All Things Digital

We’re posting all the highlights from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference, organized by day and speaker:

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Day One

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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

You would have loved Windows 1.0. Walt. You would have LOVED it.”

–Ballmer

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two
Windows 7 Demo

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Day Two

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Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

People loved their horses, too. But you don’t keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.”

–Bezos on the difference between physical books and digital ones

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Bobby Kotick, Activision

The social element has really transformed the gaming experience.”

– Kotick on the impact of games like Guitar Hero

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video Guitar Hero IV Demo with Tony Hawk and Paula Abdul

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Howard Stringer, Sony

If we were any more successful, we’d be bankrupt.”

–Stringer on the success of Sony’s LCD business

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Barry Diller, IAC

Hollywood is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth.”
 

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Michael Dell, Dell

I could take him.”

–Dell on his chances of success in a brawl with Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, Yahoo

I will never be a CEO again.”

–Yang

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Jeff Bewkes, AOL

AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don’t get no respect.”
 

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures

We invest in the creation of ideas… It’s like Baby Mama, with me as the mama.”
 

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Demo: G.ho.st Web Operating System  

Lets users access their desktop from any computer with an Internet connection.

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Tom Glocer, Thomson Reuters

We have one great advantage over bloggers: we write once, and sell many times to many different media outlets.”

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

I won’t ever stop until you’re either the biggest thing around, or you’re dead.”

–Kara Swisher on her relentless coverage of Facebook

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation

I want to meet Obama. I want to know if he’s going to walk the walk.”
 
 

Session post  |  Photos
Full Session Videos: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six

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Day Three

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Demo: evri

An application that graphs the Web via grammatical information.

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Demo: 23andMe

Web-based, direct-to-consumer genome services.

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Melinda Gates, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

All lives are equal.”

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Demo: TransMedia’s Glide

A mobile-operating system that cuts across all operating systems.

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Tom Rogers, TiVo

The TV set and its primary position in the home isn’t going anywhere in the future.”

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Demo: Deka

The “Luke Arm” prosthesis, a state-of-the-art bionic arm.

Session post  |  Photos  |  Video

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Kevin Martin, FCC and Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless

You’re the chairman of the FCC. How did you allow this to happen?”

–Walt Mossberg grills Martin on the lousy broadband situation in the States

Session post  |  Photos  |  Videos: One and Two

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Here are a few video highlights from the second half of the D6 interview of Kevin Martin, FCC chairman, and Lowell McAdam, CEO, Verizon Wireless (VZ), conducted by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Click here to watch the first half of the interview.

Here are a few video highlights from the first half of the D6 interview of Kevin Martin, FCC chairman, and Lowell McAdam, CEO, Verizon Wireless (VZ), conducted by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Click here to watch the second half of the interview.

Well, this should be interesting. Because of scheduling issues, Kevin Martin and Lowell McAdam will be interviewed at the same time. Will the two hit it off on issues of Net neutrality, early termination fees, open access or none of the above?

Kevin J. Martin is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, where he has served as a commissioner since 2001 and as chairman since 2005. During his term, he has conducted a balancing act between the interests of the technology and telecommunications industries. He mostly sided with Google (GOOG) in the effort to impose new openness rules on a large chunk of spectrum the FCC recently auctioned, and he has been publicly critical of the cable TV companies. He could be an important player in the battle over Net neutrality.

Lowell McAdam is president and CEO of Verizon Wireless (VZ), the nation’s second-largest wireless voice and data provider, and is chairman of the board of directors of CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association and lobbying group. An engineer by training, Mr. McAdam has been an outspoken defender of the wireless industry’s practices, even when they have been criticized by the technology industry. However, he has recently launched an initiative to create a parallel “open” system at Verizon, which the company claims will allow any device and any application to operate on its network without interference from Verizon.

• Pulling up a chart that showcases the lousy broadband situation in the states, Walt kicks the conversation off with a hardball question for Martin: “You’re the chairman of the FCC,” says Walt. “How did you allow this to happen?” Big applause.
• Martin tries to dodge a bit, suggesting that the chart shows penetration. Walt corrects him, noting that what it actually shows are broadband speeds that are abysmal.

