The Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up Friday with conversations about the Internet, politics, renewable energy, and space. Below are videos of on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.
In a panel discussion in which The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington is joined by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Democratic campaign organizer Joe Trippi, Huffington argues that "were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president," in part because the blogosphere has "an obsessive-compulsive disorder." Trippi agrees that "the (Internet) medium demands authenticity."
In response to Huffington's remark that "politicians definitely need to adjust how they behave," never assuming that they are having a private conversation with anyone in public, New York magazine's John Heilemann says to Newsom, "So Gavin, there's no off-the-record ever again now."
Newsom, who says he is "obsessed with Facebook," agrees: Politicians need to "get over it," he says. "You're on the record. If you get into public life, you should expect nothing short of it."
Continuing their discussion, the quartet focus on how the political spectrum is changing, largely because of the vast exposure to information that the Internet affords. But not everyone can afford to access the Internet regularly, Newsom says.
"We have a huge digital-divide problem," argues the San Francisco mayor, who has been working hard to bring his city municipal wireless broadband. "We are slipping; we are not making any real advancements." Hundreds of thousands of people still rely on network television to gather their political insights, he says.
Meanwhile, Huffington says citizen journalism on the Internet is playing a major role in transforming the lingo and polarization of American politics.
"We are so completely used to talking about right versus left," she says. "It's a lazy way to talk...If you really want to transform politics, you have to transcend these divisions and really define the new center, and I can't really think of anything more important."
For The Huffington Post, at least, "right" and "left" are now "the forbidden words."
Newsom, a Democrat, chimes in: "If you don't want to be part of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, you better be part of the get-it-done party, and the peril of all of this is that you've got to deliver."
Next up: Web 2.0 Summit moderator John Battelle, head of Federated Media Publishing and longtime journalist, invites serial entrepreneur Elon Musk up to the stage to talk about the three areas Musk identified in college in which he wanted to get involved: the Internet, renewable energy, and space exploration.
Musk acknowledges somewhat smugly that he wasn't confident during college that he'd be able to innovate in the latter two areas; the Web provided the easiest (read: least expensive) endeavor. "I'm more of an engineer than anything else, I guess."
But once the PayPal co-founder could afford to buy himself anything he wants, he says, he started investing in cutting-edge technologies such as solar energy (SolarCity), electric vehicles (Tesla Motors), and space travel (SpaceX).
"The point of Tesla is to get to mass-market electric cars, but to get there, you need to start with something. And if you look at any technology developments, in almost any sphere, you start with something which is expensive," Musk says, referring to the Roadster's current $109,000 price tag. "The first thing is about making the technology work, and then you go from there to optimizing the technology."
Musk points out that, like cell phones and laptops, in their early days, "internal combustion engine cars were considered toys for rich people, because everyone then was riding a horse."
In discussing recent Tesla news regarding fund-raising and layoffs, Musk compares running a successful start-up to running a highly trained military unit. He says taking a "special-forces approach" is necessary to becoming large and successful.
"The minimum passing grade is excellent," he says. It's "the difference between special forces and Army."
Closing the summit is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award for the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He came to the Web 2.0 Summit to talk, at least in part, about Current Media, a Web video company he co-founded that partnered up with Web darlings Digg and Twitter to cover the election last week.
"The Internet democratizes information," Gore says, arguing that Sen. Barack Obama's win had much to do with how his campaign made use of the Web.
Gore also focuses on the motivations behind Web innovation, and he uses a lesson he'd learned from a dog trainer to illustrate his point.
"A puppy has to have a purpose," he says. Likewise, "Web 2.0 has to have a purpose. We have to have a purpose."
As the conversation turns to the collective human purpose of cutting down on pollution and its devastating effects, Gore notes that people generally need a sense of urgency to act.
"The urgency center of the brain is geared to snakes and spiders and fire," Gore says, explaining that people generally require a bit more processing and analyzing, as well as conscious decision making, to react to many other potential dangers. "It needs to be stored in the cloud. It's the aggregate bandwidth that counts...so that we can respond to it collectively."
Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.
He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."
Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.
"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."
He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)
"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."
Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.
When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."
He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."
Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.
Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.
"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."
Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.
