Where is Microsoft spending its $100 million in marketing for its new Bing search service?
Here’s a photo that was forwarded to me showing an advertisement on top of a taxi in Manhattan of a goodbye message from Bing, as well as NBC, to the late pop legend, Michael Jackson.
For a tall man, Tim Armstrong has been on an awful lot of online companies’ short lists.
For a big Web exec job, that is. Indeed, whenever one opens up in the Internet space, the 6-foot 3-inch Google ad sales exec always pops up on it as a possible candidate to lead a variety of digital companies and start-ups.
Finally today–after longtime speculation that Armstrong had long wanted and would eventually leave his post at Google in order to try his hand at being top dog–he took over as chairman and CEO of the once-mighty, but now-not-so-much, AOL.
Armstrong, who will start at AOL on April 7, talked to BoomTown this afternoon about his new job.
Let’s just say the firing of AOL CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant was not exactly expected–even if everyone thought it should happen–within the high ranks of the troubled online unit, until Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes dropped the guillotine this afternoon in Manhattan.
And drop it he did, lopping off the pair of executives Bewkes had installed himself. He replaced them with Tim Armstrong, Google’s head of ad sales, a man with a much brighter resume, for what is likely to be an attempt to spin out AOL now that merger options are moribund.
“It’s a shock to everyone how sudden it was,” said one exec, noting that AOL’s top execs had no idea this is coming today. “Everyone talked about when Bewkes was going to run out of patience with Randy and Ron all the time, but no one knew it was coming now, since it had taken so long.”
Last week, an obviously jet lagged (and badly dressed, as some troglodyte commenters on Yahoo pointed out, but it was snowing!) BoomTown visited with Henry Blodget at Yahoo’s Tech Ticker studio in Times Square to talk about a range of digital topics.
The video interviews included: How well Apple will do without Steve Jobs on deck; whether blogging reporting and professionalism standards need to rise; when Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Time Warner online unit AOL will stop dancing around various deals; and, finally, how the recession is impacting Silicon Valley.
It wasn’t just Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer meeting in New York last week.
According to several sources close to the situation, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes rounded out the trio of chit-chatting execs, presumably gathered to discuss possible partnerships and other deals between and amongst the companies whose digital assets are among the largest on the Web.
Although the possibilities are numerous, exactly what Bostock, Ballmer and Bewkes–let’s call them the Busy B’s from here on out–were cooking up is unclear.
If BoomTown had known on my recent visit that the New York Times was trying to borrow money, using its spanking new building as collateral, I might have brought a big bag of greenbacks with me just to say I held a mortgage on the stunning edifice. No matter, as I got a most excellent free tour of the Renzo Piano-designed building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan and lunch last week from the Times’s longtime and sharp tech reporter Saul Hansell, with whom I did a video interview about the state of the Web and more.
When I was in Manhattan recently, I made a lovely visit to the world HQ of Andy Plesser’s Beet.TV, where we discussed where online video is going. This is a big topic for BoomTown this year because the Web is clearly becoming a video-heavy medium. And the ever-affable Plesser does a solid job covering it. This past week, for example, he looked into everything from the Web sites of the Presidential candidates to Reuters’s video reporting of the escalating fighting in the South Ossetian town of Megvrekisi to a Canadian-video sharing site.
On Friday, which was the debut day for the new 3G iPhone, BoomTown was at Apple’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan bright and early to chronicle the marketing madness wrought by his iPhoniness Steve Jobs.
So, after a lovely weekend at the shore, I went back late Sunday night (without Mom!) to the same store, assuming it had all calmed down.
Oh no, my friends.
BoomTown landed at New York’s JFK Airport this morning and, of course, could not resist visiting the flagship Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on iPhone 3G-Day.
That’s right! JesusPhone 2.0 is nigh!
So I took my Mom for a look-see at the iMadness.
In what will be yet another new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group will announce this morning that it will buy the digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”
In its ongoing bid to prove there is a robust and sustainable ad business in the social networking space, widgetmaker Slide opened a New York office and hired a big deal online ad exec.
Of course, because it has to be hip, the office is in the always trendy West Village, instead of uptown on Madison Avenue.
In a really fine review of the New York Times’ new headquarters building, which appeared in that paper yesterday, the critic Nicolai Ouroussoff made some interesting observations about the interplay of the design with current digital trends.
The 52-story skyscraper, only part of which is used by the famed newspaper, was designed by Italian architect Renzo [...]
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.
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.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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