For the last month or so, the Google homepage has played with the famous colored-letter logo by morphing it into a sci-fi in-joke and later adding another “l” to indicate the company’s 11th birthday.
Now, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi–the Indian leader whose 140th birthday anniversary is today–has become the “G” in the logo.
Yes, indeed, the head of the man known as “The Father of a Nation” is a letter.
Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.
According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant. With consumers, the Internet giant will push the idea of being a key hub on the Web.
The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference with senior Yahoo execs, including CEO Carol Bartz.
First up at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting today, as you might imagine, is CEO Steve Ballmer, who is as bouncy and braggy as I have ever seen him, probably because he is fresh from getting his mitts on a long-sought-after prize–the search business of Yahoo.
But, while Wall Street thinks Microsoft made out well in the deal, the opinion about Yahoo’s side of the deal has been not so positive, with its shares down another five percent today already, after plummeting 12 percent yesterday.
Thus, Ballmer to the rescue!
“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” said Ballmer. “It’s sort of, like, unbelievable.”
In a genius pairing of subject and artist, here is the best online viral video this week from Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show,” featuring actor William Shatner reciting outgoing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s recent farewell speech verbatim.
You simply can’t make this stuff up.
Did we have demos of new products at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference?
Oh, yes we did!
First up, legendary entrepreneur Philippe Kahn’s new company, Fullpower, which has developed the MotionX Recognition Engine.
The company is developing accelerometer-based hardware and software intended to do for motion and gesture what speech recognition did for speech.
After running one of the more successful Silicon Valley acquisitions by Microsoft for several years, Tellme Networks founder and GM Mike McCue will be leaving the company at the end of June.
As part of the transition, Zig Serafin, who has been running a lot of the speech technology efforts for the software giant in Redmond, Wash., is taking over the voice services subsidiary and all the other related units and making them into a single team with about 400 employees in total.
McCue and Serafin are now meeting with Tellme staff at its Mountain View HQ about the changeover.
Well-known venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson will be at Google Wednesday to give a talk about “disruptive industries.”
The Googlers should be mighty interested, given that the object of their current annoyance and also desire, Twitter, is one of the hottest investments of late for Wilson’s Union Square Ventures.
Before Google execs try to hand over a big bag of money to Wilson to stop the microblogging madness, Wilson asked readers in a post to help him improve the talk.
Last Friday, BoomTown attended a packed-out book party at the Silicon Valley home of Gary and Laura Lauder in honor of globetrotting pundit Tom Friedman and his latest weighty tome: “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How it Can Renew America.”
The New York Times columnist’s book is catnip for the smart set–including greentastic VC John Doerr–gathered under a swanky tent on a stunningly beautiful late afternoon, even though Friedman’s message was that these kinds of days were pretty much numbered for the human race.
Can Silicon Valley stop dopily Twittering and save the day?
The increasingly entertaining online content site, The Beast, edited by Tina Brown, is getting very good at putting together juicy collections.
Besides one on “Seven Great Talk-Show Trainwrecks” recently, it has cued up a nice group of videos of past Oscar speeches in anticipation of the 81st annual awards show this weekend, analyzing what works and what does not.
The restless frenzy is what is perhaps most disturbing of all about the never-ending obsessive death watch that has centered on Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
What doesn’t make your skin crawl about it?
That’s why BoomTown thinks it is time to listen to the wise words Jobs delivered at a now legendary Stanford Commencement address in 2005.
The last words of the speech came from the back of “The Whole Earth Catalog”: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
I think right about now, that foolish part has gone way too far for Jobs and the rest of us.
Both President-Elect Barack Obama and the man he beat in a historic election, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, gave the kinds of speeches at the end of the last night that make one proud to be part of a country where stark differences still mean grace can prevail when it’s all over.
But don’t take my word for it–the Internet makes it possible to consider them again and again.
They are a shining example of–as Obama quoted our greatest president (in my estimation, at least), Abraham Lincoln last night–of how such a contest should end: “We are not enemies, but friends, though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Sorry that this video of Microsoft’s Bill Gates speaking at Stanford University is a day late, but here it is below.
(Our lame excuse: After two lovely scoops on Tuesday–Owen Van Natta’s departure from Facebook and Yahoo’s severance plan for all employees–BoomTown took yesterday off to clean AllThingsD.com’s HQ. Really, we did, since it was filthy [...]
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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