Adobe and Apple CEOs square off

Adobe and Apple CEOs square off
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen sits down with Alan Murray and fires back at Apple's Steve Jobs in latest round of Flash fight.

Personal Finance Minute: Tips for Job Seekers

Personal Finance Minute: Tips for Job Seekers
Whether the labor market gains or loses jobs in coming months, the loss of more than 8 million jobs in the recession means those seeking work don't have an easy road ahead of them. Here's one career consultant's job-search strategy. MarketWatch's Andrea Coombes reports.

Videogame Sales Get Shot Down

Videogame Sales Get Shot Down
The weak videogame industry showed no signs recovering as April sales fell 26%, the market's sharpest decline since last July. Dan Gallagher helps explain the decline and looks ahead to developments that could invigorate the industry's bottom line.

Google TV debuts

Google TV debuts
Jessica Vascellaro has details on Google TV, which was just unveiled by the internet giant at its developers conference in San Francisco. Plus, social networking for kids and retailers use their stores to speed up shipping for online orders.

iPad makes global debut

digits: iPad makes global debut
Apple's iPad debuted overseas on Friday, drawing long lines of eager consumers who were hoping to get their hands on the hot-selling tablet-style computer that is still in short supply in the U.S. Bruce Orwall has details from London.

Obama, BP and The Gulf Oil Spill – What Should Be Done?

President Barack Obama used the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to renew his pitch for alternative energy Wednesday, arguing that the unfolding environmental disaster “gives you a sense of where we’re going” without comprehensive reform.

The federal government is “going to bring every resource necessary to put a stop” to the spill, the president said during a visit to a solar panel manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. “We will not rest until this well is shut, the environment is repaired, and the cleanup is complete.”

But, he added, “a lot of damage has been done already. The spill in the Gulf, which is just heartbreaking, only underscores the necessity” of seeking alternative fuel sources. A failure to enact comprehensive energy reform, he argued, would pose a threat to national security and the economy, as well as the environment.

And this:

The Obama administration, under pressure to act over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, is expected to announce Thursday that it will suspend consideration of any applications for exploratory drilling for oil in the Arctic until 2011.

The decision is a major blow to Royal Dutch Shell PLC, which had planned an ambitious oil-drilling program in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska this summer. Shell has been arguing to regulators that its operations in Alaska would face a lower risk of the kind of problems faced by BP PLC in its ill-fated Gulf of Mexico operation.

Is this enough? Not enough? Too much? Do you agree BP should be running the cleanup instead of the government? Given BP is the most knowledgeable on such things, despite never having tested some of their methods, is there a choice? What do you think about suspending drilling? Are you in the conspiracy camp that says the explosion was on purpose to further alternative energy? What other steps would you take?

Anne's Theme

The song "Anne's Theme" from the miniseries "Anne of Green Gables". I transcribed this piece about 20 years ago when I first watched the movie. I recently found this sheet music which was better than my original transcription so I thought I'd learn it. Hope it turned out okay.

Disrupt 2010: Startup Battlefield Finale - Soluto

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Disrupt 2010: Awards

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CHINICT: China’s biggest tech conference, streaming right here on TechCrunch

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Frustrated by your sluggish and unresponsive PC?

Soluto - Anti Frustration Software from Soluto on Vimeo.

Soluto - How to use Soluto Beta from Soluto on Vimeo.

Frustrated by your sluggish and unresponsive PC?
Soluto is bringing an end to PC user frustration with transparency, killer technology, and your help.

Disrupt 2010: Jack Dorsey, Founder & CEO, Square

Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com

Disrupt 2010: Bill Gross, CEO idealab, debuts TweetUp

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Disrupt 2010: Mike Arrington with Charlie Rose

disrupt on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Disrupt 2010: Yuri Milner, CEO & Founding Partner, Digital Sky Technologies

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Disrupt 2010: The Big Picture: Tectonic Shifts in Technology, Special Series with Charlie Rose

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Opening Remarks: Mike Arrington

Opening Remarks: Mike Arrington

Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com

Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com

Dell Streak vs. the tablet market: It doesn't fit and never will

The Writer - Cameron

Smart Girls At The Party

Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker and Amy Miles celebrate girls who are changing the world by being themselves.




http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/smart-girls-at-the-party/cameron#



Cameron has been writing stories with a penchant for the paranormal for years now (and she's only ten). She tells Amy, Meredith, and Amy about how she comes up with ideas, beats writer’s block and even co-writes an original story with the Smart Girls crew!

