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BoomTown

Friday, September 11, 2009

Yahoo’s Bartz (No. 8), Facebook’s Sandberg (No. 22), Google’s Mayer (No. 44) and More Techies Make Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women List

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Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey that it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8, along with a lot of other tech-savvy women in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

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Thursday, September 3, 2009

Fancy Bar Graphs of the Week: Zero Surprise–the Youngs Love New Media More Than the Olds

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This week, in its annual survey of consumer technology attitudes and adoption, titled “The State of Consumers and Technology,” Forrester Research found that…wait for it, wait for it…the kids love the Internet!

As for the olds–they like their traditional media stories and they’re sticking to them.

It’s only at the Weather Channel where online and offline media live together under blue skies.

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

A Preview of Time Warner Earnings: Bummer at AOL, Bummer at Magazines–Just a Bummer

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When Time Warner reports its second -quarter earnings tomorrow morning, before the markets open, most Wall Street analysts are not expecting much from the media giant, as it continues to slog toward a rejiggering of itself.

Time Warner–which owns assets like the Warner Bros. movie studio, the AOL online unit, the HBO and Turner cable networks and Time Inc. magazines–is expected to earn 37 cents per share, compared to 72 cents a year ago, according to a poll of analysts from Thomson Reuters.

Revenue is expected to be $6.97 billion, down from $11.56 billion in the same quarter last year. This drop is mostly due to the March spinoff of its cable unit, Time Warner Cable.

But AOL and its magazine unit are expected to continue to drag on Time Warner’s financial performance.

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Liveblogging Fortune Brainstorm Tech: Disney CEO Bob Iger Has “One Hand in the Present and One Hand in the Future”

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Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, is the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Viral Video: Next Week on “Entourage”…The Exact Same Plot, Over and Over

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Why can’t BoomTown stop watching the dopey machinations of the boys of “Entourage”?

Because, it’s always more of the same on the popular HBO show, which is oddly comforting–a revelation that College Humor mocks perfectly in a very funny online video called “Every Week on Entourage.”

“So many twists and turns, you’ll forget they’ve been using the same formula for five seasons,” explains the humor site.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Liberty Media Chairman John Malone: The Full D7 Session

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As many already know, John Malone has been a cable legend since he first ran Tele-Communications Inc. back in the early 1970s. His influence put most cable channels on the map and his forceful business skills willed cable into becoming a key consumer medium for entertainment and news.

Malone talked about that experience onstage at the seventh D: All Thing Digital conference and how it mirrors what is going on now as more content is being distributed on the Internet. You should listen, because Malone is a genuine media pioneer who could teach Web players a thing or two.

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Friday, April 24, 2009

Project Playlist Names Former MTV Exec Sykes as CEO, Replacing Van Natta

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Legendary former MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes will replace outgoing CEO Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.

He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp.

Sykes is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.

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Thursday, April 16, 2009

I Can’t Believe I Am Now Following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter (Though His Smackdown of CNN Was Sweet)

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Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel passed the million mark soon after, but was still second.

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

Kutcher vs. CNN was a race to get one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Now, I am worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (”G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Promise of Broadband–Is the Umpteenth Time a Charm?

In an article in The Wall Street Journal today comes the news that “President-elect Barack Obama’s call to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure has cable and phone company lobbyists maneuvering to get a leg up.”

To BoomTown, this is akin to Scrooge making his overnight transformation, except without any soul, sincerity or true intent to actually care about the consumer.

God help us, everyone.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Beam Me Up, Scotty Hologram on CNN: Cool or Creepy?

BoomTown has finally gotten used to the silly gee-gaws television networks use on election night, like touchscreen maps and drawing all over the screen and jump-up numbers.

But one used by cable network CNN last night–a hologram of a various people beamed into the studio to look like they were right there with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper–was downright freaky.

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With TiVo’s Tom Rogers (4 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with TiVo President and CEO Tom Rogers about the iconic but often-struggling pioneer and leader in the digital video recorder market.

This is part four of four parts.

In it, Rogers takes questions from the audience about difficulties in installing TiVo with new cable cards, watching television over the Internet, TiVo’s plans internationally, and other subjects.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With TiVo’s Tom Rogers (3 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with TiVo President and CEO Tom Rogers about the iconic but often-struggling pioneer and leader in the digital video recorder market.

This is part three of four parts.

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With TiVo’s Tom Rogers (2 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with TiVo President and CEO Tom Rogers about the iconic but often-struggling pioneer and leader in the digital video-recorder market.

This is part two of four parts.

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Friday, September 5, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer (4 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s the fourth and final part of an interview Walt Mossberg did with Sony Chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer.

The consumer electronics giant has been under enormous pressure to innovate and compete better in all its many businesses, and still has not proved it can knit them all together into a cogent whole.

In this video, Stringer takes questions from the audience about audio quality, cable versus telephone, software and iTunes.

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes (3 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview I did with Time Warner’s CEO Jeff Bewkes.

As you will see, Bewkes is a live wire, sassing me about the hard time I was giving him about the rough road AOL has had as a Time Warner property.

In this video, Bewkes talks about the digitization of its HBO premium cable channel and also its television and movie businesses and the challenges of making of original content online.

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About Kara

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.

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Ethics Statement

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.

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