Tech wrap: HP shake-up?
A change could be underway at the top at Hewlett-Packard. The company’s board convened on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of ousting CEO Leo Apotheker after less than a year on the job and may appoint former eBay chief Meg Whitman to fill in as interim CEO, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. HP’s board of directors has come under increasing pressure in recent months after a raft of controversial decisions has left investors uncertain of the company’s leadership.
Newly minted Apple CEO Tim Cook will try his hand as star presenter at an October 4 company event widely expected to include the launch of the latest version of the tech behemoth’s iPhone handset, according to a report on AllThingD. Sources told the website that the plan is to make the iPhone 5 available to consumers within weeks of the event. Apple has yet to officially announce or even acknowledge that the new device exists at all. For those tired of yet another story about a rumored release date, there was something akin to a confirmation on Wednesday from an unlikely source: former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Gore, an Apple board member, apparently told a tech conference that the next-generation phone will indeed be available next month. Oops?!
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt traveled to Washington on Wednesday to face critics who say his company has become a dominant and potentially anti-competitive force on the Internet. Schmidt told a Senate antitrust hearing that his company has not “cooked” its search results to favor its own products and listings, despite accusations to the contrary from senators and other Web companies. “Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet,” said Republican Senator Mike Lee, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel. Google has been broadly accused of using its clout in the search market to stomp rivals as it moves into related businesses, like travel search.
Dust your library cards off, Kindle users. Amazon announced on Wednesday its Kindle ebooks will now be available for borrowing from more than 11,000 libraries across the U.S. Borrowing a book seems pretty simple: customers find the book they want on their local library’s website and choose the “Send to Kindle” option, which will then redirect them to Amazon.com where they must log in to complete the check out. Amazon then gives customers the option of delivering the book wirelessly to their device of choice – the books are compatible with all Kindle models and mobile apps – or transferring it manually using a USB drive.
Netflix and Discovery Communications reached an agreement to bring episodes of popular TV adventure shows including “Man vs. Wild” and “River Monsters” to the streaming service, the companies confirmed to Reuters correspondent Paul Thomasch on Wednesday. The two-year deal covers only material from prior seasons of the TV shows and is limited to Netflix subscribers in the United States. Discovery has an option for a third year.
Obama tech dinner photos offer fodder for Silicon Valley Kremlinologists
It’s Kremlinology day in Silicon Valley as industry-watchers pore over the details of the two photographs released by the White House of President Obama’s big dinner with the lords of the tech world.
Who sat where, who was drinking what, and what does it all signify, were among the top questions under debate the morning after the commander-in-chief and fourteen guests broke bread at the house of venture capitalist John Doerr.
If proximity to the president is the key measure of clout, then Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Steve Jobs won top honors, with both executives flanking Obama at the dinner table, as can be seen in this picture.
The White House denied press photographers access to the event, so Reuters and several other media outlets are not publishing the photos. But you can find them here.
Whether the White House’s official dinner-table photo was deliberately shot from an angle to show only Jobs’ back was a subject of speculation, coming a day after the National Enquirer published photos which seemed to show Jobs — who is currently on medical leave from Apple — outside a cancer center looking particularly frail.
Also widely noted was the fact that 26-year old Facebook founder Zuckerberg, known for a firm attachment to sporting a “hoodie” sweatshirt at all times, saw fit to don a suit for the occasion.
And what to make of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was seated all the way at the end of the table? Schmidt of course serves on Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, so he may simply have thought it courteous to let others have some time with the prez.
Life after Google: Schmidt eyes talk show shtick
What do you do after ten years running one of the world’s most successful and feared companies?
If you’re Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, it seems the role of television talk-show host holds some appeal. The 55-year-old Schmidt, who in April will hand over day-to-day control of Google to co-founder Larry Page, has been working on developing a show that would feature him as the host, according to the New York Post’s Page Six.
The article does not say exactly what type of talk-show Schmidt wants to emcee.
Will Schmidt, who has toiled in the tech industry for decades, cast himself as a feel-good self-help guru a la Dr Phil, or might he see a model of inspiration in Jerry Springer’s tireless work chronicling the everyday dramas and disputes of regular Joes?
If the morning crowd is Schmidt’s cup of tea, his timing may be perfect, following the recent news that Regis Philbin plans to retire.
But Schmidt may have something with a bit more gravitas in mind, given that he’s been working with Liza McGuirk, the executive producer of CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program, according to the Post.
