Summit Notebook

Draper’s Valley Girl

She’s interviewed tech luminaries from Eric Schmidt to Scott McNealy. She dresses in shocking pink. Her dad was one of the VCs behind Skype and Hotmail. Who is she? She’s, like, the Valley Girl.

Jesse Draper, formerly of the short-lived Nickelodeon series “Naked Brothers Band”, and Sharon Lee are the brains, and the feather boas, behind “Valley Girl”: a 60 minutes-meets-MTV online chat show that in just one season has hosted some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley on its pink satin sofa. Or, as Jesse herself puts it: “Where Silicon Valley’s Best meet Hollywood”. Totally.

So what does Jesse’s dad think about the show?

“It’s ‘I Love Lucy’ interviewing the president of Bank of America,” gushed Tim Draper — who’s known more for plugging high-tech start-ups than his daughter’s online guerrilla show — at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was among the highlights of the first season. Picked up in a white golf-cart festooned with lacy pink curtains, the Internet chieftain gamely played at charades, answered questions ranging from “Who was your childhood crush” (“I didn’t really have a crush”) to “Have you ever Googled Google?” (It throws up a ton of hits).

“I’m delighted to be in the most pink set I’ve ever been in,” Schmidt dead-panned.

(Photo from valleygirlonline.com)

Diller to profitable companies: Lay off the layoffs

IAC Chief Executive Barry Diller took several groups to task at the Reuters Media Summit, but he reserved special disgust for CEOs at profitable companies who add to the country’s rising unemployment rate.

Also targeted by the former Hollywood executive were “incredibly, shockingly stupid” Big 3 auto executives, the Internet’s strange and growing dictionary, and Hollywood’s lack of creativity.

Diller said companies had a higher obligation, especially in tough times like these:

“The idea of a company that’s earning money, not losing money, that’s not, let’s say ‘industrially endangered,’ to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it’s certainly not necessary. It’s doing it at the worst time. It’s throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.”

A few seconds later, he added:

“It’s not that you don’t want to earn as much money as you can — it is your obligation, of course — but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday’s game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.”

Diller was equally confounded by the top three U.S. auto executives, who recently were criticized for separately flying corporate jets to Washington before hearings to request a $25 billion taxpayer bailout.

from MediaFile:

Cell phones still No. 1 movie irritant for Regal CEO

People who talk and text on cell phones are still the number one source of movie theater complaints tracked by Regal Entertainment Group, Chairman and Chief Executive Mike Campbell told the Reuters Media Summit on Wednesday.

Campbell made news at a the 2006 Reuters summit by disclosing that Regal, the largest U.S. theater chain, had armed patrons in a few test theaters with gizmos that summon ushers to deal with problems ranging from rowdy audiences to a freezing auditoriums. Back then, Campbell reported that some patrons were "getting into physical battles in the theaters" over cell phones and that the chain had "had people assaulted with bats, knives and guns" over their electronic umbilical cords.

The program worked so well that Regal has now expanded it to 100 of its highest volume locations, and cell phone talkers and texters seem to be getting the message, Campbell said.

"We have noticed -- at least our perception over the last couple of years is -- we don't seem to be having quite as many issues there," Campbell said. "I think the message that we are trying to get out to customers, both subtle and not so subtle, is beginning to have some impact."

Regal has used data from the expanded program to track whether a particular disturbance "is mostly a... one-off situation or is there a pattern across the country," Campbell said.

Still, the most common problems are "cell phone related -- texting...and cell phone usage," Campbell said. "In general, the number one complaint... continues to be some kind of customer disruption."

(Photo: Director/actor Woody Allen uses his phone, but not in the movie theater. Reuters)