  

• Martin says he feels it’s important that we improve both penetration and speed. Walt is not letting him off that easy, jumping back in to point out that not only do broadband speeds in the states stink, but that we also pay as much as four times what people in other countries pay for better, faster broadband.

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DEKA Research founder and Segway creator Dean Kamen comes to D6 to demonstrate his “Luke Arm” prosthesis. Named after the artificial limb worn by Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” the state-of-the-art bionic arm looks and feels to its user like his or her native arm.

• Walt and Kara welcome Kamen to the stage.
• So what’ve you been working on? Kamen recalls a visit with some very high-level people from DARPA years ago. The good news, they told him: Battle fatalities have greatly declined. The bad news: Many soldiers that survive battle have lost their arms. And the prosthetics we currently have don’t offer bilateral movement or fine motor control. Kamen says they charged him with developing a new prosthetic that could offer those things. “I looked at them,” says Kamen, “and I said you’re nuts.” We don’t have the technology yet. How do we interface with the human body? “You think you have trouble with the Vista interface,” quips Kamen.
• Kamen pulled together a bunch of creative folks, did a bit of research and decided to try to build the arm. DARPA asked him to build it in two years. Kamen said he’d build it in one.

  

• And almost a year later he had.
• Video of a man with two functioning arms demonstrating an exoskeleton version of the arm. He scratches his nose, picks up a pad of paper ….
• Kamen queues up another video that features an amputee who’s lost both his arms, using the Luke Arm after less than two hours of training. After passing a small ball to a colleague, the man pours a drink and then feeds himself for the first time in 13 years.
• Queuing up another video in which a man who has had the arm connected directly to his nerve endings controls the arm simply by thinking. Kamen says it took just a day for the user to learn how to use the arm to do basic things like picking up a glass.
• Kamen talks about the difficulty of this process–with so many possible degrees of freedom, how does someone wearing one of these arms learn to operate, say, a backhoe?
• Kamen says DEKA solved this problem by creating macros that could be programmed into the arm to shorten this process. Video demonstration of the “ball holding” and “power-drill operating” macros, among others.
• We took these things down to a Veterans Administration building to test them out. He found that the arm was difficult to attach because of varying degrees of amputation. Also found that many amputees don’t wear their current prosthetics, because they’re too heavy or uncomfortable or difficult to wear. Kamen worried that the Luke Arm would meet with a similar reception unless he solved these problems.
• DEKA went back into the lab and added a set of air bladders to the arm harness, along with a pneumatic pump that makes the arm not just more comfortable, but easier to use. Also quite powerful. Can lift weights as large as 40 pounds.
• Moving on to another video that shows an amputee using the arm to pick up grapes one by one and eat them.
• Kamen hopes someday to connect these prosthetics directly to the brain–non-invasively.
• On to the next Kamen passion: education. He thanks Melinda Gates for setting up the crowd, then makes his pitch: We’re the only country where minority kids and women get the message that they aren’t suitable for science or math careers. So let’s turn science, engineering, etc., into a fun sport. In short, he says, we got 23 companies to develop sports-like teams and an annual competition through FIRST (for inspiration and recognition of science and technology). The organization has grown: 13,911 schools from 38 countries. He asks the audience to help.

Here are a few video highlights from the second half of the D6 interview of Tom Rogers, president and CEO, TiVo (TIVO), conducted by conference co-host Kara Swisher. Click here to watch the first half of the interview.

Here are a few video highlights from the D6 interview of Tom Rogers, president and CEO, TiVo (TIVO), conducted by conference co-host Kara Swisher. Click here to watch the second half of the interview.

