Digital Media

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim Armstrong is such a tease.

The AOL CEO, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, didn't have any high-profile announcements like many of the other speakers at the conference. But instead, he hinted that one might be on the way.

"We have been working on something for the last three months that I think is a fairly substantial shift in our technology," he said. "When that's ready to announce, maybe we'll come back and talk to you about it."

Interviewer and conference organizer John Battelle tried to pry more information out of him, to little avail. But it sounds like it has something to do with the framework that powers AOL's network of blogs and content properties.

"It's a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content," he said. "We see that platform evolving to a much higher scale."

Armstrong, who joined AOL in March after a stint as head of sales at Google, said that recently the company has increased its roster of journalists from 500 to over 3,000, and that over 3,000 pieces of content are posted every day to AOL properties. It's also now creating three to four times as much video as it was several months ago.

"We've hired people from places like The Wall Street Journal and ESPN," Armstrong said. "You're not just hiring a person, you're hiring the community they come with, and I think that has been an important part when you look at the network effects of that."

It's still not clear how AOL, currently in the process of being spun out from parent company Time Warner, will rake in profits from this huge investment in media content. Armstrong seemed unfazed.

"If you're not going to take risks and you don't think the future is bright," he said, "the Internet is probably not the right place for you."

SAN FRANCISCO--He wasn't on the program, but nobody was disappointed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon and agreed to sit down for an onstage chat with conference organizer John Battelle.

Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."

But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previewed a new "social search" feature in Google Labs.

Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.

"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.

Where do a software maker, a cable operator, and a home appliance maker come together? At an Internet conference, of course. The Web 2.0 Summit, going on in San Francisco now, brings together executives from all walks of life, who are shaking hands and linking their diverse set of products in new and interesting ways.

AOL: We're working on something big and secret

And CEO Tim Armstrong isn't going to tell you what it is yet--but it's something pertaining to the technology that powers its content network.
October 22, 2009 3:31 p.m. PDT

News Corp. digital chief: MySpace 'kind of stopped'

As the social site attempts a turnaround, the parent company's chief digital officer talked about how it lost its way. Whether it'll be able to get back on top is less clear.
October 22, 2009 1:02 p.m. PDT

Microsoft partners with Facebook, Twitter on search

Executives Qi Lu and Yusuf Mehdi debuted the Twitter integration at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The Facebook partnership will come at a later date.
• Google strikes Twitter deal, too
• Hands-on with Twitterized Bing
October 21, 2009 11:43 a.m. PDT

MySpace blasts out new music features

An "artist dashboard," a music video library, and integration with iTunes were all announced by CEO Owen Van Natta at the Web 2.0 Summit conference on Wednesday.
October 21, 2009 4:39 p.m. PDT

Coming to Google Labs: Social search results

Content from your social network can show up in your Google search queries--as well as Twitter results--in the company's second announcement of the day.
October 21, 2009 4:20 p.m. PDT

Facebook COO: No PayPal killer, ad network--yet

The company is still in a phase of experimentation when it comes to payments and transactions on the social network's platform, Sheryl Sandberg says at the Web 2.0 Summit event.
• Video: Facebook COO sees economic models changing on the Web
October 21, 2009 3:03 p.m. PDT

Eight billion minutes spent on Facebook daily

Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, gives some background at the Web 2.0 Summit about how the site stays afloat under the weight of 300 million users.
October 21, 2009 12:58 p.m. PDT

HP can't save print industry, but big props for trying

BookPrep and MagCloud are trying to modernize old-world print with an on-demand concept. Such streamlining will keep book and magazine printing afloat, if only for a while.
October 21, 2009 12:01 a.m.

Not much to tweet about in Twitter CEO talk

Evan Williams takes the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit but didn't disclose anything new about its revenue plans or new features--just the revelation that he used to have a really bad haircut 15 years ago.
• Video: Twitter CEO on why he turned down Facebook
October 20, 2009 5:35 p.m.

GE shows off pocket-size ultrasound scanner

At the Web 2.0 Summit, GE CEO Jeff Immelt shows off a piece of health care hardware: a tiny ultrasound device.
• Video: GE shows off mini ultrasound device
October 20, 2009 6:04 p.m.

Comcast CEO: We are not a dead duck

At Web 2.0 Summit, Brian Roberts previews new on-demand video features and insists his company has more in common with Web innovation than techies will admit.
October 20, 2009 3:30 p.m.

SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.

"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."

And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."

The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.

And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.

"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."

It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.

"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."

FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.

SAN FRANCISCO--Cable companies get a lot of criticism from the Silicon Valley set for being some of the ultimate 20th century corporate dinosaurs. Or, as Web 2.0 Summit conference organizer John Battelle put it, "a dead duck."