Carol Bartz To Michael Arrington: “F*ck Off!”

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Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took the stage for a fireside chat with our own Michael Arrington. It took about 15 minutes, but Mike got her to tell him to “fuck off.”

That’s not all she had to say. When Mike pressed her about Yahoo outsourcing the social graph to Facebook. Bartz admitted that if she could own it (as Facebook does), she’d love to. “Oh, I’d love to own it — shit, why not?,” she said. She said also that “I’d love to be Queen Poobah – but I’m not.”

I highly suggest you read the notes below. She had plenty of interesting things to say. Not just about the new Nokia and Match.com deals, but about Apple, Google, Facebook, and yes, even TechCrunch.

Just wow.

Update: And here’s the video (or it’s at the bottom).

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

MA: So how the fuck are you?

CB: Is that all you got?

MA: So my last two posts were critical.

CB: Were they?

MA: You don’t read TechCrunch? I can show you how. It’s weird, I talked to you backstage, you’re a human being. You took the time to talk to us.

Okay let’s go. What is Yahoo?

CB: (her mic cuts off) What is Yahoo? Yahoo is a company that is very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one. We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It’s all customized. Our click-through rate went up twice since we started customizing this. People come to check the things they like. “You can just get it together.” Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

MA: You had two pieces of news. One is a partnership with Match.com. Why abandon personals?

CB: It wasn’t in the sweet spot of what we do. It was the same with HotJobs. It’s just not about in line with we do anymore. I was trying to think about if I should fly with the volcano cloud, I checked the AP, it was 17 hours old info. We need live content feeds.

MA: Are there any other of the big Yahoo properties you’re killing?

CB: No. We’re focused now.

MA: What was the other one?

CB: We had an announcement with Nokia. Co-branded.

MA: How important is mobile to Yahoo going forward?

CB: We’re on 37 million of the 82 million mobile devices in the US. We have half the US market. People don’t think that’s true, but it is. And we’re huge in the emerging world. It was important to get to the dominant partner outside the market.

MA: So is the focus not on the smartphones?

CB: We still do them too. We have an iPhone app, for example. We have alliances with 100 OEMs. We’re on 2,300 different handsets. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

MA: No Android?

CB: No.

MA: Let’s talk about the product perspective. You’ve made some changes and there have been departures. The new blood is Blake Irving. Does he run product at Yahoo now?

CB: Absolutely.

MA: Is there a product Czar? Does he answer to you? Think about how Steve Jobs acts, he’s in charge. Is that Blake?

CB: You can’t find anyone like a VP that compares to Steve Jobs so that’s not fair. Blake reports to me — under him there are three segments. We have one of the largest private clouds in the world. We serve 10 billion ads a day — that’s a huge technical effort. There’s no one strategy at Yahoo. We do a lot of things.

CB: We know that men have banner blindness but will look at them in certain areas. Women will look at them in other areas. Men are odd.

MA: What about the iPad?

CB: With the iPad, Apple is a hardware and software company. It’s an evolution — not revolution. These days if you’re not coming out with some device, you’re not innovating, apparently. But that’s not true. There’s a soul to our product. Absent Steve Jobs, who’s the product soul in big companies? It’s a lot of people who have to do it.

MA: You ever hear the saying, “a camel is a horse designed by committee”?

CB: That’s true but you implement with several people. I can imagine that a lot of concepts are brought to Jobs too — there are people involved. It’s naive to think there’s not.

MA: Why Blake? He was a professor at Pepperdine. Before that he was at Microsoft.