Tom Rogers, a well-rounded media executive, has had his work cut out for him at TiVo (TIVO), the iconic but often-struggling pioneer and leader in the digital video-recorder market. Before coming to TiVo, Mr. Rogers was chairman and CEO of Primedia, which publishes 200 magazines, operates more than 400 Web sites and runs a wide range of television and video businesses. Previous to that, he was president of NBC Cable and executive vice president at NBC, as well as its chief strategist. While there, Mr. Rogers helped found the CNBC business cable channel and established the NBC/Microsoft cable channel and Internet joint venture, MSNBC. He also worked in politics, as senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance Subcommittee, and has previously worked as a Wall Street lawyer.

• Tom Rogers’s interview is prefaced by a video introduction clip from “The Simpsons.” In it, Keith Olbermann accuses Marge Simpson of being a content thief for using her TiVo to watch TV without commercials.
• Kara welcomes Rogers to the stage. She recalls being at the TiVo pitch meeting “with a bunch of dumb dot-com guys,” notes that she felt it was a huge idea at the time but hasn’t proven an easy business for the company.

  

• Rogers begins by recalling his time at NBC and how his last act at the company was to make it an investor in TiVo.
• What was TiVo when you arrived? Rogers says there was a view that it was a great device with a lot of potential. I looked at that as a student of the broadcast and cable industries, he says, and thought that we couldn’t succeed as an island apart from those industries. We had to work with them, even if TiVo was initially viewed as a means for consumers to take power back from the TV industry. We had to weave TiVo into those industries.
• Kara insists that the major concept behind TiVo is really skipping commercials. “I can pause TV and go to the bathroom and skip the commercials when I come back.”
• Rogers, it seems, would prefer to refer to that as “giving consumers control of their TV experience,” rather that what it really is.
• Kara circles back: “How do you get rid of this image of TiVo as a content thief?”

Read more »

Here are some more video highlights from the D6 interview of Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation, conducted by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

This year’s D conference has had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former …

Did you have anything to do with the New York Post’s endorsement of Obama?”

– Walt Mossberg to Rupert Murdoch

“Yeah.”

–Rupert Murdoch to Walt Mossberg

I didn’t leave business school to go bankrupt.”

–Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on his first days at Microsoft

You would have loved Windows 1.0, Walt. You would have LOVED it.”

–Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

–Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates

I will never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang

Read more »

TransMedia’s Glide OS and Glide Business online operating environment are platform-agnostic mobile-operating systems that support devices running Windows Mobile, Mac OS X, BlackBerry and Palm OS, as well as the Google-backed Android platform.

• Walt and Kara welcome Donald Leka, TransMedia’s Chairman and CEO to the stage.
• Leka offers a bit of background about Glide, which cuts across all operating systems.
• Looks like demo will include Mac, Windows and iPhone. Starting with the Mac. Deka notes that Glide is a mobile-operating system that runs on top of the local operating system. He pulls up the Deka desktop. Moves a few icons around … moves on to the music application, launches it not from the Mac dock, but from Glide’s own dock. Leka explains that in addition to real-time navigation, Glide offers object-oriented navigation, he says.
• Glide includes device recognition as well as file transcoding. Moving on to the word-processing app. Pretty typical.
• OS supports a rights system that allows five different levels of access. Also offers real-time collaboration, video conferencing. Walt asks about browser support. Leka says Firefox is best, but company is working on compatibility with other browsers as well.
• Walt notes that entire OS is written as a local application.
• Glide is advertising free. How do you make money? asks Kara. Glide offers five gigabytes of storage for free, Leka says; after that, there’s a monthly subscription fee.
• Demonstrating file rights. Very granular. You can set rights to permit as little as a one-time view of a document.
• Moving over to Windows machine. Demoing “Kids Glide.” Same sort of UI, just a bit more kid friendly.
• Demoing iPhone version now. Loads very quickly. Noting that Glide requires a browser, Walt wonders how it will run on phones that don’t offer good browsing experiences. Moving on to a photo editing app. Leka notes that Glide plays Windows Media files on the iPhone and Quicktime movies on Windows Mobile phones.
• Jumping to Glide’s word-processing app on iPhone. Can export to a variety of formats, including PDF.
• And that’s it ……

Here are a few video highlights from the second half of the D6 interview of Melinda Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted by conference co-host Walt Mossberg. Click here to watch the first half of the interview.

