Last week, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta launched his new book on the search giant: “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”
But one final chapter was actually cut from the book, which Auletta posted this past weekend on his Web site. It’s made up of 25 media maxims by Auletta.
Way back in the fall of 2001, BoomTown attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer.
It is an obsession he has never given up.
So it is ironic that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple has developed–a device being spearheaded by CEO Steve Jobs and likely to arrive in the coming months.
Here’s a lovely video BoomTown did last night at our All Things Digital annual BBQ, at which the crackerjack team at our little rogue operation inside Dow Jones goes analog, gnaws on some ribs and trades tech tales.
Last night, of course, much of the chatter was about what went down at the Apple event in San Francisco yesterday, at which CEO and Supreme Leader Steve Jobs made a grand reappearance onstage after a liver transplant.
Walt Mossberg and Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski were there and give their spicy reports.
Oh, BoomTown fears this is not going to end well for the weensy little smart phone Palm is debuting today on–what an amazing coincidence!–the very same day Apple is throwing its big product bash in San Francisco, at which Mac fanboys fervently hope that Supreme Leader Steve Jobs might even appear.
You don’t step on Superman of Silicon Valley’s cape, of course, but the device with the aggressively cute name of Pixi is apparently attempting just that.
Thus, this fairytale might have a not-so-happy ending.
Despite the spate of recent rants about all that’s wrong with Apple, the pendulum will swing once again, and soon, once the drumbeat gets even louder for the new digital tablet that is slated to be delivered from on high sometime this fall by–in the most likely and juicily dramatic scenario–CEO Steve Jobs.
So, I suggest we move on from the dead-horse issue of the Google Voice app and other sleepy debates to more enjoyable late-August frivolities.
Like trying to guess the name that Jobs will ultimately bestow on the new device. BoomTown will start…
BoomTown is certainly going to be one of the many-so-many who will immediately fork over whatever it takes to get my mitts on the upcoming tablet device from Apple.
And that’s why, according to a new report from Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst Gene Munster–who is monk-like in his devotion to writing down every scrap he can about whatever Apple HQ in Cupertino, Calif., deigns to release–it’s going to be raining money down on the company, just like manna from heaven.
A few weeks ago, when I was having breakfast with legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen about his new venture fund, he talked about what he thought was critical to being successful as an Internet company.
Ticking off names, from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen said he always favored technical entrepreneurs for one key reason: “You need someone who lives and breathes product.”
It’s a refrain I have heard a lot recently from a wide range of people in the sector, most especially when talking about two of the more challenging renovations of key Internet brands going on of late.
That would be: Yahoo and MySpace.
Does the tech march ever slow down?
Not this week it doesn’t! And Digital Daily’s live-blogger de tutti live-bloggers John Paczkowski will be there to cover every move.
Today, in case you haven’t heard, is the big annual Apple event: The Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And, tomorrow brings a Google App confab.
Nutritional journalism information: We’ll be bringing it to you un-processed, but promise it will account of 100 percent of your daily accuracy value.
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.
That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.
Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.
Just smaller and cuter.
So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.
Oh dear, I always forget that the camera is turned on 24/7 these days, knows all and sees all and then sticks it on YouTube.
Like this moment for me that came during a speech I gave last week at the Software & Information Industry Association’s NetGain conference in San Francisco, which was titled, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Tweet: What Interactivity Really Means for Real Businesses.”
In 140 words or fewer, I insult Amazon’s Kindle, Apple and even myself for being a Steve Jobs fanboy.
Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple, was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:
“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”
Well, I reconsidered.
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.
Here come more tech earnings this week, as investors hope the industry can help goose a still shaky economy.
But while the tech industry is healthy, relatively speaking, they probably should not hope too hard to be soaring anytime soon on Silicon Valley’s digital flying carpet.
In other words, down is still the new up.
In any case, on deck this week: IBM, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft.
This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition 
”
Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).
Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.
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. Read more »
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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