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Now you know.

[ See post to watch video ]

As expected, Facebook’s privacy controls and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s views on privacy figured prominently in his Wednesday appearance at D8. Is the company violating its members’ expectation of privacy? Is it pushing them to overshare? Shouldn’t they be given the option of opting in to the company’s instant personalization feature rather than having it automatically personalize things for them?

If you’re looking for straightforward answers to those questions, you’re going to be disappointed. But no matter how Zuckerberg responds, his stance is consistent: He thinks his users want to share their information with the world, and he wants to help them do just that.

[ See post to watch video ]

Walt asked Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs why his company left the phone market. His answer: “We sucked at it.” Jacobs said that a key to keeping up in a technology business is to focus on core competence, and his talk with Walt on chips, spectrum and Qualcomm’s pervasive chip technologies dives deep into the heart of his.

[ See post to watch video ]

It takes a lot to organize a classroom of 20 children. It can take even more to organize the kids’ busy parents—and that often means turning to technology to get everyone on the same page.

Over the past nine months, my first-grader’s school has seen that in spades. Like many elementary schools, ours relies on parent volunteers to help out with one-on-one reading with students and math exercises. In my 6-year-old’s class, at least two parent volunteers are needed a day. In the past, volunteers were organized the old-fashioned way on paper, with parents signing up for their preferred time slots for the month on a calendar sent home with their children.

But in recent years as more schools and families have gone digital, parents are opting for an online solution to organizing volunteer class time. And a host of volunteering and calendar services have popped up on the Web to oblige them. When I asked our school’s room parent which online sites people were using to organize volunteering, he blasted out an email to poll his network of room parents. The informal survey yielded one conclusion: Each classroom was using different services, each with their own perks and drawbacks. Among the hodge-podge of choices were well-known applications such as Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Groups and Google Inc.’s Calendar, as well as less familiar names including VolunteerSpot Inc.’s VolunteerSpot and Doodle AG’s Doodle.com.

All are easily accessible on the Web and are free (though some charge a fee for premium users). All allow a central organizer to set up a master calendar or group online and invite other people to join, thereby getting everyone onto the same technological platform.

VolunteerSpot lets an organizer create a calendar, with tasks parents could volunteer to do.

Each also has limitations. Some make it difficult to print a volunteer schedule. Others don’t have automatic reminders to notify a participant that their volunteer session is coming up, or they make it tough to export the calendar to be integrated with, say, your calendar at work.

Of all the technologies our school’s parents are using, Yahoo’s Groups has been around the longest. Launched in 1999, Yahoo says it now hosts more than 10 million groups that are accessed by some 120 million members. Signing up to create a Yahoo Group is a breeze—with a few clicks, people can name a group and invite others to join. Once set up, parents can post comments, send photos and other attachments to the group, and sign up for spots with an integrated calendar application. Over the years, Yahoo has added new features, including tools to help build an event and to gather RSVPs.

But some parents complain that using a Yahoo Group creates unnecessary spam when some people forget they’re communicating with a group instead of one on one. In addition, Groups’ calendar application is difficult to import and export. Yahoo says that later this year, it will roll out a refresh of Groups that will “enable smaller groups to do things more efficiently.”

Google Calendar, launched in 2007, got a fresh new look for the application last month. The application is also easy to create and to invite people to join. Other parents can share the calendar, see at a glance what volunteer spots are available and fill in the ones they want. Reminders are built in, and Google Calendar can sync with Microsoft Outlook or other calendaring systems.

One of our school’s first-grade classes, though, faced a hurdle when it came to joining their Google Calendar. Some parents said they couldn’t join because they didn’t have a Gmail email account and didn’t want to jump through the hoops of creating one. Google says people don’t have to have a Gmail account but adds there is often confusion between a Gmail account and a plain-vanilla Google account, which only requires people to enter a username and password.