"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.
If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.
"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.
"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."
An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.
Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.
Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore is scheduled to talk to attendees of this year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at 4:30 p.m. PST Friday. Here, you'll find our take on his speech, in real time.
Update: The talk is now finished, but you can catch up on the entire thing by clicking the replay button below.
Digg founder Kevin Rose is taking the stage at 2 p.m. Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit for a brief "High order bit" discussion. Here, you'll find our take on his short talk, in real time.
SAN FRANCISCO--"We don't control the platform. It's magical when it belongs to all of us." Those were the words of Vic Gundotra, who spent 15 years at Microsoft and is now leading Google's application development efforts. He was speaking about the open Web, and Google's open sourcing of much of its code to the developer community at large at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday.
David Treadwell, vice president of Live Platform Services, took issue with his former colleague's statement about Google not controlling the platform. "If you want to be open, where is the open search and ads?" he said. Gundotra responded that not all parts of the platform have to be open. "The Internet has places to build businesses," he countered. Gundotra closed with, "The big story over the last 10 years is Windows versus the Web, and the Web has won." Treadwell just smiled or grimaced and let it go as the panel came to an end.
Google's Vic Gundotra and Microsoft's David Treadwell
(Credit: CNET News/Dan Farber)It's clear that Google plans to use its free and open Web strategy to attack Microsoft, but based on the PDC announcements last month the Windows company has a lot of ammunition to fight back.
SAN FRANCISCO--The wild days of Web 2.0 may have thrown their last sheep. Here's how you can tell that things have gotten serious: at O'Reilly Media and Techweb's Web 2.0 Summit this week, people actually showed up for breakfast.
That's because they probably weren't out as late. The party scene at tech conferences tends to be a bacchanalia--take South by Southwest Interactive, with enough events to make any little black book burst at the seams, or TechCrunch50 a few months ago, where rumor has it that a high-profile dot-commer got so drunk at an afterparty that conference organizers politely asked him to delete some intoxicated Twitter posts.
The buttoned-up Web 2.0 Summit had only one legitimate blowout: the launch party for News Corp.'s MySpace Music. The venue was the city's stately Old Mint, a landmarked Greek Revival building dating back to the 1870s that, true to its name, used to house the manufacturing of money--a harsh irony in these post-boom days.
To be sure, the annual Web 2.0 Summit is intended to be a more highbrow affair in comparison to its more sprawling Web 2.0 Expo sibling. Under the glass chandeliers and marble pillars of the downtown Palace Hotel, an ornate vestige of a bygone San Francisco, the attitude was all business. But with the economy in the tank, and dot-com dreams getting shattered by the day with each layoff announcement, it was probably a little bit more businesslike than usual.
At a Web 2.0 Summit start-up mock-pitch event called Launchpad, organizer John Battelle says the companies onstage would not be fly-by-night start-ups, but rather emerging companies with solid business models and the potential to have a big social impact.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)With a "Web meets world" theme, the speakers weren't trendy dot-com entrepreneurs, but rather industry leaders like former Vice President Al Gore and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, as well as celebrities such as cyclist Lance Armstrong and The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan. For a start-up mock-pitch event called "Launchpad," conference organizer John Battelle reminded the audience that the companies onstage would not be fly-by-night start-ups, but rather emerging companies with solid business models and the potential to have a big social impact.
But this sort of discussion can get ahead of itself. A conference about changing the world, though its intentions may be wholly pragmatic, can devolve into starry-eyed futurism when the present needs so much attention. This was something that began to rear its head when venture capital veteran John Doerr called the recession "the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetimes" and when Intel CEO Paul Otellini, despite having just said some somber words about the recession and having urged solidarity as we "get through this thing," paraded out a shiny new "smart camera" prototype that elicited plenty of oohs and ahhs upon demonstrating that it could translate Chinese into English.
"I like coming here," Otellini said to the audience. "It's a respite from, sort of, watching the stock market crash every day, and think about what the future is going to hold from us."