In fact, Schmidt has appeared as a guest on “Parker Spitzer” in the past, as well as on programs like “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, which McGuirk also served as executive producer, according to the Post.
Wild news on Apple, Google changes? Not if you’re an analyst
It has certainly been an interesting week in Silicon Valley as two of the most closely watched companies in the world shuffled their executive suites. On Monday, Apple announced that its chief executive and charismatic leader Steve Jobs was taking a temporary medical leave – his third since 2004 — a day before Apple released its quarterly results. On Thursday, Google reported a stellar Q4 and dropped that Larry Page would be stepping into the role of chief executive, as Eric Schmidt takes up the executive chairman position.
Big news, right? So it’s surprising then that analysts who have the opportunity to quiz management during earnings calls failed to mention anything about the changes. Not one analyst asked about the C-suite during the Google and Apple calls. Google even made its three top executives, Schmidt, Page and Sergey Brin available for short period on Thursday’s call. The three analysts in the queue pitched questions about the following subjects: Google’s real estate purchase in New York, government outreach and social networking plans.
from The Great Debate:
Google’s greatest skill – and challenge
By Jeff Jarvis Jarvis is the author of "What Would Google Do?" and teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His next book, "Public Parts", will be published later this year.
The miracle of Google was that it could accomplish anything—let alone become the fastest growing company in the history of the world and the greatest disruptive force in business and society today—while being run by a committee, a junta, a council of the gods.
In management, as in every other arena of business, technology, and media, Google broke every rule and made new ones.
It should not be a shock that Eric Schmidt has stepped aside as CEO and made room for Larry Page. Schmidt was the prince regent who ruled until the boy king could take the throne while training him to do so. We knew that this would happen. We just forgot that it would.
When I interviewed Schmidt a few weeks ago and asked about pressure over privacy, China, and lobbying, he said, “This is not the No. 1 crisis at Google.” What is? “Growth,” he said, “just growth.”
Scale is Google’s greatest skill and greatest challenge. It scaled search (vs. quaint Yahoo, which thought it could catalogue this web thing). It scaled advertising (vs. the media companies that today don’t know how to grow, only shrink). It is scaling mobile (by giving away Android). It has tried to scale innovation (with its 20 percent rule)—but that’s the toughest.
‘pressure over privacy’
Although it may seem just a small blip on the horizon at present, the storm breaking around UK Prime Minister David Cameron will have huge ramifications for Google, social networks and media practices….
Sun Valley: Jane Goodall and the primary primates
It’s day three of the Sun Valley media conference and the event has started to feel like a Jane Goodall documentary, in which we’re Jane and the moguls are the apes who have become comfortable letting us observe and record their movements. Several media executives groggily making their way to the morning’s first session (scheduled to kick off at 7:30), stopped to chat with the throng of press waiting to greet them.
Liberty Media Chairman John Malone voiced concerns about the economy for nearly 10 minutes while NBC’s Jeff Zucker, who once warned of the risks to media companies of trading analog dollars for digital pennies and later upped the exchange rate to dimes, posited the idea that the media industry was now within reach of collecting digital quarters. It’s change we can believe in.
Later on Thursday, Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt (who for reasons unknown has been toting a camera with a beefy zoom lens throughout the event, even after-hours at the bar on Wednesday evening) will hold his traditional Sun Valley press roundtable, possibly with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are here.
As for Steve Jobs, it appears that he is a no-show.
And while hoops superstar Lebron James mingled with the executives at Sun Valley last year, he will probably end up overshadowing the gathering of media bigwigs from afar this year when he announces his choice of a new home team on Thursday night.
(John Malone does his media thing at Sun Valley. Photo: Reuters)
Sun Valley: Sling Media co-founder has questions about Google TV
(Updates to reflect correct name of Slingbox product)
Google is a few months away from releasing Google TV, its new service that blends television with Internet capabilities.
But at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, where the masters of media, entertainment and technology congregate every July to schmooze and talk shop, one attendee with experience mixing TV with the Web noted the challenges facing Google as it tries to conquer the living room.
The “entertainment experience is not just about having a search box and some great algorithms. We all want that and we all enjoy that part of the experience” but it’s only one part of the experience, said Blake Krikorian.
As the co-founder of Sling Media, Krikorian developed the Slingbox — which allows consumers to stream their television programming to their PCs. In 2007, EchoStar acquired Sling Media for about $380 million.
