The Japanese electronics maker’s flirtation with dropping the optical drive underscores the rising importance of online networks in the videogame industry, which allow console users to download games, television shows and music without the need for disks or cartridges.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Rose is now a venture partner at the firm focused on making new investments, and he has already moved internally. When asked, a Google Ventures spokeswoman confirmed today that Rose is now on the team.

Rose famously founded Digg and built a sizable personal following through a career as a TV and video host and an early social media guy. While Digg petered out in recent years and Milk didn’t have a successful app, Rose developed a side career as a savvy angel investor.

Rose’s list of personal investments is long and actually quite strong — see his About.me page. It includes Fab, Foursquare, Ngmoco, OMGPOP, Path, Square, Twitter and Zynga.

At Google, Rose was initially named a senior product manager on Google+, while three others from Milk joined the social team as well.

The Milk deal was worth $12 million upfront with a $3 million potential earnout, according to a source involved in the deal.

Google Ventures is a three-year-old firm built within Google, with Google as its sole funder. Google Ventures had also been a backer of Rose’s Milk.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) raided Google’s offices in Seoul on Monday, people familiar with the matter say. This is the second time the agency has busted in on Google’s South Korean headquarters, and appears to be a response to the search behemoth’s resistance to the KFTC’s Android-related antitrust investigation. Sources say the agency believes Google impeded its probe by deleting documents and asking employees to telecommute while it was occurring.

The KFTC’s last raid of Google’s South Korean headquarters was a search for materials supporting complaints that the company is allegedly limiting access to local search engines on Android smartphones. Sources say that was the purpose of this one as well. In the past, Google has claimed it is cooperating with the KFTC, and denied accusations that it meddled with the investigation.

Google declined comment on the details of the investigation, but stressed that it will “continue cooperating with this and other government inquiries.”

The online travel deals site was to be one of the next Internet IPO deals led by Morgan Stanley, the bank that led Facebook’s deal. The roadshow for the Kayak deal, in which large investors get pitched on the shares, was to begin after Memorial Day, the people said. Now, that timing is uncertain, they said, as Kayak takes stock of investor confidence. Facebook shares have lost about 25 percent of their value since they started trading May 18.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Instead, Sorkin is looking to absorb as much as he can about the Apple founder and then “identify the point of friction that appeals to me and dramatize it.”

Speaking at D10 in conversation with Walt Mossberg, who frequently interviewed and wrote about Jobs, Sorkin said he feels the pressure of depicting a legend. “One of the hesitations I had in taking on the movie was it was a little bit like writing about the Beatles. There are so many people who know so much about him and who revere him, and I just saw a minefield of disappointment.”

To those people, he warned that the movie will be more of a painting than a photograph.

But it’s not like Sorkin has finished a script yet. The Jobs project is at the earliest stages, he said.

“I will be going through a long period that would not look to the casual observer like writing. It will look more like watching ESPN; to the untrained eye, it would look like watching college football. It’s a process of procrastination,” he said of his creative process.

What actor will play Jobs? Sorkin said he didn’t know, but it had to be someone smart, because that’s impossible to fake.

Sorkin said he’d describe his career as a pattern of writing about people who are smarter than he is, something he was inspired by from a young age, growing up in a family of people smarter than he was.

“I really fell in love with the phonetic sound of intelligence and the sound of a really good argument,” Sorkin said.

Later in the conversation, Sorkin talked about how he writes outside of the current trend toward antihero characters, with the possible exception of his depiction of Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.”

Mossberg asked Sorkin if he plans to portray Jobs as an antihero.

“With as little as I know about the Steve Jobs movie, I know this for sure: I can’t judge the character,” Sorkin said. “He has to be a hero, I have to find the parts of him that are like me; I have to defend this character. You want to write the character as if they are making the case to God why they should be allowed into heaven.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

At the D10 conference today, the Los Angeles-based software provider demoed its cloud-based 3-D rendering service called Octane Reader, which aims to bring cinema rendering power to any laptop or tablet, at a fraction of the cost.

“What we’re offering lets you render at a higher quality than ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] and other high-end visual effects studios,” said Jules Urbach, co-founder and CEO of Otoy.

Rendering is the process of creating photo-realistic images, such as buildings and animated characters, on a computer, using effects like lighting, shadows, texture — and then bringing that to film. The process can take a lot of time and power, not to mention money, so if you don’t work for a movie studio, creating the next “Transformers” or “The Avengers” can be challenging.

That’s where Octane Reader comes in. The service allows you to use your own computer or tablet to work on rendering, but moves the processor-intensive task to its servers, which are equipped with powerful graphic chips. To demonstrate this, Otoy showed at D10 how it created “Transformers” characters for a TV commercial, using just an iPad and Octane Reader.

Another advantage of Octane Reader is that you will be able to see any modifications you make in real time, whereas the traditional rendering process can take hours.

“Not only is our software cheaper and more efficient, it gives filmmakers more creativity, because you’re able to see things instantaneously,” said Alissa Grainger, co-founder and president of Otoy. “So if an artist doesn’t like the lighting or material, you can change it and get instantaneous feedback.”

Octane Reader has been in development for three years, and in beta, or testing mode, for the past 18 months, with about 10,000 users. Otoy will open up the service to everyone later this summer; the company did not reveal pricing at this time. It did say, however, the cost would be “minimal.”

Otoy was founded in 2008 by Urbach, Grainger and Malcolm Taylor. In addition to Octane Reader, the company offers a game-streaming service that competes with OnLive and Gaikai. Otoy investors include George Gilder, technology writer and host of the Gilder Telecosm Forum, and the capital management firm Taylor Frigon.

