D7 | All Things Digital Starts Today

At this moment some of the biggest names in digital technology are cueing up at Carlsbadistan’s The Four Seasons Aviara (if that’s what it’s still called) for The Wall Street Journal’s D | All Things Digital Conference which runs May 26-28, 2009. And that means it’s time for our annual All Things Barged expedition. We’re not as excited this year because the line-up of tech players this year while strong isn’t exactly a list of people that we’re interested in, but there are still some extremely heavy hitters. Here’s who will be speaking in Carlsbadistan over the next three days:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment
Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla
Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft
Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo
Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures
Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day
Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia
Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion
John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla
John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation
Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners
Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.
Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm
Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T
Biz Stone | Co-Founder of Twitter
Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace
Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post
Evan Williams | Co-Founder and CEO of Twitter
Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal

Now that we think about it, if we made a list of people in the tech business who had some serious explaining to do it would look a lot like the D7 speakers list. Here’s a little of what we mean:

• Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo needs to explain what happened to Nokia’s business after Apple stepped in with the iPhone.
• Palm’s Jon Rubinstein is going to do the same thing, though he will be disguising his excuses as a presentation of their new webOS.
• Twitter’s Biz Stone and Evan Williams need to explain some kind of end game for a company that has raised close to $300 million, has 30.1 million users and zero revenue.
• Mark Cuban has some seriously SEC issues that we’re sure he’s just itching to explain.
• It would be wise of Carol Bartz to explain why Yahoo has a future
• Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker should explain how money can be made with a free browser
• Steve Ballmer will likely attempt to explain the roll out Mircosoft’s next marketing failure (Bing)
• And finally, The Washington Post’s Katharine Weymouth will be faced with the “what ever happened to newspapers” question that we’re sure she’s extremely tired of answering.

We would love to hear many of these explanations, but the conference costs $5,000. We’ll let you know how it goes. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher were very cool to us last year as was a certain PR person from Google.

If you’re interested in following along click here to get the All Things D iPhone app.

[Link: D7 | All Things D]