While in Washington, D.C., BoomTown can’t just visit the policy wonks from Internet companies, so I paid a visit to Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group that works to promote privacy and protection online.
In other words, a professional–and much needed–thorn in the side of Facebook, Google and these days, MicroHoo.
Yahoo and Microsoft are poised to finally sign the definitive agreement that will govern the complex and far-reaching search and online advertising partnership they struck in late July, said sources close to the situation.
If all goes well, the various Microsoft and Yahoo execs–who have been ferreted away over the last weeks, busy dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s in the massive document–could even turn in the delayed deal homework to their bosses for signature by the end of the week.
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.
It certainly is good to see Microsoft working the innovation thing, especially in the consumer space with its Bing search service.
The ultimate goal is to gain market share for Bing, from striking deals with hotter companies like Twitter and Facebook to doing a massive advertising and marketing campaign to making constant feature upgrades.
This is one of those weeks for Bing, with the launch of a spate of new features that show a lot of chutzpah.
But whether all this will spell significant changes in market share compared to dominant rival Google is still an open question.
The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.
That would be Apple, of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.
For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight.
Yahoo has hired a new head of mergers and acquisitions–former General Electric M&A exec Andrew Siegel, who will now be VP of corporate development.
Yahoo CFO Tim Morse dropped the news with no details about that title in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s third-quarter earnings.
One question apparently not answered was what exactly is the status of its current top M&A exec, Greg Mrva–who has had the title Siegel now has posted on his LinkedIn profile–as well as that of VP of mergers and acquisitions more recently.
For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.
Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.
Here’s a chat I had with new President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman about how he is aiming to do just that.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about the status of the regulatory investigation for the Microsoft-Yahoo search and online advertising pact, which most expect to get approved.
One of the few vocal critics of the deal, though, is Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group, who lobbed MicroHoo some important questions.
Here are the answers.
Unlike the gripping back and forth of the fight over Yahoogle last year, the approval process for the search and online advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo is chugging along slowly but surely as the Justice Department has deepened its investigation by reaching out to a broad range of publishers, advertisers, public interest groups and rivals for comment recently.
But, so far, there is still no significant external challenge to the MicroHoo deal, even from Google, the likeliest company to try to scuttle or, at the very least, slow down the deal.
In other words: Zzzzzzzzzzz…
In the ongoing fight between Redbox–which rents DVDs from kiosks for $1–and major Hollywood studios, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment just filed a brief to dismiss Redbox’s lawsuit against it.
The fascinating legal battle between Redbox and the studios centers around the issues of steep discounting, windowing and the price for premium content.
There’s no question that Spotify is the latest hot start-up of the moment, which would be super annoying to BoomTown–who is easily irked by never-ending froth around Web 2.0 companies–if co-founder Daniel Ek were not so sharp and the digital-music-on-demand service he created not so nifty.
But, indeed, Ek turned out to be a very refreshing and level-headed serial entrepreneur in an interview I had with him yesterday in London.
Here’s the video.
According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.
Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and more to come.
The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.
Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.
According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant. With consumers, the Internet giant will push the idea of being a key hub on the Web.
The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference with senior Yahoo execs, including CEO Carol Bartz.
In a risky but interesting move that has some at the company nervous and others excited, Yahoo is in the process of moving key development responsibility for its juggernaut Yahoo News unit to Taiwan.
Under the new system, product management, engineering and user interface design for one of Yahoo’s flagship properties will become the responsibility of staffers there.
Editorial employees for Yahoo News–which is the No. 1 news site on the Web with 48.4 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore data –will remain in the U.S., largely located at its Santa Monica, Calif., office.
Yahoo confirmed the change to BoomTown yesterday.
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.
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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