Digital technology gives storytellers lots of new tools. But none of that matters if you don’t know how to tell a story, says Aaron Sorkin. The man has pretty good credentials, so it’s worth listening to him.

The guy who wrote “The West Wing,” “A Few Good Men,” “The Social Network” and HBO’s upcoming “The Newsroom” had a lot to say about how he actually makes all that stuff (spoiler: it involves copious amounts of ESPN-viewing) at the D10 conference today. And he also had a lot to say about the way his audience watches all this stuff.

Capturing Sorkin’s thoughts via a liveblog isn’t the easiest task, because he does indeed talk like one of his chatterbox characters. But we did our best below. If you’re good at delayed gratification, we’ll have a highlight reel later today. Weeks from now, we’ll have the entire session available.
———-

(Earlier)
Hollywood edict: If you want to make a movie about a Silicon Valley legend, you need to hire Aaron Sorkin. The writer took on Mark Zuckerberg’s story (sort of) a couple years ago. Now he’s signed on for a Steve Jobs biopic.

So maybe we’ll get a preview of the new movie during his D10 interview today. But this is likely to be a wide-ranging talk, because Sorkin has a wide-ranging career: Movies, plays and some of the most iconic TV shows of the last 15 years (with a new HBO one ready to go). I’ll do my best to keep up via a liveblog below, but if you’re reading this in real time you should also be able to follow along via our livestream. This should be a ton of fun.

And we’re off. “What are you working on right now?” Walt wants to know.

Sorkin mentions new HBO show. Walt notes this is his third TV show about TV.

Walt: Why do people care about what goes on behind the scenes at TV?

Sorkin: I’m not sure that they do. “I try to write what I like, and what my friends like, and then cross my fingers and hope that it’s good enough for me to earn a living.”

Walt: Steve Jobs used to talk like that, about using his own internal compass as a guide. And you’re writing about Jobs now.

Sorkin: Yep. One of many adaptations I’ve done — “A Few Good Men,” “Social Network,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” …

I’m at the earliest possible stage with Steve Jobs. “What I’ll do is go through a long period that would not look to any casual observer like writing. It would look a lot like watching ESPN.” It’s a process of procrastination while you try to figure out what watching the movie will be about.

Biopics are hard to do without seeming formulaic, “so I’m probably not going to write one” — instead he will try to find the essence of the story, key friction point, and try to dramatize that.

Jobs movie is a “minefield of disappointment” because it’s like a movie about the Beatles. So many people know so much about him, much more than me.

“Anytime you’re at the movies, and you see the words ‘The following is based on a true story,’ you should think about it as a painting, not a photograph.”

Walt: Who’s playing Steve Jobs in your movie?

Sorkin: I don’t know. “But it’s going to have be a very good actor.”

On writing style: “By and large, I write about people who are considerably smarter than I am.” Everyone in my family is much smarter than me, same with friends growing up. “I really fell in love with the phonetic sound of intelligence” and the sound a good argument.

So yes, whoever plays Steve Jobs will have to talk fast, but he’ll also have to be smart, because you can’t fake intelligence.

Walt: I’ve seen almost all your stuff. Hard to believe you’re not smart.

Sorkin: Okay, I’ll prove it. When my friends were being bar and bat mitzvahed, I decided I would try to learn the Torah in six weeks, even though I didn’t know Hebrew. A rabbi dissuaded me.

Walt: I went back and watched a lot of “West Wing” recently. I’m wondering if that kind of stuff works in the digital age. What I mean is: You have this dense text with lots of allusions, and you need people to rewind and pay attention. In the digital age, everything gets cut up into small pieces, and people watch TV with another screen in their hand. How does that work with your stuff?

Sorkin: When you do TV at all, the audience has much more passive relationship with what they’re watching than when they go to movies or plays. Those are things you invest in with money and time. Watching TV is a different relationship. We’re used to watching TV while doing other things. Always been a challenge for me. “The stuff that I write doesn’t work very well as background music.” HBO works because the audience is conditioned to pay attention — they’re paying for it. But now throw in different platforms, like HBO Go. I’m of two minds: I love HBO Go — great way to watch the show. Incredible numbers now on that thing — only half the audience watches an HBO show when it premieres on Sunday night. But: When you have the iPad in your hand, you’re not getting the sound that I want you to hear, or the picture I want you to see — it’s not the ideal way to watch. “But I’ll take it” because I want you to watch.

Walt: So when you write stuff now, are you thinking about the environment that people are in when they’re watching it?

Sorkin: Nope. I’m writing the same way as the guys who wrote “I Love Lucy,” “and I’m hoping for the best.” I wouldn’t know how to make changes to accomodate new ways of viewing, and I think that if I did, it would lessen the quality.

Walt: I think the same people who are multitasking when they watch NBC are also multitasking when they watch HBO. Does that raise the bar for you?

Sorkin: Yes. And there’s a lot of people multitasking while they watch us talk right now. I just try to do the best job I can.

Walt: Let’s talk about digital and today’s news business.

Sorkin: The new show takes place in a fictional newsroom. I want to stress that — it’s not meant to be MSNBC, or Fox, or CNN. But it is cable news, covering real events that happened in the past. You’ll see that in the pilot episode, that it starts about two years ago.

There’s a dramatic discussion of the news, and politics. But the show will depend on how engaged you are with the characters.

Digital plays a big role in the show — there’s a character that’s very idealistic about the way social networks work. And you’ll get to see the way the people on the show get their news — which is digital — no one ever gets their news from a guy whispering in an alleyway.

Walt: You’re saying your writing hasn’t changed because of digital. What about your life?

Sorkin: I have lots of digital stuff, just like everybody. But “I’m all but computer illiterate, which I’m not proud of.” Mostly I just use my computer to write scripts. But I’m amazed that 3-and-a-half-year-olds can resonate with computers right away. “If I could ask Steve Jobs anything, it would be ‘What’s that magic trick?’”

But storytelling hasn’t really changed that much. The digital age has brought us five, six-minute stories. That’s really cool. And it’s great that people have these great tools to make movies, like my daughter, who has a laptop and iPhone, and does that all the time.

“I think what we might see is digital filmmaking sort of becoming the new indie film.” But we still have to “distinguish between what’s going to be good and what’s not going to be good.”

There are lots of crappy $100 million movies. But at least when we buy a ticket to that, “we know there was a vetting process.” In journalism, it’s hard to get a job at the New York Times. But you don’t need credentials to start your own digital newspaper. (That’s a good thing, Aaron.)

Walt: What do you think about mashups?

Sorkin: “I smile at it.” It’s flattering when people do that with my work.

Q&A:

Q: You wrote a play about patents. (Didn’t know that!) What do you think about that today?

A: Yep, “The Farnsworth Invention” about Sarnoff from RCA and Philo Farnsworth, the guy who basically invented TV. My father was an IP lawyer. My knowledge about patents came entirely for him. “But I don’t pay as much attention to patent law as I do copyright law. But whatever side this group of people is on, I’m on.”

Q: You have certain actors that follow you from show to show. How does that work?

A: “They didn’t follow me, I kidnapped them.” Good actors are hard to find, so I try to take people like Josh Malina and Bradley Whitford from show to show. That said, this new show has actors I’ve never worked with before. It’s a great luxury to write for actors you know. I’ll give minor characters increasing time because you respond to the actors.

Q: Jon Kaplan, the guy who built Flip: How do you scale great storytelling? How do you scale you?

A: There is a lot of circus out there. But there’s also a lot of great storytelling. A lot of it is happening on TV. Any time there’s a lot of content, most of it is going to be bad, so you have to look around for the good stuff. “Storytelling is a very old art form, and the important parts of it don’t change at all.” Read your Aristotle.

“People shouldn’t learn that rules are bad things when it comes to creativity.” Just like in sports — rules help make things great. “It’s the rules that make it cool. Without rules in any kind of art, it’s just fingerpainting.”

Sorkin now using “scaling” to describe mountain climbing instead of the way Kaplan meant. Anyway, he’s as nervous about his new HBO show as anything he’s ever done. “It’s not like the Flip, which you knew everybody would like. … I know for sure everybody isn’t going to love this, and I’m going to hear from people.”

Q: Lots of the great dramas now feature antiheroes. What happened to the traditional hero?

A: I wrote one antihero story — the Social Network. But I usually like heros, and that’s what I have in my new show. That’s what I respond to. I think all those shows are great “but my taste lies in quixotic heroes.”

Walt: Where does Steve Jobs lie in the hero/antihero spectrum?

Sorkin: He’s a complicated guy. Zuckerberg was as well. But when I’m writing this movie “I cant judge this character. He has to be, for me, a hero. … To put is as simply as possible, you want to write the character like they are making their case to God, why they should be let into heaven.”

Walt: Cook talked about Jobs’s penchant for changing his mind on a dime. He thought that was a good quality.

Sorkin: I agree. You have to be able to come back and say, “I was wrong, and here’s why.” “The ‘here’s why’ is important. You have to be a good diagnostician.”

With Jobs, what captured everyone’s attention was “that he made things.” Now we’re told that we’re just going to be servicing things. But Steve Jobs made things that people want. We do that in Hollywood, too. We’re making a lot of junk, but we still make things that people like.

Q: How do you make your fictional characters so authentic?

A: Thanks! I never try to tell an audience who a character is. I try to show the audience what a character wants. “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” That conflict is the whole point of drama.

“In terms of protagonists, I’m less interested in the difference between good and bad than I am in the difference between good and great. What can a good person do if they realize their potential?”

And we’re done. Thanks for following along.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

“I never was a popular kid in class,” the Intellectual Ventures CEO and former Microsoft executive said at D10 on Wednesday. “I’m not going to be popular in this class. If I want popularity, I go to a chef’s convention.”

Although Myhrvold’s company does some of its own inventing — working on things like a new type of nuclear reactor and a broadband antenna — the company is best known for amassing a huge number of patents invented by others and then seeking to license those patents or else pursue revenue in court.

Myhrvold made the case to the crowd, though probably unsuccessfully, that his company serves a purpose similar to that of venture capital or private equity in the process of aiding innovation.

Myhrvold also quoted his own past statement at an earlier D conference, saying, “If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

Among the many topics Meeker addressed: The challenge of monetizing mobile content, how the Internet and digital technology are changing, well, everything, and how those changes are affecting the next generation in interesting ways.

She also made news by revealing that Kleiner has done no deals as of the end of the quarter ended in March, because valuations in the private markets are too high; she also reflected on the troubles surrounding the Facebook IPO. Highlights from the video are below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-legendary-internet-slide-deck-the-d10-highlights-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/google-local-the-search-giants-more-social-answer-to-places/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/google-local-the-search-giants-more-social-answer-to-places/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 18:01:18 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=214115 Google rolled out Google+ Local on Wednesday morning, the company’s revamped take on Places and location-based information.

The launch teaches the old Places a few new tricks, including adding Google+ Local pages across other Google verticals like Maps, Search and Mobile.

And in one of the biggest new features, Google+ Local incorporates Zagat ratings, making the once-costly service completely free to all.

When Google bought Zagat last year for upward of $100 million, it was clear Google was trying to fill a hole in its Places ratings and descriptions — especially when looking at Yelp, the current leader in local destination guides.

So with the new Zagat incorporation, Google argues its approach to local search is far more nuanced. Each place is scored using Zagat’s 30-point scale, with separate ratings for topics like the quality of the food in a restaurant, the ambiance and decor, or just how helpful the staff is.

Then there’s the local discovery element, which is made more robust with the integration of the Google+ social layer. Click on the new “Local” tab in your Google+ profile and you’re presented with a mix of recommendations of places of interest, based on popularity, social activity and recommendations. And it’s tailored to your Google+ profile so no two users will see the same results.

It’s yet another example of Google leveraging the power of its many different verticals — search, maps and social — to move into an area that Yelp currently dominates. Will it take off better than Places? Perhaps, if the company pushes Local as hard as it has pushed Google+.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/google-local-the-search-giants-more-social-answer-to-places/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/intellectual-ventures-ceo-nathan-myhrvold-live-at-d10/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/intellectual-ventures-ceo-nathan-myhrvold-live-at-d10/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 17:55:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=213461 “Thomas Edison’s business model was very similar to ours.”

That’s how Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, described the company he founded, when he last appeared on the D stage, in 2008. While Myhrvold likes to tout IV as a company that “invests in invention,” the truth is that it is often viewed quite differently by the very industry it professes to support. For IV, “investment in invention” has meant amassing an enormous patent portfolio — the seventh-largest in the U.S. and the 15th-largest of any company in the world — and licensing it. Aggressively. So aggressively that IV is often maligned as a “patent troll.”

Onstage at D10 this morning, Myhrvold disputed that characterization, saying IV is just like a venture capital company or private equity group.

“We believe it’s important for there to be a liquid capital market around any valuable asset,” Myrhvold said. “And we think there’s a lot of value in people investing in stuff and realizing a return. Think about the way venture capital and private equity revolutionized the economy. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re an ‘invention capital’ firm. We invest in invention. We feel inventors should get rich. They should get funding. We should have more invention.”

And we should protect it. Which is a big part of IV’s business model. As Myrhvold conceded, “Sure, we have sued some people.”

But does buying up patent portfolios and using them to squeeze licensing fees out of companies really help innovation and creativity?

“If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing,” Myrhvold said. “In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.”

To many, that view is contentious. And it has generated a lot of animosity toward IV, particularly in Silicon Valley. Does that bother Myrhvold?

Not at all.

“Look, this is a year when the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are doing exactly what I do. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They’re doing what I’m doing!

“So if you have animosity to me, that’s fine. I was never a popular kid in school. I can handle it. I’m not ashamed of suing people.”

So IV’s role is to monetize things that aren’t really products?

Not quite.

The company does have a few products in its portfolio that it is hoping to monetize: A super-high-bandwidth mobile broadband antenna, and a new nuclear reactor.

“Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel,” Myrhvold said. “So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It’s the reactor of your dreams.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/intellectual-ventures-ceo-nathan-myhrvold-live-at-d10/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-on-zyngas-symbiotic-relationship-with-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-on-zyngas-symbiotic-relationship-with-facebook/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:59:40 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=213541 Zynga’s road to succes owes much to Facebook — the social giant has been by far the largest driver of traffic to Zynga’s gaming platform. And as Zynga CEO Mark Pincus noted at our D: All Things Digital conference, Facebook remains the platform of choice in driving traffic.

“We grew the fastest with Facebook,” Pincus said. “And as we saw their platform becoming better and better. … We kept doubling down.”

So over the course of Zynga’s evolution from start-up to publicly traded company, Pincus says his company grew more and more reliant on Facebook, with the lion’s share of Zynga’s gaming business focused on the social network.

But there’s an elephant in the room that Pincus danced around throughout the interview with Kara Swisher: Zynga’s continual “doubling down” on Facebook over time can be seen as a reliance on the company. And as Facebook recognized in its S-1 filing earlier this year, Zynga makes up more than 12 percent of Facebook’s overall revenue.

So while the two companies seem to rely on one another heavily, it’s unclear how much that will continue to be the case in the future.

Pincus, though, remains cagey on distancing his company too far from the social giant. “We’ve never thought in terms of attachment and detachment from Facebook,” he said.

Mobile, however, seemed to be the direction in which Pincus wanted to move. “We see Facebook as a platform, just like we see iOS and Android as platforms. “Mobile lets you play in your cab or on the train. And it’s growing very quickly.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-on-zyngas-symbiotic-relationship-with-facebook/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/zynga-still-in-early-stage-of-mobile-growth-says-ceo-mark-pincus/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/zynga-still-in-early-stage-of-mobile-growth-says-ceo-mark-pincus/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:52:42 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=214227 Today, Zynga’s most important platform is the PC, but with mobile usage growing at a spectacularly fast rate, the company will soon have another. Is Zynga ready for that transition?

Onstage at D10 this morning, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus said that the company is well prepared but the money’s not there yet.

“Just as Facebook has been this amazing accelerator for play on the Web, mobile is the accelerator for play beyond the Web,” Pincus said. “Mobile lets you put play in your cab or on the train. And it’s growing very quickly. But in mobile we’re still at an early stage where we’re building audience. Our games are monetizing well in that space, but the audience is still small and growing. It’s going to take a while for the aggregate revenues to get where we want them.”

In other words, it’s going to take awhile for revenue from mobile play to catch up with the sector’s growth.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/zynga-still-in-early-stage-of-mobile-growth-says-ceo-mark-pincus/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/trueco-aims-to-be-the-bonobos-of-the-bra-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/trueco-aims-to-be-the-bonobos-of-the-bra-world/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:51:01 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=213271 It has been said that women in tech could use more support.

Two entrepreneurs have taken that quite literally, launching a lingerie Web site that uses a formula to help women get the perfect bra fit without even having to try anything on.

During the D10 conference today, True&Co co-founders Aarthi Ramamurthy and Michelle Lam showed off how women can buy bras without having to deal with dressing room try-ons — and without needing to use a measuring tape.

Potential bra buyers can take a quick quiz and fill out personal information, including the size of the customer’s current best-fitting bra, technical fit questions (such as, “Does your cup runneth over?”), the perceived shape of the customer’s breasts and “psychological body image” questions. Bra recommendations, drawn from True&Co’s inventory of items that match more than 2,000 different body types, are then offered, based on the customer’s input.

Much like the way that Warby Parker eyewear offers free at-home try-ons, True&Co customers will receive five free bras to try on at home, and can then purchase any of the bras or return any or all at no cost. The customer picks three of the bras, while the site’s recommendation system selects two.

Every bra on the Web site costs less than $50; underwear starts around $15. (Lucky conferencegoers are getting a thong in their D10 conference swag bags. You’re welcome, guys.)

True&Co joins the ranks of companies like Bonobos, which sells better-fitting pants for men; J. Hilburn; and another female-focused start-up called Quincy Apparel, which factors bra sizes into women’s suit designs, much in the way men buy suits based on their inseam, waist size and arm length.

“The bra-shopping experience is probably one of the most uncomfortable shopping experiences a woman can have,” Lam said onstage, noting that 80 percent of women are wearing the wrong bra size. “So we decided to change that with some technology.”

The company first formed in October, and officially launches its service today to coincide with the D10 demo. It has received a total of $2 million in funding from First Round Capital, SoftTechVC, SoftBank Capital, Aileen Lee and former LinkedIn executive Ellen Levy.

Lam and Ramamurthy said that around 500 customers have visited the site and taken the bra quiz so far.

If you’re curious to see how, exactly, this company plans to revolutionize buying over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders, check out the video below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/trueco-aims-to-be-the-bonobos-of-the-bra-world/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-at-d10/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-at-d10/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:15:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=213635 FarmVille. CityVille. Words With Friends.

Zynga is responsible for developing some of the most-played games of the decade.

As its founder and CEO, Mark Pincus has worked quietly behind the scenes since 2007, building an empire that was worth $7 billion in a public offering late last year.

But it hasn’t been all fun and games.

Pincus has been criticized for his hard-driving management style, and the company’s close ties to Facebook can be counted as both a blessing and a curse.

Sure, Facebook has gotten the company to where it is today (and, amazingly, Zynga accounts for 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue), but now it will be looking beyond the social network for its next stage of growth.

On a day like yesterday, when Facebook’s stock dove by 10 percent, the connection between the two was clearly a bad thing. As a result, Zynga hit an all-time low and is now worth $4.5 billion.

All that and more, as D: All Things Digital continues in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Pincus up next!

9:20 am: Game on!

Kara starts with a hardball, saying we are going to start with the bad stuff. What’s up with the stock price?

Mark: We always knew we were going to be a public company. It wasn’t a huge transition for us; we always had quarterly objectives.

What’s changed is we have the quarterly conference call, and then a week later we have an all-hands meeting.

But my job hasn’t changed, I’m focused on products.

Kara pushes a little bit more on the matter. After all, it’s not just Zynga, but other tech companies that are recently not doing well — Facebook, Groupon, for example.

Mark: I’m optimistic about those companies, and I’m not focused on whether the market is valuing them right.

9:24 am: Kara asks him about his relationship with Facebook, far and away the company’s biggest partner.

Mark: From the beginning, we believed in the opportunity to bring “play” to the world, and an opportunity to have a new business where it’s about paying for value that they see in the games.

Facebook, by far, was the best. We grew the fastest with Facebook, and we kept doubling down on Facebook. It was a great accelerator of not just ours, but other businesses and services.

Kara: How important is Facebook to you right now? You make up 15 percent of their revenue.

Mark: Our games are instantly social because of Facebook. That’s an amazing, magical thing that they provide.

On the Web, they’ve been really important for a lot of companies with distribution. Right now, we all have a need for a Facebook on mobile. Mobile is an explosive opportunity, but it’s still really fragmented. For Mary [Meeker], one of the questions is, how do you know that a product will be continued to be used?

Some of it is that it has to be a great app, but also it has to be ingrained in people’s lives. Discovery and the return path to apps still needs innovation on mobile.

9:28 am: Mark: I think Facebook will be important on the Web and the PC, and it has the potential to be important for us on mobile.

Kara: The “potential”? I assume that most of your business will shift to mobile.

Mark: Let’s not forget the opportunity on PCs. A lot of the traffic happens when people are at work, on boring conference calls.

The three drivers of our business and market: Games becoming more free, accessible and social.

He says he doesn’t have the answer for when there will be more revenue coming from mobile.

Just building audience brings revenue, though.

In mobile, we are in the early stage where we are trying to build the audience, and we are doing it with casual experiences like Words With Friends, Scramble With Friends and now Draw Something.

In summary, he says, I think mobile usage can grow a lot faster, but the revenue will take longer.

9:31 am: Kara: You are in a hits-based business, and you won’t be able to keep bringing on the hits.

Mark: That’s partially true.

There’s a component of the games business that is the entertainment business. You see audiences go up and peak, and sometimes fall. Social games can monetize better than TV and movies, and have the ability to be more evergreen.

Poker is an example, and then there’s FarmVille and CityVille, which are more like a hobby.

