journalism?”

Her answer was a decided yes, especially with great journalists working online, such as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post, whom the mega-blog has just hired.

That would be former CNET Networks Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh (pictured here), who quit the tech news and reviews company last year after a dozen-year run.

“The bottom line is the Huffington Post has figured out how new media should be…and that’s what attracted and appealed to me,” said Singh in an interview today.

While only on the job for a few days, he noted that he will be looking at more video on the site, as well as focusing on its new vertical strategy.

Singh is moving from San Francisco to New York, where the Huffington Post HQ is located. (Huffington herself is, ironically, located in L.A., doing her work out of her Brentwood abode.)

Singh has been a true online news pioneer, creating News.com for CNET in 1996. CNET is now owned by CBS (CBS).

Here’s my video interview with Huffington, talking about Singh’s appointment and the future of the news business:

[ See post to watch video ]

When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do (As in, No Twittering or Much iPhoning)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:45:08 +0000

BoomTown’s visit to Italy has been eye-opening in a lot of ways, not the least of which is to be reminded that not everyone in the world is jacked into the matrix 24/7.

In other words, Julius Caesar conquered Rome, but Twitter definitely has not.

In fact, the conference being held here is aptly called “Tutto Cambio, Cambiamo Tutto?” (I came here to interview Huffington Post editrix Arianna Huffington and LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman onstage about innovation and online trends.)

That roughly translates into “Everything changes, let’s change everything?”

This is not a question that is much asked in Silicon Valley, which changes just like the weather, embracing change for change’s sake.

But here, whether or not to change is much more of a debate–one in which change does not always come out on top.

Internet penetration is much lower here than elsewhere in Europe, as is everything from per capita computer ownership to online advertising spending. Television still dominates most media.

“We’re 2,000 years old” is something you hear a lot from people as an explanation for approaching everything, from social networking to iPhones to anything interactive, with some wariness.

While most people here note that they like Facebook, prounounced “FAY-sa BOO-ka,” hardly anyone sees the point of Web 2.0’s trend du jour, Twitter (“TWEE-tur”).

In fact, few have heard of it, and those who have don’t use it.

And while several people have iPhones, no one seems over the moon about the Apple (AAPL) phenom or captivated by its potential to herald Web 3.0 as the mobile revolution.

In any case, here is a video I did, speaking to both Huffington (here is her blog on the event) and Hoffman, as well as to several Italians at the conference:

[ See post to watch video ]

Romeward Bound

Kara Swisher — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:07:33 +0000

BoomTown is winging toward Italy this weekend to participate in an interesting gathering about digital and other issues related to innovation.

The once-every-seven-year conference apparently gathers all of Italy’s most powerful leaders, companies, and brands to discuss the future of their businesses and the changing nature of the relationships between companies, consumers and brands.

This year focuses on disruption and change, with the event titled: “Tutto cambia. Cambiamo tutto?”

That roughly translates to: Everything changes. But do we change everything?”

Si, cari i miei geek italiani!

While there, I will be conducting an onstage interview with Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington and another with LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman.

I honestly know next to nothing about Italy and the Web except that one of the country’s prosecutors recently decided to sue Google (GOOG) for defamation and breach of privacy over a nasty video it hosted.

But here are some interesting items I found today:

From Scientific American:

“Concerned that Christians are not entering the Lenten season (which began last week on Ash Wednesday) with the proper spirit, some clergy are calling on their flock to nix text messaging for the next six Fridays leading up to Easter on April 12. Christians are annually asked to refrain from eating meat on Fridays and to pray more regularly during Lent, but the church has apparently gotten hip to the hold that technology has on its brethren. The diocese of Modena-Nonantola in Italy in particular is calling for text-messaging-free Fridays as a way for the faithful to at least temporarily rid themselves of reminders of “material wealth,” but the church is also calling for such digital abstinence in the name of human rights.

The diocese, in a statement on its Web site (translated from Italian to English using Google’s translation software) notes that 80 percent of the mineral coltan–a metallic ore used to make used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones, DVD players, and computers–comes from Kivu, the war-ravaged eastern region of the Congo, where “civil war has caused more than 4 million deaths in the last ten [sic] years.” The diocese says that the extraction and trade of coltan by Western industry has helped fuel warfare in this region of Africa (a statement, they say, backed by a 2003 United Nations report).”

From ANSA.it:

“One out of four Italians have been a victim of identity theft at one time in their lives and one out of two of these discovered this by looking at their bank statements, according to a new report.

Drawn up by the consumer group Audiconsum, the report found that Italians are otherwise savvy about new forms of financial fraud and only 15.5 percent of the population has fallen victim to phishing, fraudulent emails from alleged banks and credit companies seeking financial and personal data for criminal purposes.”

From Billboard:

“According to data gathered by the auditors Deloitte on behalf of the major labels’ representative body FIMI in Italy, music sales (CDs, music, DVDs and digital) fell by 21 percent in 2008.

Total sales (after returns) were worth €178 million ($223.7 million) in 2008, as opposed to €224 million ($281.5 million) in 2007.

According to a FIMI statement, total turnover in Italy in 2008 returned to the same level of 1989.”

Of course, I will be there ferreting out my own info about the Italian Web scene, in an abbondanza of text and videos.

But until I post from there, here’s a trailer from one of my old favorite cheesy movies, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” (Hello, Rossano Brazzi!):

The "Billionaires' Dinner" at TED: Readjusted for the 2009 Econalyspe

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:13:43 +0000

Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.

Indeed, Brockman now calls the event the “Edge Dinner,” after his lively Edge Web site, where he presides over a variety of eclectic online debates and discussions (in January, for example, the topic was: “DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?”).

