We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

This is part three of three parts.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

This is part two of three parts.

Read More »

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview I did with Barry Diller, the always clever chairman and CEO of IAC, the Internet conglomerate whose holdings include Ask.com, Match.com and many others.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media over the last year, Diller finally broke apart IAC six weeks ago. His reason: The company had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

This is part one of three parts.

Read More »

Don’t miss this very good interview–does he ever give a bad one?–that IAC/InterActive Corp’s Barry Diller did with The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide in today’s edition.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone, Diller finally broke apart the Internet conglomerate six weeks ago. His reason: IAC had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

Read More »

BoomTown hates to miss any possible opportunity to reference a Charlton Heston movie and, thus, was struck by a report by a Wall Street analyst that Google and Amazon will be the sole survivors of the most recent digital age.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said as much in a 310-page report, “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning” he penned, noting that only the search giant and the e-commerce pioneer had legs.

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While Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang hemmed and hawed about what had happened in their disastrous takeover battle that ended not with a bang, but a whimper, everyone else who appeared onstage at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference last week was a bit more definitive about what should occur now:

Get it done.

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Jason Rapp, IAC’s SVP of mergers and acquisitions, will become CEO of Gifts.com, an IAC-created gifts recommendation engine.
Gifts.com President & CEO William Lynch, who founded the site for IAC (IACI), will transition to HSN full-time as its EVP of marketing and content. He had previously been managing the HSN.com site, while also running Gifts.com.

The [...]

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Ok, not that secret a project.

BoomTown has known about it forever and Radar Online gave the lowdown about the creation of the hip-sounding news aggregator Web site–headed by high-profile editor Tina Brown–by Barry Diller’s IAC in a report in early April.

While still in its planning stages, though, it just hired a new GM to run the business: Caroline Marks.

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Earlier this week, BoomTown posted our speaker list for the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital, which will take place in a few weeks–May 27 to 29, to be exact–in Carlsbad, Calif.

Just recently, we added Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder of Yahoo, and now he is being joined onstage at the conference by Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured here in a lovely Wall Street Journal dot-drawing).

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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT). News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch. Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX). Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang.
All of them engaged in roiling Internet deal-making of late and all of them in just three weeks on the same stage–but not, thankfully, at the same time, or we’d need a professional [...]

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Yesterday, BoomTown wrote a piece about Yahoo’s worries about the scrutiny that the monopolistic combination of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail would get, if it merged with the software giant.

The issue–which has not gotten a lot of attention–is actually a major sticking point in the price negotiations going on this weekend between the companies, as Yahoo seeks solid downside protection if the deal becomes mired in approval issues by governmental authorities due to email and instant messaging dominance on the Web.

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How’s this for a juicy quote?:
“I am beginning to think these people are insane. … Everything they cite is hogwash.”
That’s what is known as a classic Barry Diller, who can be relied on to come out with a good one when provoked.

In this case, the provocateur is Liberty Media’s John Malone (pictured on the right [...]

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One of the great things about interviewing Barry Diller, the Hollywood mogul turned Internet impresario (via InterActiveCorp), is that he actually answers questions you ask him.

Here is a sampling of quotes from my one-on-one interview with him onstage at the Monaco Media Forum on Friday morning, taken from the not-so-audible audio of my Flip [...]

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Yesterday, the battle between InterActiveCorp.’s Barry Diller and John Malone of Liberty Media got much more interesting.

As luck would have it, I will be interviewing Diller on stage at the Monaco Media Forum in Monte-Carlo this week–yes, it’s as glamorous as it sounds–so now there will be lots more to talk to him about at the digital gathering. Diller is an excellent interview as he likes to parry more than the average CEO and he is good at it.

Very good, as it turns out, when dealing with Malone.

Also in BoomTown today:

Marc Canter talks a blue streak about Google’s OpenSocial and we actually listen!

Slide’s Max Levchin plays all the angles in the Google-Facebook war over OpenSocial–very clever, Max!

Major lunch room snub of BoomTown by Yahoo’s Jerry Yang!

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Summer is officially over, kids, so back to school.

And no more Burning Man either (we completely ignored the annual techie Valhalla in his blog, because it evoked a very dusty and peyote feeling that we just have never felt the need to learn about close up and personal)!

In other words, time to get serious about the business at hand!

Namely, cranking the volume up to 11 on our ongoing efforts to figure out a few choice things about several different Internet companies.

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