D9

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET reporters. To get the key points from today's announcement, you can check out a summary of what got announced, in our story here.

Update: Steven Sinofsky is now scheduled to speak at 3:50 p.m. PT today.

Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of the Windows division, is scheduled to take the stage … Read more

PALOS VERDES, Calif.--Groupon CEO Andrew Mason kicked off his interview with Kara Swisher here at D9 with this bombshell about his company's upcoming IPO: "The news is that we have nothing to announce."

Mason's gambit to dodge the question didn't work. "Why do you want to become a public company?" Swisher asked.

"I run a business..." Mason dogmatically droned, "and shareholders want money."

The 8,000-person company (up from about 1,500 a year ago) is about one-half local salespeople. Groupon, as industry watchers well know, doesn't &… Read more

The World Health Organization semi-confirms what we've all suspected for years: it's probably not a good thing that mobile phones cause the cells in your brain to wiggle and change. Also, Lodsys continues its patent trolling unfettered by matters of conscience or threatening letters from Apple, and the PBS hackers turn their attention to Sony, as if Sony didn't have enough problems, already. --Molly

At the D9 conference, Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker defended the tech giant's size compared with smaller companies (all tech companies are smaller) by highlighting HP's capability to provide integrated and complete solutions, especially to business customers.

Twenty-six percent of HP's business is in the consumer space. It's the right mix, Apotheker said, and he says the consumer research helps the company develop better commercial products. This was in part in reference to Eric Schmidt's claim, last night at this conference, that "IT is dying."

Interviewer Walt Mossberg asked Apotheker about HP's plans … Read more

Twitter is getting its own photo-sharing service, CEO Dick Costolo announced at the D9 conference today. It will roll out over the next few weeks to all users.

"We need to remove the friction from adding photos to Twitter," Costolo said.

In addition to making photo uploading easier for all users, this move is intended to harmonize content ownership: "Users will own their photos," he said, which may not be the case on other sharing services. Photobucket will host the photos on the back end, but Twitter will own the user interface and provide it to users through its site and apps.

Twitter photos won't compete with Facebook albums, Costolo said. "It's organized around conversations," he said -- what's happening now.

Videos are still hosted by third parties.

Improvements are also coming to Twitters' search engine: Results will become relevant and personalized, so different users may get different results depending on who's in their network. The search engine will also show photos and videos in the results page.

Twitter was originally a text-only messaging service, but that didn't stop users from sharing photos through new services like yFrog, Twitpic, and Instagram. The future of these services is now in doubt. To ensure a more consistent user experience (and control the revenue stream), Twitter is also putting the boot down on third-party clients for the service. It acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. More recently, Twitter announced that it had acquired TweetDeck. … Read more

The creator of the Flip camera, Jonathan Kaplan, took the stage at the D9 conference to reveal his new project, The Melt.

"Grilled cheese makes people happy," Kaplan said. "We've created technology to make the perfect grilled cheese."

Is this a joke?

Apparently not. Users will be able to order "melts" on a smartphone, and on the other side, there's new technology to create on-the-spot grilled cheese sandwiches that customers can then pick up in new locations that The Melt is opening.

During an onstage demonstration, Kaplan … Read more

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif.--Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says his company can't afford brand-new content yet.

Netflix is still fighting movie release "windows" and not offering new releases as quickly as it likes, Hastings said at the D9 conference here this morning. With subscriber fees of $8 a month, the company isn't able to pony up for brand-new content yet. "We're a complement to the new-release business," he said.

Discussing the challenges facing the video distribution company, Hastings said that the goal for Netflix is to make both content producers and subscribers happy. … Read more

Eric Schmidt gave a bravura performance last night.

On a day when Apple dominated the headlines with news about Steve Jobs and iCloud, the Google chairman snatched the spotlight away by presenting the press with headline-grabbing revelations about Google as well as himself.

"CEOs should take responsibility," Schmidt told AllThingsD's Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the D9 conference, referring to his inability to develop a social-networking strategy. "I screwed up."

Apparently, there are two sides to the public Eric Schmidt. There is the one that freaks everyone out with his off-the-cuff remarks about Google's unchecked power to accumulate users' personal data. That's the Schmidt who can also stray off message, which is what he appeared to do two weeks ago in London when he said that Google would fight a bill designed to protect copyright even if it became law. Google couldn't distance itself fast enough from the statements.

Then, there's the other Schmidt, the one we got last night.

According to reports from my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman and others, Schmidt nimbly covered a lot of ground under a probing examination from Swisher and Mossberg. He met questions with snappy, candid answers that didn't always cast Google in a favorable light. Our CEOs don't often criticize themselves publicly or lift the curtain on their companies. For this, Schmidt generated… Read more

A demo of the new video discovery service Fanhattan (preview) blew me away. This free iPad app sounds simple--it finds stuff about movies and TV shows you want to watch--but the depth of the content, utility of what the site does, and clarity of the interface just puts this app on a different level than anything else I've seen.

Fanhattan officially launches at the D9 conference today; CEO Giles BianRosa gave me a run-through last week. This write-up is based on his demo; unfortunately I didn't get a preview copy of the app to try myself.

The main feature is Fanhattan's database of which content is playing where. If you're looking for "The Fighter," Fanhattan will tell you, perhaps, that you can see it on iTunes and get it from Netflix DVD delivery, but the Amazon and Hulu indicators will remain unlit if it's not on those platforms. If you're looking for episodes of a TV show, you might see the availability indicators change as you move from season to season, as many shows' seasons appear differently on various content sales and rental sites. It solves one big iPad annoyance: having to hop between apps trying to find a specific movie or show you want to watch.

When you want to play content, Fanhattan fires up the appropriate player on your device; it doesn't try to appropriate the audience for itself. And if you never want to see a service, because you don't subscribe to it, you can disable it from appearing. … Read more