Here are a few video highlights from the first half of the D6 interview of Melinda Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted by conference co-host Walt Mossberg. Click here to watch the second half of the interview.

Before she ever dated Bill Gates, let alone married him, Melinda French was a damned good product manager at Microsoft. She brought to market Microsoft Publisher, which popularized the step-by-step wizards that have since spread through software everywhere. And she made a valiant, if failed, effort to radically simplify computers with Microsoft Bob. Now, with her husband, she heads the world’s largest charitable foundation, bringing to philanthropy a rare combination of compassion and the business skills she honed at Microsoft. Ms. Gates received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics from Duke University in 1986 and a master’s in business administration from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987. She is a mother of three and a former member of the board of trustees of Duke and a former co-chair of the Washington State Governor’s Commission on Early Learning.

• Walt welcomes Gates to the stage. Gates recalls her first meeting with Walt, years ago in Washington, D.C., to discuss Microsoft Publisher. Walt notes that he gave the product a positive review.
• So you’re the co-chair of the Gates Foundation now, Walt notes. Is there any similarity between what you’re doing now and what you did at Microsoft (MSFT)? Gates thinks there is. The crossover, she says, is that there are amazing advances in technology, yet these profound advances are not available to the developing world. She’s using her experience from Microsoft to bring those advances to the developing world: “The skill-set I developed at Microsoft is very transferable to what I do now.”

  

• Discussing the foundation’s financial resources, Gates notes that she could tap out its wealth simply by attempting to fix the education system in California alone. Solving problems outright is not its role. The Gates Foundation’s role, she says, is to take the financial risks that often prohibit governments from beginning to address societal problems.

Read more »

Today’s session begins with a demo from personal genomics outfit 23andMe, brought onstage by Kara and Walt. Founded by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki (wife of Google’s Sergey Brin), the company is among those pioneering Web-based, direct-to-consumer genome services. Today the two will talk about 23andMe’s newest effort, 23andWe, which will conduct large-scale genome-wide association studies with the help of individuals willing to share information about their health and other personal traits.

• Avey and Wojcicki take the stage. They note that attendee Esther Dyson (and 23andMe board member) has over 30 family members signed up for the service, before giving a brief overview of their genotyping tools. Simple as a spit-test, apparently.

• Company was born out a frustration over the genetic industry’s statistical powers. With 23andWe, the company hopes to dramatically accelerate the pace of genetic research by empowering the public to come together themselves to fuel new studies. Walt asks if these studies will be peer-reviewed, and they will.
• Demo involves a sort of old-media-versus-new-media DNA-off: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt versus Kara and Rupert Murdoch.
• Is Rupert Murdoch lactose intolerant? Murdoch says no. According to 23andMe’s analysis, that’s true. Kara and Brin, unfortunately won’t be making any trips to the ice-cream store. “There go the dairy ads,” quips Walt.
• Wojcicki asks Murdoch if he would prefer a long-distance race or a sprint. Murdoch says neither. Wojcicki says his genetic info suggests he’d be a great long-distance runner.

  

• Moving on to the 23andWe demo. Question to the audience: How many people can smell asparagus in their urine? Uncomfortable giggle, raising of hands.
• Murdoch volunteers to fill out 23andMe’s survey: Do you sneeze in bright sunlight? Do you wear glasses? Any cavities? (Lots, says Murdoch.) Freckles? Lots. Right- or left-handed. Does your urine smell after you eat asparagus? Murdoch doesn’t think so.
• The survey finished, 23andMe crunches the data provided. Turns out most people don’t sneeze when they see sunlight. Lots of people have cavities. Lots of right-handed folks. And a fair number of people do not notice the smell of their urine after eating asparagus.
• Reviewing Kara’s data for information about her two sons. Turns out neither is related to Rupert Murdoch.
• Looking at Murdoch’s info again now. Kara: “Where’s Rupert’s elk-despising gene?”