No such puzzlement should exist with Doodle.com, which doesn’t ask users for their email. Launched in 2003 by a developer in Zurich, Doodle.com allows people to quickly get on a calendar, select dates and times for an event, then send out the link so people can fill in when they want to volunteer. But Doodle.com is designed primarily for setting up a business meeting, the company says. Organizing a month’s worth of classroom volunteers thus requires clicking each specific date to create a volunteer spot for it. In other services, you can bring up a month’s calendar. Printing out a Doodle.com calendar also entails someone first exporting the calendar to a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet.

One parent, who is a Doodle.com fan, says she finds the application is better used to organize one-off events such as a school field trip rather than maintaining an ongoing volunteer calendar.

VolunteerSpot was launched early last year by entrepreneur Karen Bantuveris, who says she was aggravated with the lack of tools to solve volunteer-coordinating problems at her child’s preschool. VolunteerSpot allows an organizer to create a calendar, use a tool called the planning wizard to choose tasks they need people to volunteer for, and then send the link out so people can chime in for what slots they can fill.

VolunteerSpot has gotten mixed reviews from our first-grade class. While our parent-volunteer coordinator said the website is very “usable”—with reminders automatically sent two days before a volunteer session, among other things—it was less smooth in some areas.

VolunteerSpot doesn’t allow people to see a month’s worth of volunteers at a glance; people have to click on each day to see who is volunteering, for instance. Printing a calendar isn’t easy. When I clicked on our class calendar, I could print out only my volunteer slots and not the entire class’s since I wasn’t the calendar’s administrator.

My first-grader’s teacher was particularly frustrated by those things since they prevented her from easily seeing who was volunteering when and from printing out a calendar to prompt laggards to volunteer. She says it meant she often had to bug our parent-volunteer coordinator for updates and to make changes to the calendar.

Ms. Bantuveris says the site is constantly adding features and that more than one person can be a calendar’s administrator, which allows them to make changes to a calendar’s settings. She adds that the site in February added an option allowing an administrator print out a master calendar.

Still, there’s one thing these technologies can’t overcome: parental resistance. One of our school’s first-grade classes started the academic year with VolunteerSpot—but quickly abandoned it. Instead, they switched to a paper calendar. “We just couldn’t get anyone to sign up online,” says the room parent for that class. With a paper calendar, she adds, the volunteering has gone much more smoothly.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was last on the D stage–at D6 in 2008–the company was still reeling from the privacy backlash over its Beacon advertising system. Months earlier, Zuckerberg had apologized for Facebook’s disregard for member privacy and announced some fundamental changes to appease critics. Asked during the interview what the Beacon fiasco had taught him about leadership, Zuckerberg said he’d learned that if you give people control over their information, they’re more willing to share it.

Now, two years later, Zuckerberg will once again take the D stage. And once again, his appearance follows another privacy debacle, another apology and another rejiggering of the company’s privacy safeguards. Let’s see what he has to say about leadership this time around.

Update: See video highlights from Zuckerburg’s interview. We’ve compiled a reel on his answers to privacy questions, and a clip on the inside of the Zucker-hoodie.

Liveblog

4:54 pm: “There are a lot of things to talk about with Mark,” says Kara. “And I think he’s got a lot of guts coming up here.”

4:54 pm: Walt kicks things off by asking about Facebook’s business. It’s based on sharing, but there is this perception that you’re on a course to push people’s information into a position where it’s visible on the Internet. Is that correct?

Zuckerberg: Privacy is very important to us. I think there are some misperceptions. People use Facebook to share and to stay connected. You don’t start off on Facebook being connected to your friends, you’ve got to be able to find them. So having some information available broadly is good for that. Now, there have been misperceptions that we’re trying to make all information open, but that’s false. We encourage people to keep their most private information private. But some of the most basic information, we suggest that people leave public.

4:58 pm: Zuckerberg–We recommend settings for people, and we asked that everyone review their settings and make a choice about what they wanted them to be. We didn’t simply change them….The big feedback that we got was that the privacy settings had become too complex. Over the years we’d just accumulated many, many settings.

