When in San Diego recently, BoomTown paid a visit to Qualcomm and its Chairman and CEO, Paul Jacobs, to talk about a new “smartbook” device the wireless-technology company unveiled last week, but that won’t make its debut until the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January.

There, Jacobs will show off what is essentially a combination of a smartphone and a netbook.

Obviously, it’s going to be a competitive market and, really, Apple, with its upcoming tablet computer, is also pushing into this mobile-phone-that-ate-computers space.

Read More »

Yesterday, BoomTown traveled to the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center–and it was not even time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show!

Instead, I was attending BlogWorld Expo, an annual event for bloggers of all kinds–from military bloggers to political bloggers to a roving pack of mommy bloggers–who gather to find out about all kinds of social media software and tools and, most importantly, how to monetize their sites.

Needless to say, it was blogtastic!

Read More »

Yahoo’s top mobile exec, Marco Boerries, is departing Yahoo, according to an internal email obtained by BoomTown that he sent to some staffers on Sunday.

I have also since confirmed Boerries’s departure with company insiders familiar with the situation.

In a post on Monday on a restructuring at Yahoo that new CEO Carol Bartz is likely to unveil to the company this week–sources tell me it is now set to be announced internally tomorrow–I noted that Boerries was one of the more likely high-level execs to go.

“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!,” Boerries wrote, attributing his departure in an email titled “Personal Update,” to issues related to his family.

Read More »

While attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, BoomTown moderated what turned out to be a fascinating panel discourse of what was to come in the tech sector.

No, it was not akin to a gathering of Trekkies.

The SuperSession panel, titled: “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025,” was less Spock than a logical analysis of where gadgetry is headed by looking at both the past and the present.

Here’s a video with the panelists giving their predictions.

Read More »

As BoomTown did last year, I took to the much-less-crowded floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week with tech review kingpin Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret to get their take on the scene.

Of interest to Walt was the Palm Pre launch and the Yahoo Connected TV initiative. For Katie, it was a $2,000 cellphone.

Here’s the video of their ruminations.

Read More »

BoomTown did a video interview with Palm’s sugar daddy investor Roger McNamee at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, after the debut of its Pre smartphone.

Via Elevation Partners, McNamee has invested a total of $425 million in Palm, aimed at reviving the company that pioneered the smartphone market, but lost its step to competitors.

Thus, Palm and the private equity firm have banked a lot on its new product, so McNamee was out in full force at CES in Las Vegas, talking up the Pre.

Read More »

BoomTown, MediaMemo, Personal Technology Godfather Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katie Boehret traveled to Las Vegas this week for the Consumer Electronics Show. They’re navigating the crowds in order to bring you the most important, the most interesting, and the most entertaining moments of the CES melee. They’ll probably have some interesting tidbits about boring stuff as well. All of our CES coverage will be centralized and updated in one place for the sake of convenience.

Read More »

BoomTown loves a good memo and here’s one that two of Microsoft’s top online execs, Yusuf Mehdi and Satya Nadella, sent out about the deal the tech giant signed with Dell and Verizon to distribute its search and other products.

Microsoft is opening its fat wallet to do such deal and try to best archrival Google.

Here’s the memo.

Read More »

With Macworld out of the way, a chunk of the crack All Things Digital squad is now winging its way both east and west to the annual gadgetopocalypse in Las Vegas, a.k.a. the Consumer Electronics Show.

Despite the fact that the show is feeling the pinch of the economy and that there are really no big products to speak of, CES is still one of the biggest and most important gatherings of the tech year.

Las Vegas turns into a geek moshpit every year, as legions of vendors, buyers, press and others converge to be overwhelmed for days by noise, long lines for cabs, keynotes, demos and more (like the Pussycat Dolls).

Read More »

Actually, it is always time for a dancing dog video.

That’s especially true before boarding the Southwest Airlines bus to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today and, thankfully, leaving behind the Steve-Is-Dead meme (but did you know if you spin an iPod wheel backwards, you can hear…).

But drudgery begone–bring on the cavorting canine!

Read More »

BoomTown is not saying it’s going to be like watching grass grow.

But 2009 is not exactly getting off to a rousing start this week–with two underwhelming blockbuster tech events taking place that already have more of an air of whimper than of bang to them.

That would be the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual egregious gadgetfest in Las Vegas, and the final appearance by Apple at Macworld.

Of course, while CES tries to fend off the spate of no-one-is-going-to-CES stories–well, I am!–the absence of his digital Holiness and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld has really generated most of the glumness.

Read More »

Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

Read More »

What else to watch on the day of Yahoo’s earnings call, but a six-part series, taken by a hand-held camera, at CEO Jerry Yang’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

While we did a bit of video in our post about the event, where Yahoo unveiled some interesting new mobile and email initiatives, this video person went to town and taped the whole shebang and posted it on YouTube (which is also known in Silicon Valley as the-company-Yahoo-whiffed-on-buying).

If you want to understand where and at what pace the Internet giant is going–ahead of earnings–it might be a good idea to consider this attempt to explain the revival attempts at Yahoo, which is vintage Yang.

Read More »

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 [...]

Read More »

BoomTown is usually never in sync with Wall Street analysts, given that their job is too often to sell people on companies and mine is to, well, tell on companies to people.

But I seem to be in violent agreement with Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay of late–at least with a recent report he just did [...]

Read More »