So the head of Comcast, a company that's taken loads of heat from tech experts--for imposing bandwidth caps, poor customer service, and an alleged failure to innovate on both broadband speeds and the convergence between television and the Web--was an interesting choice to kick off the summit event here on Tuesday. But Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spun his company to the audience as springing from the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that the Bay Area prides itself on.

He spoke of how he took over the reins of the company from his father, who according to legend was able to make an early strategic acquisition thanks to the winnings from a Tupelo, Miss., poker game the night before. "Similar to probably almost everyone in this room, (he) wanted to work for himself, wanted to start his own business."

He previewed new features for the Comcast video hub Fancast, which it launched slightly under two years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show. The new beta of Fancast, which will launch by year's end, will make new on-demand content available online, much of it unavailable in outlets like iTunes--and integrated with DVR boxes--to Comcast cable subscribers who already pay for HBO. About two dozen content providers have signed on board, and as Roberts scrolled through the preview, he noted that there were about a thousand movies available.

Battelle, interviewing Roberts onstage, called it "video-on-demand on steroids."

The Associated Press, referencing a briefing this week with executives at Comcast's Philadelphia headquarters, helped fill in some of the details about the service, noting that it would include such popular cable shows as HBO's "Entourage" and AMC's "Mad Men" and for now is being called "On Demand Online."

The AP said Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. Online viewing, at least in the beginning, will be restricted to those who get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies, the AP said.

Back at Web 2.0 Summit, Roberts also said that Comcast investments in broadband technology are, in part, what has facilitated the explosion in Web innovation.

"We're going to keep investing, because we believe there are great ideas in this room and in this country and in the world," Roberts said. "In the same way, it's unthinkable that a Google or a Yahoo or a Facebook or a Twitter would be happening if we hadn't made those investments (in broadband infrastructure) 15 years ago."

Battelle asked Roberts why he believes the U.S. lags behind in broadband technology advancements. Roberts replied, "I think that that's just not true."

(The audience laughed uncomfortably.)

"We have the same equipment (as other countries), the same wires, the same infrastructure, why is the adoption different is a different question. It's not the availability and I don't think it's the lack of speed," he continued. "You get to digital literacy, you get to what language it's in, do you have the right PC or a PC at all...I don't believe the infrastructure providers haven't done enough."

As for Net neutrality, an issue where Comcast has been a frequent villain after imposing bandwidth caps and interfering with peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Roberts was vague.

"We welcome that discussion, that scrutiny, and we're going to be an active participant," he said. "The few limited examples, including our own, that have gotten notoriety usually get dealt with in ten seconds, and changes get made, because this is new technology."

More recently, it's bubbled into the press that Comcast is in talks with General Electric to obtain a controlling stake in its NBC Universal property. Conveniently, GE chief Jeffrey Immelt was slated to speak later in the afternoon at Web 2.0 Summit.

"You and Jeff Immelt must have finished the NBC deal back in the green room," Battelle joked.

Roberts replied facetiously, "It's all done."

SAN FRANCISCO--"I don't know how many of you actually got sacrificed out there, but condolences to you," said Matt Walsh, head of the Interaction Design department at ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, as he surveyed the audience at his Friday morning talk at the Web 2.0 Expo.

CP&B, after all, was the creator of the "Whopper Sacrifice" phenomenon, a Burger King ad campaign on Facebook that promised a coupon for a free hamburger if participants deleted 10 people from their friends lists on the social network. It was a wild success: the Facebook application was installed nearly 60,000 times in a matter of days, nearly 20,000 Whopper coupons were sent out, and well over 200,000 Facebook friends were deleted. Facebook members even created unofficial groups, offering to let other members add them as friends and then delete them for Whopper Sacrifice purposes.

But Facebook disabled the campaign after ten days, claiming that it was a violation of user privacy because Whopper Sacrifice notified friends if they had been deleted. "(It) challenged the very concept of Facebook," Walsh said. "Whopper Sacrifice had been sacrificed." In an ironic twist, that just led to even more buzz for the campaign.

Walsh took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo to talk about what he saw as the secret sauce (ha, ha!) behind Whopper Sacrifice's success: what he calls "deceptive simplicity."

"It's a very, very simple idea," Walsh said. "And it's something that to a user is a very easy message to communicate. Sacrifice ten of your friends, get a free Whopper. It's got kind of the ultimate elevator pitch."

But the decision-making process behind the campaign was more theoretical, almost anthropological. Walsh said that another core element of Whopper Sacrifice's popularity was the fact that it tapped into a real "tension" in digital culture--how social networking has changed our ideas of what friendship means.

