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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Friending Without Benefits? But Facebook Keeps On Forging Into the Mobile Market!

Facebook, which has been very busy ferreting away to get a presence on all the big cellphone makers, is in talks with mobile handset giant Nokia about integrating the hot social-networking site on its phones.

Its deals like this–as well as building its popular Facebook app for smartphones like the BlackBerry from Research in Motion and the iPhone from Apple–that are spurring huge market share growth in the arena by Facebook.

And there are more deals to come, with cellphone makers like Palm and Motorola, as the smartphone market keeps heating up.

Too bad for fast-growing Facebook and others that there’s no money to be made yet.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Kara Visits Sundance and Interviews Hurley, Hastings and Kilar

Here’s a longish video BoomTown did over the weekend at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

I was there to moderate a panel on Saturday titled, “Where Do We Go From Here? Icons of the Digital Age,” with YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings.

I did interviews with each of them here, as well as a chat with my only indie celebrity friend, Jane Lynch, some scenes from the festival and an intro and outro from my own little stars, Louie and Alex Swisher.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Yahoo’s Peter (Chernin) Principle–And Other CEO Choices

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…

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Monday, June 30, 2008

The Entire D6 Interview With News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch (Part 1 of 6)

Sorry for the delay, but we’ll finally start posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May in their entirety.

Kicking off the proceedings will be what most of the attendees at the conference told us they considered their favorite interview, which Walt Mossberg and I did with News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Here’s Part 1 of 6 of the Murdoch interview.

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Thursday, June 19, 2008

Welcome to ATD, Therese–and a Belated Welcome to Eric

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added columnist Therese Poletti to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Dear Disgruntled Yahoos, Microsoft Is Hiring!

Microsoft took out a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News today, in an attempt to highlight its recruiting efforts in Silicon Valley.

Of course, BoomTown is not sure the crack engineers that Microsoft is seeking actually read newspapers, but we like the software giant’s spunk at a little creative Google-smacking and Yahoo-employee-baiting.

With the headline: “Microsoft Has Search Jobs in the Valley,” the ad goes on to tout Microsoft’s commitment to search and online advertising in a come-on to join the company’s 2,000 other employees in Mountain View, Calif.

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BoomTown’s Video Interview With LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye (November 2007)

Back in November, I did a video interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye about the fast-growing, in-play business social network.

We talked about the future of LinkedIn and what it all means.

As BoomTown noted then, LinkedIn was the “‘professional’ social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook.”

But that more dour productivity image certainly did not prevent it from getting a very happy $1 billion valuation yesterday and $53 million in new funding.

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Monday, May 12, 2008

AllThingsD: All Things (Re-)Designed!

dsymbol

Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Happy 1-Year Birthday for AllThingsD.com

If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to also capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

“Like It or Not: You’re in the Media Business” ATD Reader Discount

One of AllThingsD.com’s greatest friends–integral to its creation, in fact–has been Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and former president of the Dow Jones Consumer Media Group.

Crovitz knows a thing or two about the transition mainstream media has been making to new media and, more importantly, was never scared of the change. [...]

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Welcome Rupe! How’s That Gemstar Deal (Not) Working Out?

The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.
It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization [...]

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Monday, December 10, 2007

The Never-Ending Story: The Writers’ Strike Continues

With the entertainment industry reeling from weakness brought on by changing viewers’ watching habits due to the Internet, the news of the talks to end the writers’ strike collapsing on Friday can’t be a good thing for Hollywood.
With the strike now in its sixth week, the studio reps–the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers–and [...]

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Friday, December 7, 2007

The Crazy Cousins Thank Gordon Crovitz

One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can mouth off on just about anything I want and include whatever I want too (such as, for example, shamelessly making videos of my kids in a fruitless attempt to try to cajole Yahoo’s Jerry Yang into having lunch with me).

Today, that [...]

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Thursday, December 6, 2007

More on Bill Keller’s Blog-Bashing and BoomTown’s Bill-Bashing

Earlier this week, I ranted on about a rant made by New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller.
Readers had a lot of thoughtful reactions.

To recap: Keller (pictured here) had taken wobbly aim at the Web and its bloggers, calling the Internet a “media tsunami” and too much of its fare “unreliable,” such as sites like [...]

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Thursday, November 29, 2007

LinkedIn’s Dan Nye Speaks!

The rumors have been a-flyin’ recently about the reported talks between LinkedIn and News Corp.
Billing itself as the “professional” social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook, the LinkedIn service is squarely aimed at those with a task in mind from networking to recruiting to career advancement.
In many ways, it [...]

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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. Read more »

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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