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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Liveblogging Fortune Brainstorm Tech: Disney CEO Bob Iger Has “One Hand in the Present and One Hand in the Future”

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Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, is the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Viral Video: Slap Chop Rap and Jam Wow!

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In April, DJ Steve Porter remixed the most excellent infomercial–featuring television pitchman Vince Shlomi for the Slap Chop, an entertaining slasher of all foods–into a rap music video.

It has now garnered 3.8 million views on YouTube, as well as now officially becoming an infomercial itself.

Here’s the viral online video, along with another Porter did a month later for the legendary ShamWow.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Duck Call Stylings of Cisco’s John Chambers (No, Really, Duck Calls)

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What hath the Flip digital video camera wrought?

Well, for one, getting to see a major Silicon Valley tech exec do duck calls online, that’s what.

Cisco PR guy John Earnhardt, who is obviously studying technique from BoomTown’s shaky-cam video style, caught company CEO and Chairman John Chambers quacking away in his office.

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Mike Volpi Jumps From Joost to Index: A BoomTown Interview (And Full Press Release)

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Two years ago, Index Ventures was part of a group that invested $45 million in Joost, the then-hot-and-hyped online video service, while bringing on well-known tech exec Mike Volpi as CEO.

Now, he is headed to Index as a partner in the venture firm, in what some might think is an ironic move.

That’s because last week, after much effort to get traction for Joost, Volpi announced that the service was undergoing a major shakeout–drastically cutting staff and shifting its business model and strategy.

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Monday, June 1, 2009

More Mark Cuban (Trapped in the Green Room at D7 with BoomTown and the Flip Video Camera)!

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Last week, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed entrepreneur, high-definition television fanboy, dancing fool and reliable gadfly Mark Cuban at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

After our onstage interview, BoomTown also got him to be more specific about his thoughts on a variety of things he discussed, including Google’s underwriting of its YouTube video subsidiary, the problems with broadband and the Internet as a “utility.”

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

It Won’t Be Baaaaaaack: “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” Canceled (But Here’s a Resistance Video From John Connor!)

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Big, giant and prolonged sigh–as well as a cranky-old-lady shake of the fist–to our distant cousins over at the Fox television network who dinged BoomTown’s favorite sci-fi show, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” today.

I am officially in a Summer Glau funk, with major gadget withdrawal.

Loosely based on the movie franchise, the show garnered a passionate fan base online and off, but not enough to merit being renewed. It’s ironic since the latest film in the cyborg-versus-man epic, “Terminator Salvation,” will open this Thursday.

But one of the TV show’s stars is fighting back online. All hail the Resistance!

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Friday, May 8, 2009

Yes, BoomTown Will Overpay for Apple’s Pretty Version of the Kindle (Twice!)

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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.

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Friday, April 17, 2009

Boylemania, Part II: TV to Internet to TV to Internet…

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Susan Boyle’s sensational television singing performance jumped from that medium to become a viral Internet hit, fueling more television that is, of course, headed to the Internet again.

Who says old and new media can’t work together?

The YouTube official version of the original TV performance is now at 15.6 million views.

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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Good Luck Trying to Share the Angelic Voice of Susan Boyle

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Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle is indeed all she is cracked up to be.

But her virality on the Internet is not, even though she has–in fact–become an Internet sensation.

Though the performance of the unemployed 47-year-old woman–dressed in a dowdy frock, wowing the judges on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables”–has been viewed many millions of times now and growing, it’s not easy to move it around on the Web.

It should be.

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Yahoo’s Jumpcut Pushed Off Cliff (But You Can Send Your Videos to Yahoo’s Flickr!)

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You could see this one coming a mile out: After telling users they could not upload new videos late last year, Yahoo is finally shutting down Jumpcut.

“This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!,” said Jumpcut in a note to users today.

That’s code for the stylings of new CEO Carol Bartz, who is hard at work axing many of Yahoo’s similarly lagging services.

The sassy video-editing service was bought by Yahoo in 2006 amid high hopes of the Internet giant becoming a big player in the hot online video market.

That honor, as it turned out, went to YouTube, which was more cats-on-skateboards-oriented than tools-oriented.

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Thursday, April 9, 2009

If Yahoo’s Going Social, Is Demand Media Back on Its Dance List?

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Last year, Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider and then-Media Group head Scott Moore had a summery seaside dinner with Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt in Santa Monica, Calif., right around the corner from the online publishing company’s HQ.

While many speculated that Yahoo could be doing some friendly kibitzing to get a sense of where the eclectic network of general- and special-interest sites was headed, for a possible acquisition, nothing came of it.

But now, a year later, with recent indications that a major strategy for new CEO Carol Bartz will finally follow through on making Yahoo’s massive but disparate service more social, especially in its content offerings, several sources close to the company tell me another look-see at Demand is likelier than ever.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

BoomTown Decodes Google’s Phish-y Associated Press Blog (So You Don’t Have To)!

Yesterday, in response to Associated Press board Chairman and MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton’s diatribe against those who shoplift news and his pledge to “protect news content from misappropriation,” Google posted a response on its public policy blog. Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that most people think the Singleton speech was aimed at the search giant and its burgeoning power over the distribution of media, although Google was not named by him. Still, it’s always nice to make nice. Sort of.

So, it was hard to resist translating this Google blog by one of its lawyers.

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Facebook CFO Gideon Yu Out; Fast-Growing Social Network Says It’s Doing Fine Financially

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Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.

The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”

But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing ad revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.

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Monday, February 23, 2009

AOL Socializes Even More With New Lifestream

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As part of its ongoing rejiggering of its social-networking offerings, AOL is formally rolling out its expected Lifestream platform today with a new “timeline” depicting a user’s online life in a streaming horizontal calendar called a Lifestory.

Lifestream will first be available on AOL’s Bebo and include updates from friends on Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Del.icio.us. Lifestream can also be used by brands, celebrities, bands and companies.

It’s all part of ongoing changes at the Time Warner online unit.

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Friday, February 20, 2009

Dear Dad: You Lost the Election Because the GOP FailWhaled on the Web

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Almost-First Daughter Meghan McCain gave the Republican Party the analog equivalent of an unhappy emoticon yesterday in a column in The Daily Beast, predicting the political party will lose power quicker than a faulty iPhone if it does not get more Web-savvy pronto.

BoomTown always liked GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s sassy spawn, who had a pretty good blog during the campaign and was always coming out with some little nugget that I am sure made her PR handlers cringe.

Well, there she goes 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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