Since I managed to miss the fete entirely (embarrassing confession: I fell dead asleep at 7 p.m. and did not wake until the next morning) and could not chronicle it, Brockman allowed me to post some photos from the event taken by him and by former Microsoft research guru and current intellectual property mogul Nathan Myhrvold.

Here are some, and you can see the rest here (click on the images to make them larger):

Google co-founder Larry Page and Applied Minds’ Danny Hillis

Former AOL kingpin and Revolution Health’s Steve Case and Jean Case, Case Foundation

Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Neoteny’s Joi Ito

Nathan Myhrvold, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates and DEKA’s Dean Kamen

New Media Nabobs Tim O’Reilly and Arianna Huffington

Here's the Official HuffPost $25 Million Funding Press Release

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:06:09 +0000

Here’s the official press release from the popular news and blogging site, The Huffington Post, which announced $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners this morning.

(BoomTown’s story on the funding is here, along with an interview with Oak’s Fred Harman)

Sources told BoomTown the investment gives the site–which had 4.5 million unique visitors in September, a quadrupling from a year ago–a valuation of “south of $100 million.”

Here’s the official release:

The Huffington Post Announces $25 Million In Funding From Oak Investment Partners

New York, NY (December 1, 2008)–The Huffington Post, a leading news and opinion site, today announced that it has secured $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The Huffington Post (”HuffPost”) will use the proceeds to invest in the growth of the company and for select and focused acquisitions. The company said it would invest in its technology and infrastructure, increase its in-house advertising capabilities, and continue to expand its content offerings–including a new investigative journalism initiative and a rollout of local versions of The Huffington Post in select cities. The announcement was made by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, co-founders of The Huffington Post.

“This commitment from Oak Investment Partners will allow us to accelerate our growth, with more verticals, more video, more citizen journalism initiatives, more cities for our local editions, and a fund for investigative journalism,” said Arianna Huffington. “We are particularly excited to have Fred Harman of Oak join our board; his deep knowledge of the new media landscape will help us to take HuffPost to the next level.”

Said Kenneth Lerer: “We are thrilled to bring on board a partner like Oak to work with Softbank Capital and Greycroft [Partners] as we move forward. Since launching the site three and half years ago, the company has built a strong brand and an audience of millions who rely on the site for its mix of smart news and opinion. The additional capital from Oak will enable us to go full-steam ahead with operations and select acquisitions.”

Fred Harman, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, said, “Much of the news media business needs to be reassembled online around an ad-supported model and the timetable for this has been accelerated, not slowed, by this economic down cycle. We believe that The Huffington Post has built a platform and business model to be among the leaders in aggregating this audience online. Our financing will provide the resources necessary to scale the company, both organically as well as through acquisitions of additional talent and new media companies. We are also very excited to have the opportunity to back Arianna, Betsy, and the company’s strong entrepreneurial team.”

Betsy Morgan, CEO of The Huffington Post, said, “With funding from Oak, The Huffington Post is perfectly positioned to build on its incredible growth. Oak brings to the table a team with enormous experience and insight, and we look forward to working with them to seize the opportunities ahead of us.”

The Series C financing round comes as The Huffington Post continues to experience significant growth following the expansion of the site in 2007, when HuffPost began rolling out a variety of new sections, including entertainment, politics, media, living, style and green. The site also started its first local version, HuffPost Chicago. This year, The Huffington Post received widespread attention for its original reporting on the 2008 presidential race, including the coverage provided by its OffTheBus team of citizen journalists. HuffPost currently has 46 employees.

Harman joins The Huffington Post board of directors, whose members include: Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner of Softbank Capital, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Betsy Morgan.

Huffington Post Nabs $25 Million in Funding–Here's a BoomTown Interview With Oak Investment's Fred Harman

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:53:26 +0000

The Huffington Post will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

Kara Visits "The Future of the Internet" Book Party!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:29 +0000

This past Saturday night, BoomTown attended the tony San Francisco book party for Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.”

It was hosted by megablogger Arianna Huffington and Melanie Ellison, an old friend of Zittrain’s from high school, as it turned out.

And BoomTown took our Flip video camera, of course.

For one, it was held at Ellison’s stunning Pacific Heights home, with a lot of Internet and San Francisco wattage in attendance, including Melanie’s husband, Larry Ellison, and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

By the way, Zittrain is professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

And the book is actually not about stopping the Web–perish the thought, as what would I do with my life without my beloved Internet, which I would marry if it were legal?

Instead, according to Zittrain, my beloved Web is in deep, deep trouble!

He is justifiably worried about innovation continuing and the book is a bracing call to fix some of the Internet’s serious structural and other problems, before it collapses in a giant heap of too-tightly controlled mundanity.

I’m for that! Let Web Wackiness Worldwide (WWW!) reign!

In that spirit, here is a video of the party, in which I ask everyone the key question: What is the future of the Internet?

The video includes some book party speeches and thoughts from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Zittrain and, of course, Huffington (and I also got her to impersonate Tracey Ullman impersonating Arianna to up the wacky quotient) .

And also three Internet clowns trying to impersonate me. Wackier still!

Here’s the video (there is an odd voice/video disconnect in the Zittrain and clown sections at the very end that I am trying to fix):

[ See post to watch video ]

Blogs and Kisses!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:01:04 +0000

Here is a clip from my favorite new television show, “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union,” which recently debuted on Showtime.

The British comedian does spot-on impressions of average people and the errant celebrity too, including a pitch-perfect one (right down to yelling for her sister Agape) of blogger Arianna Huffington with the signature line: Blogs and Kisses!

And in this video, accepting an award at the Bloggies, the hysterical moment when Ullman/Huffington tells a competing right-wing blogger to have her “YouTubes tied.”

Here’s the video and also the promotional one for the show that is pretty funny too: