by The Editors on May 26, 2009
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]
by The Editors on May 5, 2008
The biggest, most important tech conference (if you judge it by its attendees), D: All Things Digital will be back in Carlsbad at the Aviara Four Seasons Resort May 27-29, 2008.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch. Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang. . . . All of them engaged in roiling Internet deal-making of late and all of them in just three weeks on the same stage–but not, thankfully, at the same time.
Looks like this is going to be an even better party to crash than last year.
[Link: D: All Things Digital]
by The Editors on June 1, 2007
With the major event of the week (Steve and Bill on the same stage) going down on Wednesday, the final day of the Wall Street Journal’s digital conference at the Four Season at Aviara was a bit of a let down. Time Inc. CEO Anne Moore took the opportunity to let some of the world’s best tech writers know how completely out of touch she is with anything related to the Internet. That didn’t stop her from repeating her latest legacy begging mantra:
I am going to be known for transforming Time Inc. For diversifying Time Inc. And I am going to be the person who leads the transformation, to make sure we are around for another 80 years.
Yeah Ms. Moore. . . say that three more times, click the heels of your ruby slippers, and it will happen. Seriously.
Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was equally out of touch, however, there were a few who spoke a little more eloquently about their digital futures:
– Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube
– Google CEO Eric Schmidt
And then there was “International Space Tourist” Charles Simonyi, a former Microsoft employee who paid more than $20 million to visit the International Space Station for 11 days. Truthfully, we don’t care what he has to say about anything. Yeah, Charles, we know. Things do feel heavy back on earth after being weightless for two weeks.
What a way to end it all. Next year, we’re going to be much more diligent about our barging. . . maybe we’ll even get a job bussing tables that week.
[Link: All Things Digital]
by The Editors on May 29, 2007
We just took a stroll past Vigilucci’s overlooking Tamarack surfing beach and saw some guys in suits getting into a taxi headed back to Aviara. They looked very “tech,” but they weren’t Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs. And seriously, we’re thinking about driving up there to see if we can mingle with the technorati of the world. Only 500 people get to attend. Obviously, we’re not any of them.
John McCain spoke tonight. Here is a live blog of what he had to say. The San Jose Mercury News’ John Paczkowski is blogging the whole conference and this is what he had to say about today:
We’ll be seeing some big announcements from Palm and RealNetworks, the debut of Mahalo, unscripted conversations with a host of tech luminaries and, of course, a few surprises. Plus a rare joint appearance by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
With exciting prose like that it’s no wonder he’s the Wall Street Journal’s blogger of choice. If we make it up there, we’ll report back. Hopefully, it won’t involve Four Seasons security and a night in the at the Vista jail.
P.S. Here is the schedule of events for the next three days, if you want to join us in a tech barge.
[Link: D: All Things Digital]
by The Editors on May 29, 2007
Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal is in Carlsbad now getting ready for the D: All Things Digital conference at the Four Seasons Aviara this week. She has been blogging the conference planning and this is her latest. It starts tonight:
with an interview with Sen. John McCain, who is in the race to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. We will talk to him about that, as well as the war in Iraq, but also hope to discuss a plethora of digital issues with him.
Others who will be speaking includes: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; CBS CEO Les Moonves; News Corp. President Peter Chernin; Cisco CEO John Chambers; former AOL CEO Steve Case, who will talk about his new company, Revolution; famed director and producer George Lucas; Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore (don’t really know what she’s doing at a digital conference); Google CEO Eric Schmidt; YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley; Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom; and space tourist (and former Microsoft exec) Charles Simonyi.
This is probably Carlsbad’s biggest name crowd ever.
[Link: All Things Digital]
by The Editors on May 26, 2007
According to the Computer Business Review Online Carlsbad will be visited by to world’s two biggest tech titans. Apparently, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are going to make a “rare joint appearance” at the Wall Street Journal’s D5: All Things Digital May 29-31 at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara.
“We expect to use the occasion to get them to reflect on both the past – how we got here – and the future,” said Mossberg
And we expect them to put on a live performance of “Hi, I’m a PC and I’m a Mac. . .”
[Link: Computer Business Review Online via Slashdot]
by The Editors on May 30, 2007
by The Editors on May 30, 2007
Okay. It’s now 10:07 PM and we’ve just returned from the Four Seasons at Aviara where we successfully infiltrated the surprisingly intimate D: All Things Digital Wall Street Journal Executive Conference. On entering we walked straight into the D Anniversary Celebration and Nightcap Gathering (slipping past someone who looked like Six Apart’s Mena Trott) then took a right to go check out the conference rooms. The stairway in the back was lined with monitors and a woman was video taping something. Down below I saw a cadre of men in suits coming up the stairs from below and I was approaching to go down.
Now, saying you’re going to go barge a conference, take some pictures and hang out is one thing. Doing it is another. We discovered this while standing face to face with the shockingly ghost-white John McCain who was surrounded by several aids and a team of Aviara’s finest security men. Before we could even think about getting our camera out they moved past and down the hall.
We got no photo of John McCain, but we also didn’t get thrown out. Which is good. If we had, we never would have snagged this lovely photo of the 5th Anniversary cupcake tower.
Having been to dozens of industry conferences we can add that barging is 100 times more fun than paying, wearing the lanyard and standing around with a bunch of geeks pretending to have a good time.
Stay tuned: we’re making plans for another foray into the digital world tomorrow. Carlsbad has never been so tech.
ADDED 10:50 PM: Just heard via Jason Calacanis’ Twitter post that George Lucas was in the lobby talking to Chad Hurley (Youtube.com co-founder) and it is obvious that we left too early.
by The Editors on May 29, 2009
In an arbitration meeting today the Four Seasons’ management company and Broadreach Capital Partners (the owners of the Aviara resort) decided that the entire matter should be continued until the week of June 15, 2009, according to Four Seasons Director of Public Relations Tony Pistillo.
“At the direction of the arbitration panel, we have no further comment,” Pistillo said in an email.
The meetings, set to resolve a dispute in which the resort’s owners are attempting to replace Four Seasons as the property’s management company with the New Jersey based Dolce Hotels and Resorts, came on the heels of the resort’s most visible event of the year, The Wall Street Journal’s D7 | All Things Digital Conference. The event, which featured titans of the digital and media business, brought Carlsbadistan, an unbelievable amount of press.
by The Editors on May 27, 2009
According to a recent tweet, Carlsbadistan resident Tony Hawk was meeting with some T-Mobile people at The Wall Street Journal’s D7 | All Things Digital conference when he ran into Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (@ev).
had a mtg with T-Mobile this morning and look who I ran into: @ev – the guy behind the guy behind the Twitter
Tony is well on his way to being Evan’s next million follower man. . . between them they have 1.5 million followers.
[Link: @tonyhawk]
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