4:59 pm: Walt–The real issue here is whether people trust that you are still on board with the idea that they thought you were on board with when they joined: That you will keep the information they want to be private, private. But you’ve done some abrupt things and forced people to do something to maintain their privacy settings. Why are you making me have to take steps to protect my information?

Zuckerberg dodges. Talks about the serendipitous connections that Facebook enables. Offers an anecdote about meeting someone for dinner.

5:03 pm: More on serendipitous connections. Zuckerberg continues with this theme until Walt jumps in and asks him to answer the original question.

5:04 pm: Zuckerberg stresses that people can still control their Facebook information. More than 50 percent of Facebook users have changed their privacy settings at one point. That demonstrates that our users understand the tools, he says. “To me, that’s a signal that on the whole, we’re getting it right and giving people the control they want.”

5:05 pm: Kara–So do you feel this recent backlash against you is unfair? How do you explain the hubbub around this? She notes some old inflammatory college IM messages of his that have been making the rounds lately that suggest he may have a cavalier attitude towards privacy.

Zuckerberg: When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs…. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.

Kara: But people want to know about you. Do you feel that you’re adequately portrayed?

Zuckerberg seems confounded for a moment. Then recounts his oft-told story of moving to California and being approached with offers to buy the company. Another long rambling answer to a simple question. Finally: “I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do the best that I can do moving forward.”

Kara and Walt again circle back to the issue of privacy. Is Zuckerberg attempting to force his vision of privacy on all of Facebook?

5:08 pm: [My God, Zuckerberg is literally dissolving in a lake of his own sweat. He is visibly flushed, and you can see the beads of sweat rolling down his face. Could this be his Nixon moment?]

Kara sympathizes, suggests he take off the hoodie he’s wearing, “You all right?” she asks. “We’re not even yelling at you…yet.”

Zuckerberg refuses to take off the hoodie. “I never take it off,” he says. Then he wipes the sweat from his brow, looks at the resulting water stain on his arm, says “whoa,” relents and takes it off.

5:10 pm: Kara helps him and then examines the hoodie. Evidently Facebook’s mission statement is printed inside it along with a giant Illuminati-style insignia (“Making the world more open and connected”). “Oh my God. You’re a cult!” jokes Kara, commenting on the emblem inside. Zuckerberg’s obviously relieved that the privacy questions have paused, at least for a moment.

Walt moves on. “So what is instant personalization?”

5:10 pm: Zuckerberg–”We have this strategy where what we’re trying to do is make it possible for everyone to design social apps where their contacts are at the center….What we’re trying to do now is to make it so that people can extend that to the rest of the Web….We’ve made it so that people can build these people-centric Web sites.” These points are buried in a long rambling answer. He’s fumbling here.

5:13 pm: Walt–Why not, when I log on to Facebook, give people the option to use instant personalization instead of automatically personalizing things for them?

Zuckerberg dodges again, then suggests that doing so would create “a lot more friction.”

Walt again tries to get him to answer the question at hand: But shouldn’t people make this decision themselves? Shouldn’t they have to opt in? [C'mon, Mark. Just answer the question. It would be so much easier....Over on Twitter, longtime tech observer Dan Gillmor just wrote: "Walt Mossberg insists on an answer re FB’s unilateral privacy changes; nope, still no answer."]

Opt in versus opt out is part of a balance in sharing, says Zuckerberg. He rambles on for a while before noting some previous Facebook innovations that people rebelled against, that are today viewed as essential to the service. Newsfeed, for example. [At last a decent point.] “My prediction would be a few years from now is that we’ll all look back and wonder why these services weren’t personalized. The world is moving in this direction where everything is designed around people.”

5:17 pm: Kara–What’s your next big goal? What’s on the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon?

It’s tough to follow Zuckerberg’s answer, here. He seems to be replying to another question. He talks a bit about the development of applications. He says that the industry is moving into an age where more services will be built with people at their core.