He's right; talking about the future, and listening to industry luminaries do so, is important. On the other hand, it can happen at the expense of the present. Trendy "health 2.0" companies are exciting, but the more pressing problem in the United States is that millions of Americans can't afford health care coverage, let alone a 23andMe spit test.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom hails Barack Obama's campaign mastery of social media.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)In a panel about how the Web is changing politics, digerati icon Arianna Huffington and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom hailed Barack Obama's campaign's mastery of social media and acknowledged that the new president-elect needs to keep using these powerful tools when he inherits a national mess in January. They were less descriptive, though, regarding how.
Elon Musk, the PayPal co-founder now at the helm of troubled electric-car start-up Tesla Motors, took the stage on Friday afternoon and spoke candidly about his company's issues. After the economic meltdown, Tesla nixed a plan to raise about $100 million because it would've involved "very difficult terms" with investors. (The company raised $40 million instead.) He used a military analogy to describe the carmaker's subsequent layoffs: "(It's the) difference between sort of special forces and regular Army, and if you're going to get through a really tough environment...you need to have a really high level of dedication and talent."
But when Battelle, interviewing Musk onstage, asked if the beleaguered Tesla would actually make money, the serial investor replied, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely!" and said he still believes in Tesla's strategy: release a six-figure sports car, the Roadster, first, then eventually move on to more affordable electric vehicles. "It's important to emphasize that the point of Tesla, the reason I funded it and put so much time into it, is to get to mass-market electric cars," Musk said. "To get there, you need to start with something."
The digital futurism didn't make its way to MySpace's party on Thursday night, with performances by Lionel Richie and paparazzi staple DJ AM. It was a big success: the Old Mint was packed to its gilded walls with Valley notables from VC legend Ron Conway to actor-turned-entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher. But the atmosphere was tinged with an acknowledgment that the Web 2.0 Summit and the MySpace afterparty, dual doses of Old San Francisco and dot-com glory, could be the last such revelry for quite some time.
Layoffs were just the tip of the iceberg. In the tech industry's meet-and-greet culture, the conference and event circuit is the next to get hit hard by the economic slowdown, partygoers predicted. O'Reilly's own Web 2.0 Expo in Tokyo had already been canceled earlier this fall, with an employee citing lack of sponsor interest. John Battelle announced to the audience that next year's Web 2.0 Summit would be held not at the Palace but at a less glitzy Westin hotel down the street.
Some small conferences, particularly those held outside the United States that rely on Valley types to jet across an ocean or two for attendance, were also gossiped about as big question marks. Individuals were remarkably candid about their companies' own chances: "I give myself four, six months," one entrepreneur told me.
Maybe, once the constant talk of saving the world had subsided, the Internet's thinkers were finally willing to focus on what's happening now. Or maybe they're just more honest after a few drinks.
A correction was made at 2:11 p.m. PT: O'Reilly Media co-produces the Web 2.0 Summit with Techweb.
At a Web 2.0 Summit panel about politics, author John Heilemann discussed the just-ended campaign and upcoming presidency of Barack Obama with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, and political strategist Joe Trippi.
The upshot: We are in a new era of politics. It started in 2003 but really took hold in the recent campaign. As Trippi said, when it comes to both campaigns and governing, "It's the network, stupid."
L to R: Joe Trippi, Gavin Newsom, Arianna Huffington, John Heilemann
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn / CNET Networks)He was responding to the theme of the panel, as stated by Heilemann, that the Internet was a fundamental new force in politics for the 2008 elections. As Trippi pointed out, people spent 14.5 million hours watching Obama on YouTube. That kind of exposure on television, he said, would cost $47 million, half of what the John McCain campaign spent in total.
Huffington agreed: "Were it not for the Internet, Obama would not be president. He would not be the democratic nominee."
More than that, she continued, "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics." Swiftboating was not possible in 2008, she said. "The truth kept intruding into peoples' living rooms. The truth is solidly mainstream." By that calculation, she maintains, Obama embodies the new center.
Gavin Newsom and Arianna Huffington: Web 2.0 makes for strange bedfellows.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)Mayor Newsom was first the raise the issue of governing in this new era. He said that the Internet and social networks, create "a connection that is more useful." But, "most politicians are not there yet. It's a state of mind, and they don't get it. It's not about old or young, it's a new kind of politics."