We build what we call “bold beats,” which get people to play for a few more months. An example is FarmVille Hawaii, where you can do aqua-farming. They are like expansion packs, or new TV episodes.

Kara quips: I’m not going to do that. But I do play Words With Friends.

9:34 am: Pincus brings up Zynga’s acquisition strategies, two acquistions that have been product lines: One was Words With Friends. It had less than two million daily active users, and they grew by five times on our platform. We think that was very successful.

On Draw Something, which Zynga paid nearly $200 million for: What was unique about it is that they innovated on user-generated content. They figured it out and found a way to inspire people to draw. The game still has more traffic today than when we engaged to buy them. We didn’t buy them for the short-term impact that they would have. We have built our company off franchises. We think we can support it for five to 10 years, and we thought this game would do that.

Kara: So the acquisition was successful?

Mark: I think it’s too early to say if the acquisition is successful. I’ll have to tell you in a year if it was successful.

Kara: Did you try to buy Angry Birds?

Mark: We are always in the market, engaging with any successful product or team. We are learning by meeting with these teams, and sometimes there’s a good fit. We’ve talked to them in the past.

Kara: And …?

Mark: That’s it. The vast majority of users and revenues has been organically built. To be the best, we have to be the best developer and operator of social games. Beyond that, we have to be the most powerful and capable in the market.

Pincus is now talking about Zynga.com, its off-Facebook platform for social gaming.

Mark: We think we’ve built the best hosting for social games and deep analytics. You can make your network available to companies through APIs, and we are in the early stages of doing that.

We would be more than a games distributor. We need more aggregated channels, we need more ways for people to find and discover new apps, and find their way back to the apps. We want to be a game network, a lot like Xbox Live.

Kara: Do you want to get into consoles and hardware?

Pincus’s one-word answer: No.

9:40 am: Kara: Do you consider Zynga innovative? Some people really don’t like you. Do you feel like you’re innovative, or do you take things more widespread?

Mark: We’ve had to reinvent gaming, apps and our company many times in five-and-a-half years. I think we’ve been disruptive and done things in our own ways. We value innovation that makes it easier for you to play a game with your family.

“We look for micro beats.”

There’s tons of innovation in our company, from building our own Z-cloud and building our own analytics. I think we haven’t gotten credit for it. I look at innovation, can we create games that engage millions of people. We do hackathons in our studio, and some of the things make it to market. In FarmVille, they’ve created something like Instagram, where you can take a picture of farms and share them.

Kara: What is your biggest strength and weakness as a CEO?

Mark: I need to aspire to be a great CEO and not just a great product engineer. I’ve grown a lot, and I’m learning every week. I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

Kara: You are definitely calmer.

Mark: You can thank my wife for that. I’ve been good at product entreprenuring … It’s hard to manage 3,000-plus people through delegation. If you like our games, give me a good grade.

9:45 am: Time for Q&A with the audience.

First question is about virtual goods overseas, and how do you apply that learning here.

Mark: Asia is ahead of us and behind us. In Japan, they are ahead of us on mobile. They are ahead of us on converting “players to payers.” But they’re behind us on social gaming because most of the games on the PC started off as hardcore.

I think there’s lessons to bring back, but their model won’t map perfectly.

9:49 am: Another question on real-money gaming, a.k.a. gambling.

What makes virtual goods exciting and entertaining is that the decisions you make in the game can affect your real life. I think poker chips in a casino are a perfect substantiation of virtual goods. I think real-money gaming will be incredibly popular with regular consumers. And I think when the regulatory situation makes it available, we’ll see an explosion.

Kara: How big will that be for you?

Mark: Depends on the regulations.

Next question is about multiplayer gaming, where you play at the same time, versus taking turns and passing the game back and forth.

Mark: As we require less from you for gaming, we think we have a chance to become gaming like SMS. It’s a “Poke” with a purpose. That’s where we want to get to.

Final question: How do you lessen your attachment with Facebook?

Mark: There’s nothing stopping us from putting our games in other places. I have a 90-10 rule. When a platform can get you millions of daily active users, then that’s when you invest. Facebook has done that for some time, and now iOS and Android are just getting to that point. I think people have a latent interest in playing, and we will go anywhere where we can make it free, accessible and social.

Follow-up question: How do you become an independent business from Facebook?

Mark: You don’t think we are a business? We see Facebook like a platform, like iOS and Android. We aren’t too worried about getting too attached on iOS or Android. If they became a huge concentration for us, we wouldn’t feel like we didn’t have a standalone business.

That’s it, folks! Thanks for reading.

Just happy Pincus showed up, after bailing on us last year. Second time was the charm!

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mark-pincus-at-d10/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-on-a-five-year-olds-favorite-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-on-a-five-year-olds-favorite-apps/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:10:26 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=214193 What were you doing when you were five years old? Consider the experience of Mary Meeker’s niece.

Asked during a question-and-answer session following her onstage presentation at D: All Things Digital about why — with all the changes being wrought by the Internet and digital technologies — we don’t seem to be getting any smarter.

Meeker answered by describing how she asked her 5-year-old niece about her favorite mobile apps. At first it seemed ridiculous to ask that question, but the answer was not ridiculous. The youngster rattled off five apps without missing a breath.

“For a new generation of kids, this will be really exciting,” Meeker said. “You or I may not get any smarter, but the new generation may.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-on-a-five-year-olds-favorite-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:07:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=214103 We all hear it every day: The Internet and digital technologies are changing everything. It’s become one of those big pronouncements that tends to end a bad conversation or start a good one.

But few people have thought about the subject as clearly and completely as Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst, who in a presentation at D: All Things Digital illustrated those changes in their historical context.

