It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.
by Marisa Taylor, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”
As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”
None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.
John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It’s the sort of “speculative fun” that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the “Facebook might buy Twitter” fire.
Of all the jobs I’ve had in the past 20-odd years, I’m pretty sure the one that pleased my parents the most was my brief stint as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, my family’s local paper of record. My mother in particular seemed quite proud to see her son’s work land on her breakfast table each morning.
by Therese Poletti, Senior Columnist, MarketWatch, Tech Tales
On Wednesday, about 1,000 of the tech industry’s elite will begin schmoozing at a three-day conference here on Web 2.0 technologies, in what is now a vastly different business climate than a year ago.
At the onset of the Wall Street meltdown, many in Silicon Valley seemed to have their heads in the sand. But in recent weeks, with lightening speed, venture capitalists are suddenly preaching to their portfolio companies to cut costs, generate revenues and become profitable, fast, or die.
by John Battelle, Founder and CEO, Federated Media
After a funny film featuring nearly every luminary under the sun giving Yang and Decker advice (Buffet, Stringer, Zuckerberg, etc) Yang and Decker took the stage and Walt immediately asked them about the MSFT deal. Yang agreed that they could not get to a price, but that there were other issues as well, regulatory is one that came up, but I can imagine others (ie, approach to open source, total installs of Outlook at Yahoo, etc.!).
Back a year ago, I wrote a three-part series on the future of the media business. It began as an attempt to think out loud about a topic with which I had become obsessed, and it ended up becoming a manifesto of sorts about conversational media and marketing.
As you may recall, I started that last set of posts with the observation that major media companies–Time Warner, News Corp., CBS–had all fired or parted ways with the longtime managers of their digital assets, opting instead for insiders or traditional media folks with whom they were more comfortable.
Has it been a whole year? I posted my predictions for 2007 on Jan. 1, 2007, and here it is, the first day of 2008, and here we go again. This year I am going to organize my predictions by companies (just the big ones) and trends. I’m focusing on advertising and search markets and the largest companies in that space, as that seems to be what’s on our collective minds these days, and it’s what I seem to have focused on in the past, as I read through my past prediction posts. So what are the trends in 2008?
Well, the time has come to review my predictions of a year ago. Overall, I think I did pretty well, but I’ve had to interpret a few liberally to give myself extra credit in a few cases.
I’ve enjoyed my professional relationship with Chris Sacca, who is leaving Google to pursue a career in investing. When I heard of his move, I pinged him in email, and the resulting dialog can be found below, verbatim.
I’m reading a book as I prepare to start the real work on my next book. Called “The Language Instinct,” by Steven Pinker, I’m finding it a fascinating read, if at times a bit too happy with itself.
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