But the panel seemed very hopeful that a citizenry connected over the Internet could help the government function. Newsom said, "Government can't solve our problems exclusively." The panel discussed using the Web for not just fund raising but to encourage citizen involvement in thorny issues, such as health care reform.
Trippi proposed a site, Mywhitehouse.gov, where "Ten to 20 million Americans" could help the administration figure it out. What was not discussed: the method of filtering out the rants, complaints, and terrible ideas that would likely swamp a public forum on a contentious issue like this.
The Internet also offers a danger to politicians. Newsom, the sole elected official on the panel, put it this way: "Everything you say, the way you say it, how you say it, it's all exposed. I have to watch myself saying now, 'I left my heart in San Francisco.' It's the end of the world as we know it. We're in a reality TV series now in politics, 24/7."
The panel used this point to discuss the transition of politics from talking points to personalities. Trippi said, "We're all human beings, that's just the way it's going to be."
He and Huffington expect that people will, on the one hand, eventually become tolerant of human moments (anger, gaffes, and so on) that any human politician may make. And more importantly, that the true nature of politicians will become known; that candidates will succeed or fail based more on what they are about than whatever soundbites they successfully push into the media sphere.
A networked political system will challenge traditional right-vs-left politics, the panelists agreed. Trippi: "The Republicans say the glass is empty. The Democrats say it is full. The bloggers say look at the damn glass, and make your own decision."
"The tools have changed," Trippi said. "It's Web 2.0. (Obama) did it due to these tools."
The on-stage chats at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday featured heavy-hitters from the realm of online applications.
Day 2's lineup at the San Francisco event included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AT&T's Ralph de la Vega, and a four-executive panel of VMware's Paul Maritz, Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff, Adobe Systems' Kevin Lynch, and Google's Dave Girouard. Below are videos of their on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.
Want to know what's up with an old friend or a new acquaintance? For many people, the place to keep up with their social circle is Facebook. The site's vigorous growth, however, hasn't necessarily been an easy thing for the company behind it. Zuckerberg tells how Facebook is coping with its growing pains as it adds features and moves toward a more open system.
"We learned from (the platform launch) that we want to do stuff in a slightly more
controlled way just so we don't have to make those painful changes that often," Zuckerberg said.
De la Vega, AT&T's CEO for mobility and consumer markets, talked in part about the company's news of the day, its acquisition of Wi-Fi network provider Wayport. He also confirmed that, starting sometime in 2009, iPhone 3G users will be able to use their phones as wireless modems.
"We're looking at the consumer holistically and making sure that
they have a great
experience, a simplified experience," said de la Vega.
The panel focused on cloud computing, the hot-as-a-pistol notion that businesses and consumers will see more and more of the information and services they use residing somewhere on the Internet, rather than locally in the home or office. But is there enough money to go around for all the companies jumping on the bandwagon? What about the operating margins for those companies? And what of the contention by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison that cloud computing is nothing more than this year's fashion?
Maritz: "All of us are increasingly characterized by a body of digital information that's
going to live with us all our lives...and it's going to outlast any device we have."
Benioff, on Oracle: "I think that Sun Tzu said it best--when weak, feign strength."
I am tired of hearing Twitter CEO Evan Williams give the same old song and dance about his company's revenue strategy.
"It's a valuable service," he says, "I don't think it's going to be hard to monetize." So what's the holdup? I worry about Twitter's business because I want to see the company and the product thrive.
Twitter's delay in implementing a revenue strategy makes me jittery. I would pay for it if I could. But at this point, I don't believe that the Team Twitter actually has a plan for making money from the site.
It's not like it is an inherently unmonetizable service. Here are some ways the service could generate a few bucks:
Sell advertising.
Like on Pownce.
Charge for premium consumer "bling" and services.
Sell access to themes, skins, file transfer features.
Charge Twitter authors for commercial-grade services.
Companies using Twitter as a part of their media strategy would pay for guaranteed uptime, capability to embed a Twitter feed, branding control, etc.
Go "freemium."
Allow only so many Tweets per day or total followers per account. Collect payment after that.
Sell enterprise-level services.
Create a version of Twitter for business (see Yammer, Presently, SocialCast). Include security features, logging, support, possibly an installable version, etc. This is the leading contender for a business model, according to Williams.