We’re pretty familiar with the well-worn tales of how the Internet is disrupting the 305-year-old newspaper business, and how mobile phones are messing up the 125-year-old landline telephone business. But Meeker’s presentation goes a lot deeper than that.

The Internet is also disrupting the creation of art, how people document and record the histories of their life, how they take notes, how they borrow money. Roughly a third of Meeker’s 125 slides are devoted to this theme of change and disruption, and when taken as a whole, it’s startling. “A lot of it is stuff you know, but when packaged in a way that you see it all together, I’m overwhelmed,” she said.

“People used to put pictures on their walls, and now they have Facebook,” Meeker said.

Other examples: Groupon and clipping old coupons. Also, going to school. “Education and learning will become as fun as video games,” Meeker said.

Something else that’s changed: How people cope with traffic. During a follow-up interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Meeker talked about Waze, a navigation and traffic app for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. She described how, when she saw a burning semi truck pulled over on the side of the road, she reported it first to Waze before calling 911.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/quris-secret-shopper-app-goes-live-in-the-app-store/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/quris-secret-shopper-app-goes-live-in-the-app-store/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:00:18 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=213524 San Francisco-based Quri, formerly called Wiseview, is opening up its app nationwide today; it enables people to earn money by snapping pictures of in-store displays and checking on product availability on behalf of consumer product brands. Using Quri’s EasyShift iPhone app, shoppers can earn $1 to $20 for each mission completed. Check back tomorrow for more information, after the company presents onstage at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/quris-secret-shopper-app-goes-live-in-the-app-store/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-internet-trends-live-at-d10-slides/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-internet-trends-live-at-d10-slides/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 15:33:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=213561 This year, Mary Meeker brings her famous annual Internet Trends report to D10, where she just appeared onstage.

Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former financial analyst, is describing what she calls “the re-imagination of nearly everything” powered by mobile and social, with a torrent of slides tracing what was then and what is now. For example: News outlets are reimagined on Twitter, note-taking is reimagined on Evernote, scrapbooking is reimagined on Pinterest.

Meeker also traces out the story of the mismatch between mobile growth and mobile monetization, pulling together numbers and analysis of one of the biggest weaknesses in today’s Internet industry.

And she gives some context to the state of the global economy and that in the U.S., in particular today’s bubblicious climate.

Here’s the full slide presentation:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-internet-trends-live-at-d10-slides/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 15:32:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=214061 Looming over the Internet industry is the mismatch between the growth in mobile usage and mobile monetization.

Most recently, it was the risk factor that helped take down Facebook’s ill-fated IPO roadshow, when the company warned at the last minute publicly (and perhaps more emphatically privately) that mobile monetization really wasn’t keeping pace.

So it’s quite topical that today at D10, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker is delivering one of her famed Internet trends presentations by depicting the opportunity for mobile advertising.

Here’s how Meeker describes it; there are a lot of stats in here, but they actually tell a rather smooth narrative:

There are 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers, which is 37 percent growth but just 18 percent penetration. That’s compared to 2.3 billion global Internet users, with growth of just 8 percent from last year.

Adoption of new smart devices is happening faster than ever — the iPad and Android growth curves are way steeper than that for iPhone. But there’s still a long way to go; there are only 953 million smartphone subscriptions of the world’s 6.1 billion mobile subscriptions.

In May of this year, mobile usage hit 10 percent of total global Internet traffic, up from about 5 percent at the same time last year.

Okay, now over to the monetization side: Right now, it’s not just ads. Mobile e-commerce is 8 percent of the total e-commerce market in the U.S. Today, payments for and within applications account for 71 percent of revenue versus 29 percent for mobile advertising.

Meeker concludes there’s a “material upside” for advertising in mobile because it’s currently out of whack with the percent of total media consumption.

And that’s a pressing issue, because mobile Internet usage is replacing desktop Internet usage. In India this month, total mobile Internet was bigger than desktop Internet for the very first time.

There are lots of places to find evidence of the mobile monetization gap. Effective desktop CPMs are five times the price of mobile Internet CPMs in the U.S.: $3.50 versus $0.75. And companies like Pandora, Tencent and Zynga currently report that average revenue per user is as much as five times lower on mobile. Google’s and Facebook’s financials show mobile is constraining revenue growth.

Meeker doesn’t provide solutions to those problems, but she does surface some light at the end of the tunnel. For instance, in the more mature Japanese market, mobile game maker GREE has seen rapid growth in average revenue per user, up to $24 per user per year at the beginning of 2012. Another player, CyberAgent, has seen a similar curve, and is now up to $418 average revenue per paying user on mobile, more than what it sees on the desktop.

Using pattern recognition from the Japanese market, Meeker predicts that mobile monetization levels in the U.S. could surpass those on the desktop within one to three years. She says she thinks this pattern of dollars following eyeballs is inevitable, but “it just takes time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/hp-names-bill-veghte-coo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/hp-names-bill-veghte-coo/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 15:23:50 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=214159 More big changes at Hewlett-Packard today, this time in the company’s executive management team. On Wednesday morning, HP tapped Bill Veghte as chief operating officer. Veghte, who previously ran HP’s software business, will now oversee the company’s strategy, reporting directly to CEO Meg Whitman. Taking over for him in the software slot: George Kadifa, previously an exec at Silver Lake.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/hp-names-bill-veghte-coo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/announcing-our-new-conferences-dive-into-mobile-and-dive-into-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/announcing-our-new-conferences-dive-into-mobile-and-dive-into-media/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 15:00:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=213426 Tickets for this week’s D: All Things Digital sold out months ago. But it’s not too late to get in on the upcoming D action.