Krikorian said that getting the content and programming right — the traditional DNA of Hollywood and New York media companies — will be the key for a tech company like Google to succeed in the living room.
“People just want to relax and be entertained sometimes. That requires a certain DNA. That DNA, Hollywood has understood and NY has understood. And Silicon Valley worlds don’t quite get that, with the exception of Steve Jobs.”
Inside Google’s M&A machine: 3 months, $145 million, 9 deals
It’s no secret that Google has been on a buying binge, snapping up tech start-ups at a rapid-fire pace. What’s less transparent is how much that spree is costing it.
How much money is forked over is mostly a matter for speculation. Google doesn’t disclose financial terms for most acquisitions and only a few of the deals have had financial details leak out onto the blogosophere.
So it’s a bit of a welcome surprise that Google shed a little more light on the matter on Wednesday in a regulatory filing with the SEC, in which it said it paid a total cash consideration of $145 million for nine acquisitions in the first three months of the year.
That works out to roughly $16.11 million per deal on average, though some deals, of course, fetched higher prices (social search site Aardvark was reportedly acquired for $50 million), and some deals may have involved stock as well as cash.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said publicly that the search giant expects to acquire about one company a month now that it has emerged from the worst of the economic downturn. At its current pace, Google is exceeding that goal by a wide margin.
If you include the $123 million deal to buy On2 Technologies ($28 million in cash, $95 million stock), which closed in February, Google spent at least $268 million on M&A in the first quarter.
Google is known to acquire companies for the engineering talent as much as anything else. According to Wednesday’s filing, Google cited goodwill as accounting for $107 million of the $145 million in cash that it paid for the nine acquisitions.
Viacom digs up more YouTube documents for court case
Viacom’s ongoing legal fisticuffs with Google over alleged piracy on YouTube rages on. The MTV and Nickelodeon owner on Thursday put out nine additional exhibits in addition to the hundreds of pages that were put out last month including transcripted deposition from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Viacom, which extended CEO Philippe Dauman’s contract today, said the exhibits “make clear one of our core claims in the case: that Google made a deliberate, calculated business decision not only to profit from copyright infringement, but also to use the threat of copyright infringement to try to coerce rights owners like Viacom into licensing their content on Google’s terms.”
Viacom is making that claim based on various statements from Google senior employees while management was considering buying YouTube.
As for Schmidt’s deposition from May 2009 it’s not particularly controversial, with perhaps the most interesting statement being that he owns 30 computers and claims it has been his practice for 30 years to not retain his emails unless asked specifically.
(Photo: Reuters)
Digital content disputes only end up hurting the consumers
Apple’s Jobs and Google’s Schmidt: Let’s do coffee
An unusual — and unverified – photograph posted on the Internet by Gizmodo is triggering a minor sensation in tech circles. Google and Apple may be at war, but — if this snapshot of CEOs Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt casually chatting over a coffee is to be believed — the generals of the two tech superpowers may have discussed matters of state via an intimate, streetside tete-a-tete on Friday.
According to Gizmodo, a perspicacious passer-by spotted Jobs and Schmidt at a restaurant in Palo Alto, California on Friday and duly relayed the resulting photos to the tech blog.
For those who haven’t been following Silicon’s Valley favorite new drama: Jobs and Schmidt once sat on Apple’s board together and were allied in the battle against software giant Microsoft. But in recent years, the two chieftains have positioned their companies against each other, in markets like smartphones, mobile advertising and PC operating systems. And, according to some accounts, the relationship between the two has taken a turn for the worse.
Thus, the seeming news of a pow-wow between the two bigwigs (with Jobs of course clad in his trademark black turtleneck) was cause for speculation across the blogosphere.
Was it a sign of detente between two hostile tech titans? A Sopranos-like “sit-down” to negotiate appropriate reparations for past grievances? Or something else?
The intrigue was stoked further by the snippets of conversation overheard by the eavesdropper and reprinted on Gizmodo.
“They’re going to see it eventually, so who cares how they get it,” Jobs reportedly told Google’s CEO in a comment that apparently seemed to relate to Web content. As a crowd of onlookers began to mass, Jobs then suggested they take their conversation somewhere more private, Gizmodo said.
Count Dracula-Schmidt appears be finishing up from his latest feeding on Steve Jobs. Looks like Steve has been sucked dry.
