All Things Digital

Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.” Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.” With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there. Read More »

Have you bought a Kindle? Do you plan on buying a Kindle? If you answered yes to either question, you’re part of not-that-small group: JP Morgan estimates that some 10 million Americans either own one of Amazon’s e-book readers or plan to get one soon. Meanwhile, whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its DX reader? Read More »

ShoreTel posted better than expected results for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30. For the quarter, the company reported revenue of $32.4 million, down from $34.7 million a year ago, but up four percent sequentially, and ahead of the Street at $32.1 million. Non-GAAP profits of three cents a share beat the Street consensus of a penny a share. Read More »

Here’s a new video that has been making the rounds recently featuring “Roller Babies,” which is essentially a computer-generated bunch of babies on skates doing a rap number. It’s a commercial for Evian Water, but BoomTown laughs every time I look at it anyway–probably because it reminds me of the most famous of all viral videos on the Internet: The Dancing Baby of 1997. Read More »

Cisco Systems on Wednesday held a news conference with Warner Music to promote software to create and manage Web sites, one of nearly 30 new businesses the tech-equipment maker is getting into that it says has the potential to someday reach $1 billion in revenue. Read More »

The rumors of the much-anticipated, yet-to-be-confirmed Apple tablet continued to pile up. The latest version comes from that old rumormonger, Trip Chowdhry, proprietor of the boutique research firm Global Equities Research. Once a month or so, Chowdhry publishes Silicon Scorp, a roundup of chatter he’s hearing around the Valley. Read More »

Google says its oft-maligned video site is going to start making lots of money soon. But it still has some work ahead of it. Right now, for instance, just four in 10 of YouTube’s most popular clips carry advertising. Read More »

Some people go to conferences for the networking, others go for the keynote session and still others, apparently, go for the dancing. Not this year. One of the highlights of the annual Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., has been Google’s party, known as “Google Dance,” at its Mountain View headquarters. The search giant canceled it this year, however, citing cost-cutting efforts. Read More »

Oh, it’s the middle of August, so why not report this little tidbit: Former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has been appointed to the board of the J. Crew Group, the well-known New York-based specialty retailer. She is now a CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners in Silicon Valley, after leaving her longtime job at Google, where she was president of its Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations. Cassidy was also one of Google’s more visible execs and highest-ranking women leaders, so BoomTown is more interested in where the the 39-year-old will land next as a top exec at a Web operation. Read More »

The battle for control of the DVD rental business continues to heat up. Redbox, the Coinstar unit which operates more than 15,000 DVD rental kiosks around the country, today announced that it has filed suit against 20th Century Fox over new proposed distribution terms which would prevent Redbox from renting the studio’s DVDs to consumers until at least 30 days after they are released to the public. Read More »

BoomTown just got this interesting memo that Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele sent out to her staff immediately in the wake of the deal for Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search technology business two weeks ago. I render it unto you, dear readers, since it shows just how intent the top managers of Yahoo are, especially internally, in reassuring those concerned that Yahoo had not just gutted itself and how it would remain as innovative as ever. Also amusing–for reasons I cannot understand since it is an internal memo–is the use of the code name for Yahoo, which is called Yale, after the famous university in New Haven, Conn. Read More »

So now that the RealNetworks attempt to get into the movie-copying business has been rebuffed by a federal court once again, I’ve got a question: Why, exactly does RealNetworks want to be in the movie-copying business? Read More »

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently. In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its exploding popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers. Read More »

Apple has been up in the Sierras, shooting a new ad for, well, something new. The Sierra Sun reports that Apple employees have been spotted in Truckee, California, shooting an advertisement at a diner called Jax on the Tracks. Read More »

Though my own family might find it hard to believe, I don’t generally keep my BlackBerry on my nightstand overnight. I keep it in a bureau drawer, and the few seconds it takes in the morning to walk over there strike me as the difference between an addiction and mere avid use. Read More »