We’re continuing our series of focused conferences with two events in the coming months. First up is D: Dive Into Mobile, The Global Edition, on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York co-chaired by AllThingsD Senior Editors Liz Gannes and Ina Fried.

Following our fantastic 2010 Dive Into Mobile conference, the 2012 version will explore the concept of “mobile first.” For billions of people, the first computing device they own — and perhaps the only — will be a smartphone. Even in the developed world, where computers are ubiquitous, the phone is taking on an increasingly important role as the device people have at their side nearly 24 hours a day. Once an afterthought, companies are now focusing on designing their mobile services first and only later translating them for a PC.

Among the great lineup of speakers are Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, Android chief Andy Rubin of Google and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs. We’ll have many more speakers to announce in the coming months.

Next up will be the second edition of D: Dive Into Media, which is again being produced by Senior Editor Peter Kafka.

The first Dive Into Media conference featured entertaining, insightful interviews with leaders from old and new media companies, from Viacom’s Philippe Dauman to Twitter’s Dick Costolo, along with media creators like Neil Young. They’re all trying to figure out how to respond to, grapple with and harness the changes that technology brings to the media business every day, and they’ve all got different answers.

We’ll ask a different star-studded cast to tackle the topics this time around, but we’ll come back to the same sparkling location: The amazing Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in southern California, on Feb. 11 and 12. More information here.

And, of course, if you want to know about everything you are missing at D10, this week we’ll have complete coverage here at AllThingsD including blogs, photos, videos and stories.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/announcing-our-new-conferences-dive-into-mobile-and-dive-into-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kixeyes-games-on-facebook-are-not-cute-or-cuddly-just-like-its-prickly-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kixeyes-games-on-facebook-are-not-cute-or-cuddly-just-like-its-prickly-ceo/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 12:30:17 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=213274 Farms don’t have rocket launchers, but games built by Kixeye do.

And you won’t find purple cows or other decorations in Kixeye’s games — just blood.

Kixeye CEO Will Harbin

That’s how Will Harbin, Kixeye’s CEO, described his company’s social games to me last week over the phone.

Harbin is passionate about building games for Facebook, but we are not necessarily talking about the ones that appeal to 40-year-old housewives. The company’s titles include Backyard Monsters, War Commander and Battle Pirates, and 97 percent of the company’s audience is male.

Because of the small niche it is serving, the games don’t appear in Facebook’s Top 40. But they do monetize extremely well.

Kixeye is currently registering about one million users a day, and while most social game companies make roughly four cents per user, Kixeye claims it makes closer to 60 cents.

The San Francisco company has been profitable for the past two years, and this year it is projecting revenue in excess of $100 million.

It’s similar to the story Kabam and other social game makers have started to tell as Facebook becomes a more mature gaming platform. Developers are starting to see that if they target a more hardcore gaming demographic, with more sophisticated kinds of games, the players will be more engrossed and, therefore will spend more time and money in the game.

Besides, it is these players who are typically used to spending $60 per videogame for a console system, so getting a few dollars out of them is much easier.

But even though this all sounds great, don’t expect Harbin to hype the company’s prospects. Instead of pumping up the company as a prospective IPO candidate, or raising millions of dollars in private equity — just because he can — he is fairly pragmatic.

In fact, the lack of sensationalism in his voice would be considered almost boring if the conversation weren’t actually such a breath of fresh air in what is becoming an overheated sector. And despite having plenty of good things to say, talking to me seemed like a real chore, something he was only mildly tolerating.

What’s more, when I reacted positively to Harbin’s disinterest in our conversation — because it is so different from most pitchmen who talk to me — he was almost disappointed, saying that most people think he’s a jerk.

“I’ve had successes under my belt, but more importantly, I’ve had failures,” Harbin said. “I know what I’d be in for, and I’m not in a rush to IPO. It’s got to be the right time. Too many companies go public too early and have ruined their growth trajectory. No one here has incentive to cash out and get out quickly. We love what we are doing, and this has been a passion of mine since I was a child — videogames, that is — and it would have to make real sense for me to change my day-to-day job.”

Without IPO pressures, and without being accountable to shareholders on a quarterly basis, Harbin can aim for the fences.

The company, which is on track to have 300 employees by the end of the year (up from 35 a year ago), has raised $22 million in funding, and is announcing today that it has opened a development studio in Australia.

Harbin said he was able to pick up employees from 3 Blokes Studios, which RockYou acquired and subsequently shut down. He was going to acquire the studio, but when the deal fell through, he was able to hire everyone anyway. So far, there are about 10 people, and he thinks the studio will max out at 20.

A similar occurrence happened closer to home, when he was able to hire six employees from Crowdstar when that company shifted gears away from building Facebook games.

Harbin said he sees three areas of focus for the company: Building its own game platform so players don’t have to play via Facebook, developing mobile games, and expanding internationally.

The first mobile game, Backyard Monsters, is expected to come out for iOS and Android this summer, and will be distributed on Ngmoco’s Mobage network.

Still, Harbin is reluctant to grow too fast or stretch the company’s resources too thin.

“We are trying to be pragmatic and do what we can with the management bandwidth we have. We don’t want to get too big too fast,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kixeyes-games-on-facebook-are-not-cute-or-cuddly-just-like-its-prickly-ceo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/ebook-maker-inkling-jumps-to-the-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/ebook-maker-inkling-jumps-to-the-web/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 12:00:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=213963 E-book maker Inkling, which had previously confined its books to the iPad, is moving to the Web — a move the company has been promising for some time. The move means that Inkling’s books should be available on most laptops, though the company says it will work best on Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browser.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/ebook-maker-inkling-jumps-to-the-web/feed/ 0