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Thursday, July 9, 2009

What Hath Flip Wrought?–The Ghoul Edition

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Earlier this week, BoomTown pointed out how Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers was captured doing duck calls on the Flip digital video camera, made by the start-up his company bought in March for $590 million.

That was an adorable use of the consumer electronic device. But in the not-so-cute department, I submit this photo at right.

Sitting next to her boss, Barbara Walters, an ABC producer used it to ghoulishly take shots of the kids of pop legend Michael Jackson memorial service on Monday.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Duck Call Stylings of Cisco’s John Chambers (No, Really, Duck Calls)

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What hath the Flip digital video camera wrought?

Well, for one, getting to see a major Silicon Valley tech exec do duck calls online, that’s what.

Cisco PR guy John Earnhardt, who is obviously studying technique from BoomTown’s shaky-cam video style, caught company CEO and Chairman John Chambers quacking away in his office.

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Thursday, July 2, 2009

Yahoo Product Head and CTO Ari Balogh Speaks!

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In BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh.

Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and, most of all, innovative manner.

To explain all this, Balogh sat down with me twice–he is clearly a glutton for punishment–to talk about where Yahoo stood as it sought to dig itself out of its long slump and reemerge as the potent Internet force it once was.

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Monday, June 15, 2009

Pure Digital: The Full D7 Demo

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Continuing our posting of the full sessions, in order of their presentation at the D: All Things Digital conference in late May, here is a video of the demo of new personal channels from Pure Digital, maker of the Flip digital camera.

Which is, as many readers of this column know, a key BoomTown accessory–with which I make my wobbly videos annoying various tech mandarins.

Pure Digital debuted its first Flip at a previous D conference and was recently sold to Cisco.

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Friday, June 12, 2009

Kara Visits The Lobby Party on Sand Hill Road (As Opposed to the Sandy Beaches of Hawaii)

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Last night, BoomTown went to a lovely party thrown by David Hornik, the August Capital VC who also runs The Lobby conference in his spare time.

He threw the event because those who attend the annual invitation-only gathering in Hawaii wanted to get together again during the year in Silicon Valley for even more schmoozing.

I went to the first Lobby in the fall of 2007, so Hornik let me in to have some pizza and beer at August’s offices on Sand Hill Road and use my Flip video to ask those in attendance where they thought the digital sector was in terms of the economy and innovation.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Apple Co-Founder and Dancing Fool Steve Wozniak Talks!

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Today, at the Silicom Summit at Stanford University, BoomTown was on a panel about consumer media, and right in a front seat paying rapt attention was Steve Wozniak.

It was the same Woz–the famous nickname of the Apple co-founder–who was also staring back last week at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference and taking it all in.

So, of course, I whipped out the Flip digital video camera and asked him some questions.

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Monday, June 1, 2009

More Mark Cuban (Trapped in the Green Room at D7 with BoomTown and the Flip Video Camera)!

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Last week, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed entrepreneur, high-definition television fanboy, dancing fool and reliable gadfly Mark Cuban at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

After our onstage interview, BoomTown also got him to be more specific about his thoughts on a variety of things he discussed, including Google’s underwriting of its YouTube video subsidiary, the problems with broadband and the Internet as a “utility.”

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

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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.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Kara Visits Twitter’s San FranTwittCo HQ!

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Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter?

Fooled you! Just testing to see if you’re paying complete attention to the relentless media attention on the Silicon Valley start-up of the moment!

Well, BoomTown is too, and that’s why I fired up the MINI and motored top-down on over to Twitter’s San Francisco HQ yesterday to get myself a tour of the place by none other than co-founder No-Biz-Like-No-Biz Stone.

Here’s the video.

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Monday, April 6, 2009

Pure Digital’s Jonathan Kaplan–aka the Flip Guy–Speaks (Post-Cisco)!

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BoomTown has been an unabashed fan of Pure Digital’s Flip digital video cameras since we debuted them at the D: All Things Digital conference in 2005.

And I have used the nifty device on this site since for my shaky-tastic video extravaganzas.

Yes, Pure Digital’s CEO Jonathan Kaplan is to blame!

Here is my video interview with him, which I did last week, in the wake of Pure Digital’s acquisition by Cisco for $590 million, in which we talk about what’s to come for my beloved Flip.

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Flip Flips to Cisco for $590 Million in Stock (Plus the Press Release)

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Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip digital video cameras, has sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock.

The deal, which had been rumored last week, was announced this morning by Cisco.

The simplicity of Pure Digital’s line of relatively inexpensive cameras has made it a huge consumer success, which is no easy task in the devices arena.

And Cisco has been trying to turbocharge its consumer-focused business and the move is a clear step in that direction.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

A New Flip Joins the BoomTown Video Family: High-Def Hijinks Ensue!

As you might know from Katherine Boehret’s review of Pure Digital Technologies’ newest Flip today, there is now a high-definition version of the popular digital video camera.

BoomTown has been using some version of the Flip for our videos since the site started almost two years ago to make our jiggly masterpieces about the tech scene.

Thus, here’s a video where my old Flips meet the new one in town.

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Monday, November 3, 2008

Web 2.0 Conference This Week–Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Jerry Yang, Mark Zuckerberg…and Lionel Richie?

On Wednesday, the annual Web 2.0 Summit kicks off in San Francisco.

The lineup is particularly good this year and it is also a perfect time to take the temperature of the Internet’s movers and shakers, given all the hubbub of late with the weak economy.

Speakers will include bicycle champ Lance Armstrong, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, former VP Al Gore, Google.org head Larry Brilliant, Paul Otellini of Intel and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others.

But, best of all for BoomTown, singer Lionel Richie will be performing at a MySpace Music party.

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Today in Mountain View: The Google Chrome Browser Is Released Into the Wild (and to the Wilding Media)

Later this morning, the media circus has been summoned to the Googleplex in Mountain View for a look-see at Google’s new Chrome browser and a chitchat with Google about the meaning of it all.

(Also, a 100 percent chance of both free comics and tasty organic snacks too!)

And Chrome, the shiny code name of the project, which stuck as the brand name, will also be going out to the world at large right after that.

BoomTown will be doing a video report, of course. But, until then, I have decided to forgo writing the expected long, long, long, long what-the-new-Google-browser-represents-for-geekkind thumbsucker for a much shorter version.

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Monday, August 4, 2008

Kara Visits the Yahoo Annual Meeting!

BoomTown was blogging so manically from the Yahoo annual meeting, which took place in San Jose on Friday, I plum forgot to load up the video I did there.

No video was allowed inside the meeting or anywhere near it, by the way. So rather than getting beaten senseless by the squads of purple-clad Yahoo minions of CEO Jerry Yang, I decided to pocket my Flip camera for part of 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.

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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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