Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

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 Palm soon saw its business gobbled up by the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM) and the iPhone from Apple (AAPL). And, of course, there is the G1 phone from Google (GOOG) too, along with competition from Nokia (NOK) and many others.

And Palm is following the less-than-stellar last launch of the Foleo in 2007.

Thus, the company and the private equity firm have banked a lot on this revival, so McNamee was out in full force at CES in Las Vegas, talking up the Pre.

The Pre launch was indeed the highlight of the show, and also gave Palm’s moribund stock a boost.

And, indeed, the Pre does look pretty cool, with a sleek design and a new operating system, although the real proof will be when it debuts to consumers later this year.

In any case, here is the always hopped-up McNamee giving it his best for the Pre:

But when it comes to top Google exec Sheryl Sandberg taking over as COO at Facebook, apparently a very influential person in the move was Marc Bodnick (pictured here).

While Bodnick’s Elevation Partners colleague Roger McNamee–both are named on its site as managing directors and co-founders of the private equity firm–has been cited correctly as being key to hooking up Sandberg with Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg noted that Bodnick’s enthusiasm was critically infectious.

“Marc has been a real Facebook proponent for a long time and really understood first exactly how powerful a medium it was,” said Sandberg in an interview with BoomTown last week of her brother-in-law. “He really was a great influence on me.”

Of course, Bodnick would be–he serves on the board of popular Facebook developer iLike and, perhaps more importantly, is a personal investor in Facebook.

“Sheryl is a tremendous leader who has the chops in both online ads and monetization,” said Bodnick. “All of the problems of these social-networking business models are all new, and she natively knows how to deal with them.”

Sandberg (pictured here) just cleared out six years of detritus from her desk at Google (GOOG) Friday and is taking two weeks off before starting in her new and highly touted job as the COO of Facebook on March 24.

The appointment of Sandberg, news of which was broken in BoomTown (our motto: embargo-a-no-no), got a lot of attention, most especially because she is such a high-ranking and experienced Internet executive.

While we posted a few interesting tidbits on Sandberg, as well as showing off a bit of her in a video BoomTown made this summer, she and I got in a quick phone interview before she took off.

As she has said, Sandberg was, in fact, already thinking about leaving Google before the Facebook offer materialized. She had earlier been approached by one traditional media company she will not name, in fact.

“I was not looking in a big way, but I was seeking a new challenge either internally or externally after six years at Google building the online sales team,” she said.

Sandberg noted that when she came back from a recent maternity leave for her second child, she was struck by how well her No. 2, David Fischer, who is taking over for her now, managed a strong team.

“The team was in great shape and I felt like it was time for change for me,” she said.

And a good time for Zuckerberg to make an approach, which happened at a holiday party thrown by former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig. Ironically in the small world of Silicon Valley, the pair had never met before.

Still, Sandberg said she had been a longtime fan of the Facebook social-networking service and an early user.

“I used it a lot for family groups, following election coverage from my friends in D.C. and to share a lot of information,” she said.

At the party, Sandberg and Zuckerberg started talking about this, as well as how to scale organizations–you know, fun holiday chatter!–an area in which Facebook has been in dire need of help.

Zuckerberg asked Sandberg if they could continue the conversation, and over a series of dinners they discussed the company and its challenges.

“It was very philosophical at first and we did not ever talk about a specific job,” said Sandberg of the half-dozen or more meals they shared, mostly at her home in Atherton, Calif.

The pair moved closer to specific talks after spending even more time together at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, the tony annual gathering where the world’s elite gather to ogle each other.

It did not take long after that for the deal to be struck for Sandberg to come to Facebook, where she will have purview over large and important swatches of the company, especially public policy and sales.

“I think Facebook has a huge and unique opportunity to expand and have even more influence, if it leverages its amazing product in the right way,” said Sandberg. “Its biggest challenge is the same, though, and that is, do consumers like it and does it help people share information in the best way possible?”

While Sandberg says she knows the heat and hype around its $15 billion valuation attract attention, she thinks the company needs to focus on scaling operationally, scaling geographically and scaling monetization, and the rest will take care of itself.

“Our goal is to get more and more users using it and more and more of those users using it more and more,” said Sandberg in a tongue-twister of a new motto for Facebook. “Does that make sense?”

Incredibly, it does. Now, it will be Sandberg’s job to actually pull it off.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. ]]> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080310/almost-new-facebook-coo-sheryl-sandberg-speaks/feed/ 4 http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070522/kara-visits-elevation-partners-roger-mcnamee-with-no-bono/ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070522/kara-visits-elevation-partners-roger-mcnamee-with-no-bono/#comments Tue, 22 May 2007 10:29:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070522/kara-visits-elevation-partners-roger-mcnamee-with-no-bono/ So, in getting back into the swing of things, I have been paying visits to various and sundry players around the Web industry, and there’s probably no better place to land than in the offices of Roger McNamee, a voluble longtime investor in the sector.