"For so long, friendship in the social space has kind of been a form of social currency," Walsh explained. Social networks' "entire system is kind of dependent on you aggregating as many of your friends as possible in the network, ballooning as quickly as possible, but at the end of the day that's all fine and good in the ramp-up when everything is novel...quite a few years into the social-networking arena now, there's really a question of what is friendship in the 2.0 world?"

Combining that provocativeness with a simple, no-brainer campaign is what Walsh said made it work.

"You're going to be faced with a lot of questions, and you're going to be faced with a lot of what-ifs, and you're going to be faced with a lot of bells and whistles added on," he suggested to marketers in the audience. "Whopper Sacrifice was one that went viral with pretty much zero media budget. We had a few small media banners on Facebook itself, but outside of that...we had a press release and that was it. It blew up because it was something that really resonated with people."

He also acknowledged that not all the feedback was glowing.

"Some people thought it was a little brutal because we did send notifications," Walsh admitted. "If I defriended you, you would get a message saying that you were worth less than one-tenth of a Whopper."

When Demo 09 kicks off Monday in Palms Springs, Calif., the high-technology showcase conference that prides itself on putting cutting-edge companies in front of A-list venture capitalists and journalists will do so in perhaps the worst economic environment in modern tech history.

Exhibitors at Demo pay well into five figures for the privilege of giving a six-minute presentation to a room full of influencers--many of whom have paid up to $3,000 to be there. So one could wonder whether the show can maintain its relevancy while companies are shedding record numbers of jobs, when credit is as tight as it's been in decades, and in an era where tech firms have more ways to promote themselves than ever before.

Yet Demo is not alone in its class: smaller tech conferences of between several hundred and several thousand attendees, such as TechCrunch 50, AlwaysOn, and those run by the GigaOm network. And with money being as tight as it is and the Internet and social media allowing start-ups and companies with new products to bypass traditional promotional methods, one question is obvious: Do we need these conferences?

The answer, according to conference organizers, attendees, and journalists, is yes. But we don't need all of them. And it seems likely that over the next year or two, unless economic conditions improve dramatically, only those conferences that can provide the kind of value that attendees and exhibitors alike need--a solid focus, great content, a long list of influencers, high production value and exceptional networking--will make it.

"I think every business in general is at risk to some degree right now," said Eric Faurot, a senior vice president at TechWeb, which puts on the Web 2.0 conferences, as well as many others. "In the event business, the stronger events, the really healthy events that have a real purpose to them, will emerge stronger, and weaker events will just die. They just won't survive."

Demo, of course, is in a transition period. It announced earlier this month that its longtime director, Chris Shipley, would be stepping aside after its fall 2009 iteration and that VentureBeat CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall would be taking over. Marshall will appear on stage with Shipley at next week's event.

The Demo formula
Some might say that Demo's model of charging a fairly hefty fee to exhibitors, as well as several thousand dollars to attendees--not to mention the fact that it's held at pricey resorts in out-of-the-way places like San Diego, Palm Springs, and Phoenix--would make it a candidate for extinction. But Demo may in fact have just the right formula.

Asked if his software company, Bomgar Corp., would exhibit at Demo in the future after having done so two years ago, CEO Joel Bomgar was unequivocal: "Absolutely....We considered it a huge benefit when we did it."

Bomgar said he had paid $18,000 to present at Demo, and wouldn't blink at paying such a fee again, even if it had gone up a bit.

"If it was a matter of spending $20,000 to get in, we would alter our budget" to do so, said Bomgar, who is speaking on a panel at Demo next week, but who otherwise has no connections to the show. "All of the (benefits it offers), you can leverage to a value that far exceeds $20,000."

To Bomgar, one of Demo's most valuable functions is its traditional filtering process, in which organizers whittle down hundreds of companies--all of which are willing to pay the five-figure fee--to the between 65 and 70 that are finally chosen to present.

"The media and the venture capitalists show up to a show like Demo," Bomgar said, and "they know they're getting the cream of the crop. If they were just getting a random selection, that's instantly less compelling, rather than getting a focused group."

For Michael Arrington, who wears the hats of both a prominent tech journalist--editor of TechCrunch, which he founded--and one of the organizers of TechCrunch 50, a conference's value comes from the people he meets.

"I need to be around CEOs," Arrington said, "because they're the ones that will talk (about what their companies are doing). And there needs to be a lot of news breaking."

That's the lesson conferences can learn in order to stay vital, Bomgar suggested: Give the press and the money people the confidence that they won't be wasting their time by attending, and they'll go out of their way to come, regardless of where the event is. And if the media and the top VCs are on hand, then serious companies that are committed to building their businesses will line up to exhibit, even if they have to pay a hefty fee to do so.