5:20 pm: Walt, moving on again–What is the social graph? Is it something you control?

Zuckerberg: The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that’s what we’re doing at Facebook. Once you’ve done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don’t.

5:22 pm: Kara–So what kind of power does Facebook have in this graph?

Zuckerberg: I think people look to us a the leader in this space. And I think there’s a widely held belief that we’re much closer to the beginning of the space than the end. It would be easy for us to just keep things as they are, but we don’t believe that if we did, we’d be doing the best thing for us or the industry. So we do what we think are the best things, even if they are controversial.

Walt: How does the social graph get monetized?

Relevant advertising, says Zuckerberg. And user engagement. He cites a recent campaign by Starbucks (SBUX), which was evidently quite successful. He says that people are sharing information about brands in the same way they are sharing information about themselves.

5:25 pm: Kara–Who are your competitors in this space?

Zuckerberg: We compete with different companies in different ways. One of the things I try to do as CEO of this company is not make mistakes that other companies make….I make different ones, he jokes. [Given his performance today, one wonders if he's really qualified to be the public face of his company.]

The world is changing so quickly now that I think the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of, Zuckerberg continues. So we just need to stay focused on doing what we do and doing at well.

5:27 pm: Kara–You’re going to be CEO of this company when it goes public?

Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Kara: When will that be?

Zuckerberg: I don’t know.

5:28 pm: Some more patter. Then Zuckerberg again circles back to this theme of a Web centered around people. This is obviously his D8 PR bullet point, just as “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” was his bullet point for D6.

Kara: How do you think you’ve changed as a CEO in the past few years?

Zuckerberg: I’ve always just focused on a couple of things. One is having a clear direction. The other is having a good team. Right now, I think we have a clear direction. We’ve got a lot of cool apps and a great platform. On the people side: Just continuing to bring in great people and putting them in positions that they’ll excel at is important. We’re out in the valley recruiting the very best people for the roles we have available in the company. I think as a company, if you get those two things right, then you can do pretty well.

Q&A

Q (from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser): Do you realize that you’ve built at the age of 26 one of the five most important Internet companies in the world? Because of that, people view you differently. How do you deal with that?

A: Maybe I’m in denial. I think our goals haven’t really changed much at all. We don’t think of the company as successful. We know that we have a service that many people use. But it goes back to this concept where I really think we’re just a lot closer to the beginning than the end. Personally, I have a core group of people that I really trust, and that’s what I care about: Those people that share my values and the values of the company.

Q: Who’s your role model? Who would be the best person to run Facebook–aside from you?

A: [Pause] I don’t think I can answer either of those questions. I feel like I learn the most from the people around me now. [Who's your role model? Easy question, Mark. How about "my Mom." ... No real answer.] … I think if something happened to me you could pick any of the people around me and they’d do a great job of running the company. And that’s important because we’re still a very small company.

Q: I’ve heard that you’re going to offer an email platform. Is that true?

A: We’re not building a Web-mail competitor. People already use Facebook for messaging. There are definitely these great services that people use that are full Web-mail clients, but I think the opportunity is more around short-form communications.

Q: How are important decisions made at Facebook?

A: We’re a company where there’s a lot of open dialogue. We have crazy dialogue and arguments. Every Friday, I have an open Q&A where people can come and ask me whatever questions they want. We try to do what we think is right, but we also listen to feedback and use it to improve. And we look at data about how people are using the site. In response to the most recent changes we made, we innovated, we did what we thought was right about the defaults, and then we listened to the feedback and then we holed up for two weeks to crank out a new privacy system.

Q: When it comes to Facebook, what’s your opinion of Flash?

A: We’re agnostic on that issue. I tend to believe more in the Web than apps. The thing that I actually care a lot more about is how you integrate people into all this stuff.

Q: I wonder if you can comment on what it means for Facebook to have mobile apps?

A: Our mobile experience is growing really quickly. It’s well more than 100 million people using Facebook on their phones right now. I think that one of the challenges of mobile is that there’s no standard platform yet. Is it going to be Android, iPhone, HTML apps?

