ABC certainly has been taking its sweet time in releasing the first episode of “V,” a sci-fi television series that debuted earlier this week on the Web in any substantial way.
The premiere of a redo of a 1980s miniseries about a lizardy alien invasion disguised as a peace mission by outerspace hotties turned out to be a big broadcast hit, but it is hard to watch online.
Until tomorrow, that is.
Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming videogame-to-live-action Disney fantasy adventure movie, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.”
It still looks an awful lot like a videogame and is chock full of special effects–but the adaptation also seems to feature much in the way of shirtlessness and mascara-wearing on the part of star Jake Gyllenhaal.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”
Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.
According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.
That would be welcome news for many.
If you want to get Hollywood movie studio types irked, mention Google. And if you want them steamed, bringing up Netflix will usually work.
But if you want to see the tops of their heads blow off, Redbox is just the ticket.
Except not to their movies, it seems, if the major movie studio execs have their way in an ever-growing legal battle with the DVD-rental kiosk company.
A typical consumer named Louie Swisher, though, begs to differ.
A few weeks ago, when I was having breakfast with legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen about his new venture fund, he talked about what he thought was critical to being successful as an Internet company.
Ticking off names, from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen said he always favored technical entrepreneurs for one key reason: “You need someone who lives and breathes product.”
It’s a refrain I have heard a lot recently from a wide range of people in the sector, most especially when talking about two of the more challenging renovations of key Internet brands going on of late.
That would be: Yahoo and MySpace.
Here is BoomTown’s first video from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which kicked off last night with a keynote speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
So far, it’s been a definitely thinner crowd, a reflection of the weaker economy.
But CES is still a reliably noisy, often pointless, gadget cavalcade–with introduction of a new smartphone from Palm, called Pre, as the highlight so far.
With so many more ex-Yahoos out there now, BoomTown put out feelers to a range of them to ask whom they would like to run the company they no longer work for. After all, who better than to pick a new CEO than an ex? The response was swift and varied wildly, depending on which way the ex-Yahoo felt the company should go, from a basic turnaround expert to–drum roll, please–his digital Holiness, Steve Jobs of Apple. No kidding.
While recently in Los Angeles, I paid another visit on Jason Kilar, who has been quietly making the Hulu premium online video service one of the brightest spots in the Web 2.0 space. The joint venture between News Corp. and General Electric media unit NBC Universal has shown an astonishing growth since its launch in late 2007. Yesterday, for example, comScore reported that it had risen to No. 6 in online video market share in October, after big players like Google’s YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo and in front of Disney and AOL. Here’s my latest video interview with Kilar about it all.
Obviously, the dream CEO for Yahoo is News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin.
And, no surprise, he is the No. 1 choice of most inside and outside Yahoo in the wake of the news late yesterday that its current CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang is stepping down.
Well, Yahoo would certainly be a challenge for Chernin, in terms of a corporate cleanup challenge, especially compared to figuring out how to make bank on plush toys from “The Simpsons.”
But there are many other contenders for the job, despite the slog it could be. Here’s BoomTown’s list…
As former Disney CEO and online video investor Michael Eisner said in a recent onstage Q&A appearance about what works for video on the Web: “Sex seems to work. User-generated, sports, news, anything with Sarah Palin works.”
Indeed, anything with Sarah Palin.
Here is the latest Internet effort, an unusual interactive site called PalinAsPresident in which you click on various items in the Oval Office, where Palin is sitting behind the desk, to hear funny remarks from her.
Today comes news that jumping-on-prone California Attorney General Jerry Brown is thinking of climbing onto the federal government bandwagon heading right for the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., to stop the search giant’s online ad deal with Yahoo.
Brown joins big advertisers, newspapers and whatever mudslingers Microsoft can gather (and, let it be said, Microsoft can sling a lot of slimy mud).
While Google would by no means control a lot of Yahoo’s search ads, the fact that the pair together have an 80 percent share of the search market apparently frightens ordinary mortals.
Maybe it should.
It is absolutely worrisome that Yahoo’s share price continued its downward swirl today, closing at a five-year low today at $17.75.
The downward drift far from the it-can’t-drop-below-$20 barrier makes it clear that Wall Street is valuing the company at close to what it could sell its assets off for and not much more and this obviously puts additional pressure on the already squashed-down Yahoo management to perform.
In fact, with all this pressure, you’d think Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang would have turned into a twin of the cursed Hope Diamond by now.
Recently, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, I caught up with Veoh Founder Dmitry Shapiro.
BoomTown will be focusing a lot on online video this year and Veoh is one of the several online video sharing sites–a group of smaller players that includes sites like Joost, Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others that I like to call not-YouTube.
Still, it is making progress.
Today, the Los Angeles-based Veoh announced that the ABC television network would put full episodes of its hot primetime shows–such as “Ugly Betty” (love it) and “Desperate Housewives” (not so much)–up on the site.
We had this video hidden away in Voices today, but BoomTown had to let it run free some more!
Why?
Can you say Wookie dancing to “Footloose” and Darth Vader to “Thriller”?
Frankly, that’s all I need to achieve nirvana.
And we are not even going to explain why Princess Leia dancing to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is simply divine.
As Yahoo continues to be in limbo, pressure is sure to mount heavily on its CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang, and it is not a stretch to imagine he will not remain in the top job at the troubled company for the long term.
So who would be good to replace him?
I have six candidates I like, so here’s my short list (and remember, the last time I made one for the job of the No. 2 leader for Facebook, its current COO Sheryl Sandberg was high on my list).
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.
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