If a search and advertising partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft is ever struck, perhaps a little CEO-to-CEO note-passing should get some credit.
Yesterday, we wrote about the purple Post-It that Bartz passed to Ballmer via the makeup person in the D: All Things Digital Green Room.
Here’s the photographic proof!
Oh, BoomTown could not resist making the obvious literary pun on the debut of Peter Kafka’s new daily blog, MediaMemo, on AllThingsD.com.
I am referencing, of course, Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 novella, “Metamorphosis,” about a man who turns into a bug–except that the transformation is fraught with so much more meaning.
And thus it will be in Peter’s column, as the most excellent writer and reporter plunges into the topic–as he writes in his first explanatory post–of “the ongoing battle between the established media business and the technology that is reshaping it day by day.”
Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.
He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City, starting at the end of October.
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 1 of 6 of the Murdoch interview.
Here is a great chart from The Wall Street Journal that kind of says it all.
Start stacking them up in your mind like your kid’s Legos and it gets interesting (click on the image to make it larger):
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
Finally.
But, I am sorry to say, probably much too late.
Still, it was nice to see a relatively bold statement from Yahoo (YHOO) leadership yesterday about its growth prospects and plans, a clearer statement of purpose it would have been much, much nicer to see a year ago.
And the assessment of Yahoo executives, who filed documents [...]
Last week, I was in Santa Barbara at the Bacara Resort for The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics: Creating Environmental Capital conference, which described itself as a “CEO-level view of the rapidly developing relationship between the environment and the bottom line.”
Topics that were delved into via interviews were wide-ranging: “Sales Job: Will Consumers Spend to Go [...]
The thudding failure of the online-born “quarterlife” original series on network television Tuesday night, garnering some of the worst ratings in NBC’s history (after experiencing a declining Internet audience too), was loudly touted yesterday as a possible impediment to online-to-offline dreams of original content creation that Hollywood has been nurturing.
Well, it’s not. One show, which just did not work, is in no way representative of a trend, any more than the box office failure of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” meant online marketing and hype was finished.
To: Rumormongers
From: BoomTown
Re: Wacky–even by Google standards–stock market schemes
Google (GOOG) –let me get this straight–is apparently considering buying just under 20% of Yahoo (YHOO) shares at some elevated price, according to a post on TechCrunch yesterday, “although the goal isn’t so much to close the deal, which would almost certainly be opposed by U.S. regulatory [...]
If you are feeling a little déjà vu about the news BoomTown broke this morning about new retention packages and enhanced severance benefits for Yahoos, in order to keep them from bolting in the face of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid (and to give them a payout in case it works), you are not wrong.
According to several [...]
Eek, diamonds are now apparently being used in a new water-delivery system that debuted at the International Builder’s Show in Orlando, Fla., this week.
For those who do not know it, BoomTown is a closet–get it??–home renovation freak and once had a column in The Wall Street Journal called “Home Economics.” (Here is a link to [...]
BoomTown is suffering from Rupert Murdoch déjà vu.
Back in July, I actually wrote a post about the head of News Corp. (owner of Dow Jones and this site) in which the first sentence was: “MySpace and Yahoo should merge.”
I was referencing a very interesting comment that Murdoch made in an interview in June of 2007 with Time’s Eric Pooley.
In it, he floated the idea of trading a 25 percent stake of Yahoo for MySpace.
The Yahoo board meeting, via phone, went off today without a resolution, as BoomTown surmised in an earlier post today.
See this report on the telephonic meeting from our excellent reporting colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, Kevin Delaney and Matthew Karnitschnig.
As you can see, the breathless reporting that Yahoo’s fate was to be decided today [...]
Don’t miss a terrific Wall Street Journal profile of Yahoo’s new non-executive Chairman Roy Bostock, penned by the always excellent Kevin Delaney in today’s paper. The longtime ad exec has definitely his work cut out for him, given Microsoft’s unsolicited $31 per share bid last week.
In it, Delaney outlines the stakes for Bostock, who was installed only minutes before the Here’s-Johnny! call from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, demanding to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion or else.
Over the last year, as he has sought to revive the flagging fortunes of Yahoo, CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang has ferreted himself away from the spotlight and has seldom made himself available to talk to investors or reporters about what he has been up to.
I dubbed it the “cave” strategy, mostly because that’s what many around Yahoo called it. Since Yang really didn’t have anything good to say about the troubled Internet giant, he didn’t say anything at all.
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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