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Monday, May 11, 2009

VC (and Twitter Investor) Fred Wilson to Speak at the Googleplex on Disruption: Help Him Write His Speech

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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.

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Friday, April 24, 2009

When GeoCities Grabbed the Web’s Golden Ticket–A Trip Down Silicon-Valley-Has-No-Memory Lane

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In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.

Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.

GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.”

As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.

But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

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Friday, March 6, 2009

Twitter Business Plan Count-Up: Snuggie-Tweet!

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Yesterday, BoomTown decided to start a new “Twitter Business Plan Count-Up” because the fine folks over at the hot-as-Alabama-in-July start-up were taking too long to do so.

Oh, they’ve been promising for a while to deliver the financial goods, but Twitter still has a devil-may-care attitude toward its lack of revenues.

(Who do they think they are? General Motors?)

Thus, my next idea: A Twitter-branded device and fleece blanket outfit that you wear and that vibrates every time you get tweeted.

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Monday, November 24, 2008

When Twitter Met Facebook: The Acquisition Deal That Fail-Whaled

About three weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter ended several weeks of serious talks, in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock, which also included a cash component. While rumors of Facebook’s interest were brought up in an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago, some shot down the idea as silly. Quite incorrectly, as it turns out, since top execs at both Facebook and Twitter were right then at the tail end of discussions, which were initiated by the privately held Facebook in mid-October, about bringing the two together. Those talks, sources on both sides said, are now over. So why did the deal break down?

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Games People Play: Zynga’s Mark Pincus Speaks!

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Since I posted an interview with Social Gaming Network’s Shervin Pishevar today on the announcement of his $15 million funding, it seems only sporting to post this lively video interview I also did with his main competitor, Mark Pincus of Zynga, recently too.

Zynga, named after Pincus’s dog, is one of the two main social-gaming networks that are competing for audience by offering highly interactive games of all kinds. Its aim is to be more engaging and create a series of addictive games that users will return to again and again.

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About Kara

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 »

Ethics Statement

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.

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