CB: Well he was taking a two year break from Microsoft.

MA: Fair enough. How important is social to Yahoo?

CB: Back when social had a broad definition, you could almost say that Yahoo Finance chat was the first social product. We have a million comments a day now. We had 85,000 comments on day one at Yahoo News. And we’re merging in some of the big products like Twitter, etc. We’re doing some new cool things with Mail next month too. It’s about finding out the new things about people.

MA: Facebook would say the social graph is key. Is that important to you? Are you comfortable not owning that?

CB: I don’t know if anyone really owns it. They share it with partners. It’s just about getting the information. Building a better user experience.
“Oh, I’d love to own it — shit, why not?” “I’d love to be Queen Poobah — but I’m not.” (reference to Grand Poo-Bah from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado“?)

MA: In 2008 you said Jerry Yang first approached you about the job. You said you weren’t the right person for the job. Are you now?

CB: I’m one of many. Many people could do this job. There’s no one special person for any job. That’s the beauty of it.

MA: You’ve asked bloggers to tone down some of the critiques and advice. But you made a statement earlier this year that Google has some problems.

CB: Did you see the interview? I said Google needs to grow a Yahoo every year — just go into a lot of businesses. They have to be a 20% grower. It’s not so bad to say.

MA: You said they were so reliant on search advertising.

CB: Is that wrong?

MA: No but you said it’s not a good trick to have.

CB: I would love to have that! Like the social graph. What I said has to be true. I’m just saying they need to grow a company the size of us every year. They have to do other things.

MA: Are you being a hypocrite by giving them advice when you say you don’t want advice?

CB: I gave them my opinion. You do that all the time. “I’ve never had a bong in my life if that means anything to you.”

MA: Is your pitch kind of BS though?

CB: Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 — the iPod came out 4 years later. 3 years after that is the first time his market cap grew. It took 7 years. I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company.

MA: Very tiny.

CB: It probably takes you a long time just to convince yourself what to do. “So fuck off!”

MA: Are you a search company or not?

CB: Half of our revenue is from search. The fact that you can crawl the web is a commodity. We’re about search, but we’re not a search company. We do a lot of things.



Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/24/carol-bartz-talkes-with-michael-arrington-at-techcrunch-disrupt/#ixzz0p0vQVepe

Disrupt 2010: Startup Battlefield–Session 4: Finalists

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Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, we had a panel entitled “Does The iPad Change Everything For News, Or Is It Still All About The Web?” The New York Times’ David Carrmoderated the panel which included angel investor Ron Conway, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bloomberg chief content officer Norm Pearlstine. The common theme? The only thing that can stop the iPad is Apple.

While that may sound confusing (since, of course, Apple makes the iPad), everyone seemed to agree that Apple’s restrictions could end up hurting the device in the long run. Apple is in control right now because they’re the first to market with a killer product, but others will emulate them, reasons Pearlstine. He believes a lot of the content on these type of tablets will eventually be web-based rather than app-based (similar to an argument Google co-founder Sergey Brin made last week).

Carr extended on that question, asking if maybe the iPad itself would just be a device where you consume content on the web rather than through apps?Hippeau says that’s up to Apple. Clearly they want to push people towards apps, behind their wall, he believes. The problem with this is that Apple doesn’t give back nearly as much data as having your own website would, Hippeau says. He thinks Apple will have to learn that media organizations live off of this data. “They’ll have to open it up more,” he says.

Pearlstine agrees, saying that the key for traditional publishers is their lists of subscribers. More importantly, they have their payment information. With iPad apps, Apple has that information, and that will be a problem for a lot of media companies. “There will be other providers that won’t do it the Apple way,” he says. That, again, is implying that while Apple may have jump-started the industry, if they don’t open up a bit more, a competitor will beat them.

Of course, that hasn’t happened with the iPhone yet. But Android is charging fast.

Conway believes that Apple has a good lead for now though thanks to its “fantastic user interface.” He sees publishers flocking to it just like the music business did to the iPod/iTunes combo. “It’s a better model than free,” he says.