interactive

With a nod to the Valley, CBS Interactive shuffles management

CBS Interactive, the media giant's digital division, has announced the opening of a Silicon Valley office and an executive reshuffling to focus on growth, President Quincy Smith announced Thursday.

The CBS Interactive satellite office in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened, with its eye on tech partnerships and acquisitions. The Valley branch will "allow the company to better facilitate existing partnerships in the area, and future ones as well," a release from CBS explained.

Smith is himself a Valley veteran, with a mergers-and-acquisitions background that involved the sale of Delicious to Yahoo, and Netscape to AOL. CBS hired … Read more

Rethinking the all-in-one DVD player

Talk about good timing. Just yesterday we wrote of a rather unusual media player that stored a proverbial boatload of videos but had no screen to show them on. Now the perfect companion has emerged: a "hybrid" DVD player and 19-inch widescreen display.

This dual-purpose device from U.K.-based Touch Interactive is a lot sleeker and more portable than other DVD combos, as it was designed specifically not to look like products that have come to market. It could probably be outfitted with a tuner to turn it into a TV as well. But maybe the timing … Read more

CBS Radio, Last.fm sing a streaming-audio duet

Last.fm, the social music site that CBS Interactive purchased last year, will be seeing closer integration into one of the media conglomerate's other properties very soon. According to a joint announcement Tuesday, Last.fm and CBS Radio will be sharing audio content on the Web to provide online editions of CBS' radio stations to Last.fm users and free streaming music to CBS Radio listeners.

A collaboration with CBS Radio has been rumored since the Last.fm acquisition was first announced last May.

In what Last.fm co-founder and CEO Felix Miller said was "the first of … Read more

Music downloads via 'Grand Theft Auto IV'

Why didn't anybody think of this before? Grand Theft Auto franchise developer Rockstar Games has teamed up with Amazon.com in an interesting joint promotion.

When GTA IV comes out on April 29 and you are cruising around inside doing whatever evil deeds come to mind, you might like a particular song playing on one of the radio stations in the game. Well, you will be able dial a number on your in-game virtual cellphone and receive a text message with artist and title information. And if you've signed up to be part of Rockstar's upcoming social … Read more

OSBC Report: CBS Interactive, open source, and innovation

I've known Steve Pearson for a year or two, and have always been blown away by how aggressive his company, CBS Interactive, has been with adopting open source. MySQL, Linux, Spring, Lucene, etc. etc. The list of open-source projects that CBS Interactive deploys is long.

Why? Why does CBS Interactive use open source? According to Steve:

Speed of development (rapid prototyping); Ease of access (Access to the code as well as documentation); Expandability (Ability to contribute back to the core product); Cost.

Steve went on to describe three projects that it has moved to open source. It turns out that the company's adoption of open source has evolved over time, based on bad experiences with proprietary software (and its vendors). CBS Interactive replaced and revamped its content management system with open source. It runs its David Letterman site on open source. And so on.

As Steve noted, the pace of adoption of open source is only going to increase, with two particular things of interest:… Read more

If MobLogic is journalism, does that make Lindsay Campbell a journalist?

Lindsay Campbell is not a journalist, or at least she claims she isn't. The former host of Wall Strip and the current host and producer for MobLogic (a new web series produced by CBS Interactive) wasted no time before disclosing this perspective to her audience. On March 7, in the first official episode, she describe how she she's her role in the media. Now let me say right from the start: I'm not a journalist. I'm coming at this like you. I read the news; I read blogs, and I want to talk about the things that are going on around me in the world. You do too, and we want to hear from you. Your ideas, your opinions, that's the point of the show. We take a story we find interesting and we go out and talk to people about it. Where better to start than right where we live? Look we're not trying to hide it, this show's coming from CBS. At the time, I thought it was a strange approach, but wanted to see where the show was headed before weighing in. Since then, I've found myself tuning into MobLogic on an almost daily basis and have found the show's journalism to be exemplary on at least two occasions.

The second episode of MobLogic was titled, How the Dems Screwed Florida, and provided an in-depth look at the mechanics of the Florida Primary fiasco that I hadn't encountered in any other media outlet. Two weeks later the show profiled the case of an Al Jazeera cameraman who has been held in Guantanamo for more than six years. The story provided an insight into a journalist's legal trouble that has received little media attention, but also explored how New Yorker's feel about the matter.

… Read more

SXSW Sketchnotes

Designer Mike Rohde attended several panels at SXSW Interactive last week and created 34 pages of sketchnotes for them in real-time, captured in a Moleskine sketchbook:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/sets/72157604109069527/

And here's his post about them with a little more detail:

http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/002768.html

What I like about this unique format of panel transcripts is that it shows how rich those on-stage conversations actually were. Sometimes you find yourself in the audience, passive and wondering if the discussion on-stage is really all that meaningful to you. Well, it is -- … Read more

SXSW wrap-up: or how to link 3 panels in 3 synthesizing steps (+bonus)

Since the SXSW conference buzzword was convergence, Chelsea Holden Baker of Frog Design looks back at convergent themes of three panels in three synthesizing steps, and a little bonus at the end:

Blood Sweat and Tears: Great Design Hurts

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Michael Lopp (Apple), made the case for cultivating discomfort as a designer: "Are you willing to be an asshole?" We took a trip back through the iconic designs (like IBM) of Paul Rand and examined the allure of the Apple logo (whether rainbow-striped or white, what makes it sexy is the bite. It's … Read more

Designed for disaster: SXSW's Zuckerberg keynote discussion

Chelsea Holden Baker, of frog design, says better planning and a different design choice could have changed the outcome during the now-infamous 2008 SXSW keynote discussion between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and reporter Sarah Lacy.

Here is Chelsea's blog on the matter from Tuesday:

If you have any interest in South by Southwest and/or the blogosphere, then you've probably seen something on the infamous train-wreck-of-an-interview, aka the SXSW keynote discussion with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and journalist Sarah Lacy. (In this metaphor Zuckerberg is the Little Engine That Could and Lacy is the conductor that derailed the … Read more