Excursions

AUSTIN, Texas--Is there a little bit of madness to the sky-high tech company valuations that are all over the place right now? Yes, says IAC founder and former entertainment mogul Barry Diller, who gave a talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) this morning to provide a bit of blunt, curmudgeonly insight for a conference best-known as a hub of the young, wide-eyed, and exuberant.

It was one of Diller's first high-profile appearances since he stepped down as the CEO of IAC in December; he remains chairman.

So is there a tech bubble, as evidenced by the … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Marketers are everywhere here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, but this year they've discovered some prime new territory: private transportation. The annual geek gathering is nominally headquartered at the Austin Convention Center, but in reality sprawls all across the city's downtown, and given the amount of late-night revelry taking place, cab rides are commonplace. Luckily for this year's attendees, a whole lot of those rides are free--or cheap.

Social-networking site Tagged decided to intercept travelers as soon as they landed at Austin's airport, setting up a display for a "Tagged Wheels" … Read more

During the past decade, airlines have been keeping passengers' eyes focused on the seat backs in front of them, filling in-flight entertainment systems up with satellite TV, real-time maps, and movies on demand. But does the proliferation of devices like the iPad mean people will stop paying attention?

It's a particularly compelling question for Virgin America, which runs an in-flight entertainment system called Red that's inarguably the fanciest out of any U.S. airline. Virgin is still on its way to profitability--it recently posted a first-quarter loss of $35.5 million, narrower than last year's--and while trying … Read more

Virgin Group CEO and entrepreneurial icon Richard Branson promised "one hell of a party" for the kickoff flight for air carrier Virgin America's first international route from San Francisco to Toronto on Tuesday, and if the trays of mimosas and acai-cranberry cocktails that kept getting toted past his first-class seat were any indication, his promise would not be broken.

Branson, a British national who was knighted in 1999, has become one of Silicon Valley's icons of late for his enterprises in green energy and the fledgling Virgin Galactic space company, and Virgin America is headquartered in … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--So a British billionaire, a Hollywood action hero, and an unusually good-looking city politician walk into an airport terminal.

That would be Virgin Group CEO Sir Richard Branson, California governor (and erstwhile Terminator) Arnold Schwarzenegger, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who were all on hand at San Francisco International Airport on Tuesday morning to kick off Virgin America's inaugural flight from San Francisco to Toronto. It's the three-year-old Burlingame, Calif.-based airline's first international route.

"To get Virgin America established, we had many battles," Branson said in the press conference, sounding more like … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Nestled inside the badges that were handed to attendees at Facebook's F8 developer conference here on Wednesday were what looked like little paper dog tags emblazoned with Facebook's logo. These are part of something calls "Facebook Presence," which at this point is little more than a gimmick for the hordes of techies here.

But it calls up the possibility that when Facebook finally makes a concrete move into the hot "geolocation" space, it may look something like this.

Here's how the RFID-enabled "Presence" works. The tokens contains a number, which … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--As part of its unveiling of its "Open Graph" product suite at the F8 developer conference here, Facebook is getting rid of the standalone "Facebook Connect" product that it unveiled at the last F8 two years ago.

"We are actually eliminating the Facebook Connect brand," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press conference following his keynote address. "We figured that 'Connect' is not descriptive for users."

Facebook director of platform product Bret Taylor chimed in. "Facebook Connect was just an initiative to have [the] Facebook log-in work on external Web … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company's F8 developer conference on Wednesday to unveil what he said is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web." It's called the Open Graph.

There was no introduction: Zuckerberg just walked onstage in jeans, sneakers, and a black hoodie and started talking about Facebook's past F8 launches. In 2007, it was the original Facebook Platform. In 2008, it was Facebook Connect.

There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were the last time … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The essence of Twitter's new business model is giving businesses the opportunity to push their Twitter accounts further into the microblogging site's massive audience, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said at Twitter's Chirp developer conference on Wednesday afternoon.

Characterizing the new program as "organic to the platform, something that's just 'of Twitter,'" Costolo talked about the thought process that went into the company's decision to build "a monetization engine that didn't just work on Twitter.com and went where the tweets went."

The company insists that "promoted tweets&… Read more