Can your cellphone check your blood sugar? What does a wireless BandAid do? Is my pill networked? Can a videogame cure cancer? Will a robot care for my mom? Can an iPhone save my life?

And, of course, does synthetic skin feel gross?

The answer to the last question is yes, but it is also pretty astonishing to touch, as noted in one of the many tech-heavy talks at TEDMED, the medical and health-care conference, which has returned after a five-year hiatus, to Hotel Coronado near San Diego.

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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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Some of the best delivery of video on the Web right now is via the TED Web site–the Internet part of the well-known conferences where big thinkers express bigger thoughts, mostly focusing on technology, entertainment and design.

The organizers have long put those analog talks, called TEDTalks, online. But they are now trying to make them even more accessible globally–with subtitles, an interactive, time-coded transcript, and the capacity to be translated by volunteers world-wide. It launches today with 300 translations in 40 languages, including Urdu.

Yipes! We were planning to translate All Things Digital in Pig Latin–for example: Ittertway isway away ecretsay otplay otay estroyday ethay umanhay aceray iavay Ashtonway Utcherkay–but nixed the effort due to cost.

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Goodness gracious, make it stop!

You must know by now how much BoomTown loves internal Yahoo memos. But this is getting ridiculous.

It’s been like a flash flood after a long drought at Sunnyvale HQ today, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz turns on the firehose of a whole lot of communicating.

“I know you guys have reorg fatigue,” wrote Bartz in the latest email to employees about the management reorganization finally announced this morning.

Also memo fatigue at All Things Digital HQ, if you can believe it.

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Peter Chernin might be going from News Corp. But he’s not forgotten, at the least by our little tech Web site (see, Peter, we still like you, even if you’re–almost–no longer our boss!).

In fact, you can see him in action after the jump in a video, talking about digital issues and more in a long interview I did with him onstage at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007.

Will the 57-year-old Chernin–who was top choice to head Yahoo and has been mentioned as a possible leader at Apple–have his next act in tech?

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Wishing I had had the foresight to head up to the Sierras in California before they finally got a ton of snow dumped on them this past week, I was fiddling around the Web looking for various ski sites as a way to approximate being there.

And, like all things in mapping, the best way to see slopes is now in 3-D, the technology that is going to become more and more prevalent on the mostly flat Internet in the years ahead–and well beyond obvious applications.

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While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off–figuratively, of course!

TED, which feels like a four-year college in four days, had an eclectic range of speakers, many focusing on the awful state of the earth. But there were also less-dire presentations, such as one on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a Sony database for all eternity.

That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.

Here’s some more TED reaction from the digerati.

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Last week, BoomTown traveled to Long Beach, Calif., to attend the TED conference, a longtime gathering of digerati and others who have come to love its eclectic and outward-looking program.

The four-day TED2009, titled “The Great Unveiling,” included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates unleashing a small swarm of mosquitoes in the hall, a long list of varied speakers and a whole lot of schmoozing.

Here is my belated video of the event, including my kids trying to steal a futuristic car.

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BoomTown is no fan of PowerPoint, but this one by longtime Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday is made worse by its depressing content.

Meeker, a veteran who was around for the last Web 1.0 meltdown, should know from grim. An inveterate numbers cruncher–I actually met her 15 years ago, while she was crunching a different set of numbers on AOL late into the night at her New York office–she pulls out a lot of tough ones here.

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If it’s Oct. 1, it must be time for the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008!

DonorsChoose.org funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

Last year, BoomTown did pretty well, raising $12,199 from 52 donors, impacting 1,940 students and almost scoring the grand prize of a lunch with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

Well, I finally managed to get a dinner with him, as you can see in the video after the jump.

But now I face a more daunting task–besting the naked Scoble!

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It used to be, many years ago, that longtime Silicon Valley tech exec Eric Schmidt could work up a very significant head of steam when talking about the thuggish monopolistic practices of Microsoft and its negative impact on the tech industry.

And, for the most part, Schmidt was dead right.

Thus, BoomTown is both gobsmacked and a bit in awe that Schmidt–now sitting atop at the high-tech pig pile as CEO of the powerful search giant, Google–can, with a straight face, make the argument that everyone is wrong to be nervous about its deal with Yahoo to serve some of its search ads, even though the pair make up more than 80 percent of the search market.

Still, at a press conference yesterday, Schmidt went on the offensive to defend the Yahoo deal, which is set to begin in a few weeks, in a most peculiar way.

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

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at the D6 conference.

Here’s part three of three videos of the most popular demo, by well-known inventor Dean Kamen, who showed off his latest creation, the “Luke Arm” prosthesis.

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

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at the D6 conference.

Here’s part two of three videos of the most popular demo, with well-known inventor Dean Kamen, who showed off his latest creation, the “Luke Arm” prosthesis.

Read More »

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

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview I did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The social-networking site has had quite a year as the hottest and most hyped on the Web 2.0 landscape. With fast growth and still-questionable monetization power, where Facebook is going will be a journey plenty will be paying attention to.

In this video, Zuckerberg and Sandberg talk about why Facebook is a technology rather than a media company, as well as how to make money via advertising, how change is affecting the young company, the state of its relationship with both Google and Microsoft, whether Facebook should sell or go the IPO route, and where the company will be in five years.

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Sorry for the delay, but we’ll finally start posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May in their entirety.

Kicking off the proceedings will be what most of the attendees at the conference told us they considered their favorite interview, which Walt Mossberg and I did with News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Here’s Part 6 of 6 of the Murdoch interview.

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