D8 Conference – Who said what? And what was in the Goodie Bag?

4 Jun 2010 by Graham Lyons - News apple, Facebook, Flash, microsoft No Comments

It has been a star studded few days down in California as the D8 conference has once again put the digital industries biggest players to the sword with many tough questions which have given us all much to talk about. The Walls Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference has seen its creators, and executive producers, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put an eclectic band of interviewees on the hot spot for their 8^th annual conference, and given a platform for some new tech to be launched at the same time.

The big names included Tim Armstrong CEO of AOL, Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft, Steve Jobs CEO of Apple, John Donahoe CEO of eBay, Alan Mulally CEO of Ford, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook and even James Cameron who made box office busting Titanic and Avatar. Here are some of the most interesting bits of chat and what the press got in their goody bag!

Jobs

Jobs was for most people, the star attraction of the show: “Apple is so hot right now!” He spoke at great length about a range of topics; Gizmodo and the soon to be on our shelves (hopefully) 4G iPhone which was stolen; Flash and how he sees it as a nearly obsolete technology and that HTML5 is the future; how the iPad was in development before the iPhone and how they saw a gap in the market and jumped iPhone ahead; as well as AT&T, Google and TV, Google and Android, and those pesky iAds restrictions. Here is just one of the now umpteen videos of his interview:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0U3O8-YutE[/youtube]

Microsoft

Microsoft, who dominate the OS market around the world, certainly failed to dominate the show at D8. This is mostly based on the fact that I couldn’t find nearly as many videos from Steve Ballmer’s interview in comparison to the numbers of videos of Steve Jobs interview. From what I could find out, they spoke about cloud computing and mobile Microsoft but failed to even mention Microsoft Office 2010. Shocking. Here is a bit of their dull chat:

Ford

Alan Mullaly was there unfortunately not to announce a new flying car or teleportation device (Ford Flight?/Ford Zap?), but to talk about making digital interaction in cars safer, better music synching, and about electric cars and how the internal combustion engine isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg spent his interview defending Facebook’s privacy issues. Big suprise. Walt and Kara gave him a roasting leaving Mark frazzled but he came away having given his main message:

“Privacy is a really important issue for us and for the Internet. We will continue to make the right changes, even if some of them are controversial,” Zuckerberg insisted. He added, “There are some misperceptions that we want to make all information open and that’s completely false.”

Kno

Kno is a new tablet being aimed at students and from this video looks a bit massive! It runs on Linux and is apparently going to be available for under $1000. I think it looks ridiculous.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8AHyf9VDC4[/youtube]

Natal

Another release showcased at the D8 is Project Natal. Its premier is down as being July 13^th (the same quarter that Sony’s new ‘Move’ controller) and from this video it looks like a Wii motion sensor, and basically is, but is supposedly aiming beyond the adolescent male demographic which dominates this field. See what you think…

Goody Bag

And finally, my favourite CNet reporter Ina Fried rooted through her goody bag, which all D8 visitors received and seemed a little disappointed at its contents. These are tough economic times though…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kP4a5TSFig[/youtube]

A jolly nice conference with some jolly nice people and I want to go to the next one. What did you make of it and what was your favourite thing at this one?

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