web 2.0 summit

Foursquare moves toward ditching check-ins

SAN FRANCISCO--Interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley talked about how the location check-in app is becoming more passive.

"One of the big hurdles we have is that you have to think about using it," he said of Foursquare. "If we can lower that barrier, we can juice the experience."

That's why the company recently launched the Radar feature, which, once you turn it on, collects info about where you are, the direction you're going, and so on. It'll tell you if people you like are nearby, and "… Read more

HP's confusion is Dell's gain, says Michael Dell

SAN FRANCISCO--Hewlett-Packard's uncertainty and confusion is unquestionably an advantage for Dell Computers, according to the company's founder and CEO Michael Dell.

"It's a great opportunity for us to describe to our customers and our potential customers our commitment to what we do, [and] investments that we're making within inside our business," said Dell while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday morning. He added that Dell Computers has approximately 100,000 partners, and that pool is growing very quickly.

"You think about the enterprise customers. These are customers that think about … Read more

Twitter CEO: 250 million tweets a day--now what?

SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took to the state of Web 2.0 Summit here tonight and, in a far-reaching conversation, talked bluntly about the 5-year-old company's goals.

"We have lofty ambitions," Costolo said in a conversation with John Battelle, whose company, Federated Media, sponsors the conference. "We want to be part of the fabric over every communication in the world, and we think we can reach every person on the planet."

That goal, he said, makes Twitter distinct from what Facebook and Google+ is trying to achieve, which he described as social "as … Read more

UberMedia's new social platform chimes in

Serial entrepreneur and investor Bill Gross is "completely smitten" with social media.

"The way it's connecting the planet, it's a new connective tissue for knowledge sharing," he told CNET during an interview last week. "It's really, really unbelievable."

As Gross sees it, the only hurdles today's social networks face are relevance and monetization. Not surprisingly, his latest social offering, dubbed Chime.in, is an effort to address both issues. Chime.in will formally launch today at 11:05 a.m. PST--timed to coincide with a live demo by Bill Gross … Read more

Yahoo's Levinsohn: What problems? Let's talk about U2!

SAN FRANCISCO--Considering all that's going on with beleaguered Yahoo, it's impressive that Ross Levinsohn even showed up here at today's Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo's executive vice president for North America didn't say much about the hot-button issues in his interview with John Battelle, the founder and CEO of Federated Media, which puts on the conference: Will the company sell itself, for instance? And who will replace Carol Bartz, whom the board fired in September after a disastrous 2 1/2 years as CEO?

But Battelle tried.

Is Yahoo buying AOL? … Read more

Sean Parker: Spotify to finish what Napster started

SAN FRANCISCO--Sean Parker's interests in revolutionizing the music industry, so to speak, are well known from his early days as a co-founder of Napster. His current efforts on this horizon are focused on Spotify.

"These historical limitations that defined the dynamics of the record business no longer any sense," said Parker, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Parker described Spotify as an "attempt to finish" what he started with Napster, being that it is a "dream of frictionless-free, tiered service that enables music sharing."

"We're all trying to figure out … Read more

Competitive unease hovers over Web 2.0

SAN FRANCISCO--There was an uneasiness in the air this week at the stately Palace Hotel during the eighth annual Web 2.0 Summit, the sort of vibe that you couldn't see in the glossy program or in the lineup of events that included talks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and big-ticket investors like John Doerr and Fred Wilson. People weren't talking about it, for the most part, but you could see it. You could hear it sometimes, too, if you knew what to listen for.

"We're … Read more

Twitter co-founder riffs on Facebook, developers

SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was

the final speaker of the Web 2.0 Summit conference on Wednesday, with a slew of potential announcements anticipated like perhaps a massive new funding round or a formal roll out of the "analytics dashboard" product that it's had in the works for some time.

Not quite that exciting. Williams' only comment on the funding rumors was "we have a lot of money in the bank," and with regard to the supposed dashboard announcement, he said casually that an "analytics dashboard-y thing" was being used by "… Read more

Netflix CEO: iPad affects us 'very little'

SAN FRANCISCO--The iPad and other tablets might be the future for a lot of media, but Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon that the tablet craze affects his company's strategy "very little."

"People prefer large screens," Hastings said. "So the impact of Xbox, PS3, the Wii phenomenon--huge impact. The impact of the iPad--it's a great system, but the Mac laptops outstrip the iPad for Netflix viewing by a huge factor." Long-form video viewing does not translate that well to mobile platforms, … Read more

Zuckerberg: We don't have the answers yet

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg painted a benign portrait of his company in a talk this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit, countering both the concerns about how it handles users' personal information as well as its increasing power to muscle out other companies in an apparent quest to dominate the Web.

"I'm not sure we're 100 percent right on this," Zuckerberg said of Facebook's recent spat with Google in which the latter forbade Facebook users from importing their Gmail contact information because Facebook doesn't let them do the reverse. "The correct … Read more