The TechCrunch 50 model
There are other models, of course. For example, TechCrunch 50, an annual show in San Francisco put on by, among others, Arrington and Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, gives a select group of start-up tech companies a chance to showcase their wares in front of many of the most prominent tech journalists in the world--without paying a fee.

"We don't charge anything (to exhibitors) for TechCrunch 50, so the only cost is people's time," said Calacanis. "In a down market, many intelligent and creative people have extra time. There is literally zero cost to the startup....If they make it to the main stage, they get $250,000 to $1 million worth of exposure in my estimation."

And according to Calacanis, the TechCrunch 50 model seems to be working pretty well. "We've seen more demand for this year than the previous two years in terms of companies asking us for the deadlines,speaker requests and sponsorship."

Still, expecting conferences to expand in this environment is unrealistic, said TechWeb's Faurot.

"You can't defy the physics of travel restrictions, and paying for conferences," said Faurot. "So any event that doesn't have a rock-solid position is at serious risk...You're going to sell less conference passes than last year, and you're going to sell less sponsorship than last year."

He explained that while TechWeb considers itself fortunate to have "the market leader" in several conference categories, it is without a doubt seeing the effects of the economic downturn. Faurot said where growth for some of the shows might have been around 30 percent two years ago and 15 percent last year, this year the company is simply hoping not to lose ground.

"We're calling flat the new growth," Faurot said.

Factoring in social media
While the evolution of social media--and the promotional and networking opportunities that services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others give companies and individuals alike--may pose a threat to conferences that are not prepared to deal with it, it also presents a big advantage for those that are.

"In our experience, we've actually found that social media has increased (attendance at) events," Faurot said, "because people who are building relationships online, and people then have a reason to meet that person physically. It's very powerful. I think you just have to embrace it."

And that's where Demo may be in a good position, he added.

"People say, 'Of course, I can release my product at a number of events,' and there's a lot of alternatives to doing a launch at something like Demo," Faurot said. "But on the other hand, Demo is creating a time and place where people are focused on a category. The bet is you're going to amplify more (there) than if you just did your own announcement."

One phenomenon that has gotten a lot of notice in the last couple of years is what is called "lobbyconning," where people who haven't paid to get into a conference hang out in the lobbies at the event venues in order to network with the paying attendees.

But Faurot said that the activity of lobbyconning existed long before the term became well-known, and that, in fact, conference organizers who don't see such behavior are going to be unsuccessful.

"The worst thing for an event is when someone doesn't want to sneak into it," Faurot said.

One who isn't planning to sneak into Demo is BusinessWeek reporter Arik Hesseldahl, a longtime attendee of the conference. In a story he wrote earlier this month about Shipley's departure from the Demo directorship, Hesseldahl touted the value of the show.

"Shipley has run a great show, one that I have always considered a must-go," Hesseldahl wrote. "I quit attending most of the other tech conferences, but have always liked Demo because it is manageable, and because it's always interesting. Shipley has always picked a great crop of companies and I always leave Demo feeling optimistic about the future for tech companies and for the general state of innovation."

Of course, as a longtime attendee, Hesseldahl's enthusiasm for Demo isn't a surprise. But one person who gave the conference an endorsement was, perhaps, unexpected.

"I'll certainly go to (DemoFall)," said Arrington, who had stirred up a fair bit of controversy last year when he and Calacanis scheduled TechCrunch 50 at the same time as the 2008 edition of DemoFall and who, at the time, said, "Demo needs to die." "I think we're on different weeks this year. If we're invited, we'll go."

Clarification at 8 a.m. PDT: The Amazon.com Web services blog posting was not written by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He wrote a related blog on the subject.

Amazon.com is in the midst of creating a new content delivery service aimed at developers and businesses that it expects to launch by year's end.

According to an Amazon Web services blog posted Thursday:

This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels wrote in a separate blog that his company is "expanding the cloud" with this service: "Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access."

Amazon's service will allow customers to store their content in an Amazon S3 holding tank and then mark it as publicly readable when its ready. According to Amazon, customers will then "make a single API call to register the bucket" and have a domain name assigned for their content. When clients "request the object via the returned domain name they'll be routed to a nearest edge location," which aims to deliver content at high speeds.

Amazon's content delivery service is hoping to make its money by allowing customers to pay as they go when using the service. Pricing has not been made public.

GigaOm's Om Malik said that Amazon's service will be disruptive to content delivery network (CDN) incumbents, such as Akamai and Limelight Networks:

Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like an brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

Seeking Alpha's Dan Rayburn agrees, with one caveat:

While the initial content delivery offering won't compete with the major CDNs like Akamai...and Limelight...when it is released, it has the potential to down the road if Amazon adds some specific product functionality.