Allow Twitter authors to collect money from followers.
Take a cut of the revenues. Proposed by Narendra Rocherolle on TechCrunch.
Sell access to either the Twitter API or "firehose."
Keep it free up to a certain traffic level. Charge after that.
Analytics.
Sell data from Twitter use to big users and to advertising/marketing companies and/or hire out a Twitter analyst to companies that will pay for it.
Host Twitter-centric apps.
If companies want their app hosted at Twitter, they can pay for it.
Sell plush Fail Whales.
Ignore revenue.
Grow the user base and sell the company, perhaps to Facebook. It worked for ICQ, which was scooped up by AOL in 1998.
What's your take? Chime in.
SAN FRANCISCO--Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. thinks there is still a big place in the world for much-maligned major record labels.
"The value that we have is both on the editorial side, and on the marketing and promotion side," Bronfman said in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon. "Those channels are getting harder, not easier." In other words, it was an argument very similar to the one that newspapers and magazines have made in justifying their place in an industry that's getting flooded by scrappy bloggers--big music labels provide the quality and experience.
Even in the face of In Rainbows, the label-ditching, revolutionary effort from Radiohead, he said he hasn't changed his mind. "There will be different models (as opposed to labels, particularly for artists or bands who have built up a long and distinguished career, whose products don't necessarily need marketing or promotion, whose editorial is going to go out unfettered, but there are very, very few of those," Bronfman insisted. "It's getting harder to build a multiyear, certainly a multidecade career, than ever before."
Bronfman shared the stage with moderator and conference host John Battelle, and co-panelist Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of MySpace. Bronfman's Warner Music Group, along with each of the other major labels, has taken a financial stake in MySpace Music, the News Corp.-owned social network's ambitious retail and streaming hub.
MySpace Music, a sponsor of the conference, distributed free CDs to attendees subtitled "The Last CD You Will Ever Get."
DeWolfe, notably less loquacious than Bronfman on the panel, said that there have already been 80 million playlists created with MySpace Music and that more than 5 million bands are on the social network. Big brand advertisers, like Toyota and McDonalds, are on board. "The obvious yardstick, long-term, for success, is profitability," DeWolfe said. "We started this business just like we started MySpace, to become profitable very quickly."
He said that MySpace Music intends to be "a full 360 model," with "download revenue streams, ringtone revenue streams, tickets, (and) merchandise."
Bronfman said that Warner Music Group is also adopting a "360" strategy in the face of a need to adopt more solid revenue streams. "Every new artist we sign, we sign now with rights in all their revenue streams: ticketing, touring, merchandising, sponsorship," Bronfman said. "We're only signing artists that way and we now have over a third of our current roster signed to 360 rights."
"360" deals rose to fame last year at Warner's expense--Madonna left the label to adopt a 360 contract with concert promoter Live Nation.
Battelle, a seasoned devil's advocate, repeatedly prodded the two into talking about Apple's iTunes, which remains the overwhelming frontrunner in digital music. Both Bronfman and DeWolfe spoke about it with a mix of reverence and dismissal.
"Apple's done a phenomenal job," Bronfman said when Battelle asked him to provide his honest opinion of the Steve Jobs-helmed company. "It's true, it's really true, what is remarkable and why you have to give them so much credit is (that) no one has managed to pull it off. No one has been able to come up with a sexy device that consumers want, that has an interface that is seamless, that hooks up with a service that gives them the content they wanted."
"I don't really think iTunes has ever been about community," DeWolfe said when asked if he was concerned about it as a competitor. "I think they're focused on selling devices, and that's why I don't think they're competitive to us."
Early on, Battelle attempted to push out some details about the widespread reports that MTV executive Courtney Holt would be joining MySpace as the head of MySpace Music. Neither DeWolfe nor Bronfman would cough anything up.
"It's actually been a difficult position to fill because there's so many variables...we're looking for someone that loves music, understands music, has been in the music industry but understands technology and understands user experience," DeWolfe said. He said they interviewed about 40 people for the job. "We've only made one offer, and we're very confident that we'll be able to make an announcement in the near future."