Q: Will you have an iPad app?

A: I assume that we will.

And that’s a wrap!

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Here’s a fun alternative history exercise: What would have happened if AOL-Time Warner had bought Apple (AAPL) and put Steve Jobs in charge of the giant mess?

I can’t imagine that Jobs would have ever gone for it. And it doesn’t seem to have gotten past the spitballing stage. But former AOL CEO Steve Case says he did indeed float the idea to his board back in 2002.

He explained the logic to Kara Swisher onstage at D8. Putting AOL (AOL) and Time Warner (TWX) together wasn’t a terrible idea, he insists–they simply never had the management team to make it work.

But add Jobs, plus a hardware company to marry content and Internet businesses, and…well, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. But fun to fantasize about.

[ See post to watch video ]

Lloyd Braun is a one-man convergence story: He ran Disney’s (DIS) ABC, then Yahoo’s (YHOO) media group, and now makes up half of BermanBraun, which makes movies and TV shows and Web stuff.

Steven Levitan, meanwhile, makes good old-fashioned TV shows like “Frasier” and “Just Shoot Me.” But he earned digital bona fides this spring, when his hit show “Modern Family” used Apple’s (AAPL) iPad as a plot device in an episode that aired shortly before the gadget went on sale. Time to compare and contrast!

Liveblog

4:11 pm: Here are a couple clips from that aforementioned “Modern Family” episode. And now here are Braun and Levitan–”actual creators of content,” as Kara describes them.

4:11 pm: Levitan goes through his TV bio, which includes “The Larry Sanders Show,” which is awesome. All of you should go get the DVDs.

4:12 pm: Braun’s bio–started as a lawyer and had Levitan as a client. Then off to Brillstein-Grey, then Disney, ABC, two years at Yahoo, then hooking up with former Fox boss Gail Berman.

4:14 pm: Kara to Levitan–You don’t really care about digital, right?

Levitan: It’s changed little things, like how we share scripts and information, collaboration tools, etc. “But at its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories…and that requires virtually no technology.” So interview’s done! Ho ho ho! Just kidding.

4:16 pm: Kara to Braun–What do you think? Has tech changed development of TV?

Braun: Nope, not really. Not at the pace you might think. People like Braun think of making TV shows. Digital pieces are things you think about if you have to think about them, and no one has time to think about them. Digital “is frequently a stepchild” to the television show. The marketing people do it.

But! In the future, TV shows won’t be TV shows. They’ll be brands. And TV will be a primary distribution model, but not the only one. That may be years off, but that’s where I think it’s going.

4:18 pm: Kara to Levitan–Does that sound right to you?

Not really. We talk about stuff we can do on the Web, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet. But I feel like fundamentally–I don’t know…when they come to us and say, “now let’s do some summer content” for the Web, I worry that it will drive people to the Web site and not the show, and it will make the show less good. And the Web stuff can’t be as good as the show, because it doesn’t get a full effort, because that’s what we use for the show.

4:20 pm: Kara–What about Twitter, etc.?

Levitan: Twitter’s interesting. When the show airs on the East Coast, and we’re on the West Coast, we hit Twitter, and watch people watching the show and basically in real time, laughing on Twitter. We get instant feedback about which lines work. “I think what it’s doing is bringing people back to watching television live. Because they want to be a part of that conversation….I see it as a wonderful companion right now.”

4:22 pm: Levitan–If you have a wonderful show and it’s working, it’s going to work. The digital stuff won’t make it work. But if you spend too much time on the Internet and take your eye off your show, “that’s the worst thing you can do.”

4:23 pm: Braun–Here’s the problem. Success for Levitan and everyone else is about the ratings the night the show airs. That’s the only metric that matters. So Steve used the word “dabble” to talk about the Web, and I felt the same way at ABC. But that isn’t what the full story is going to be for all of these shows. And if we think that way, we’re going to miss out on what the medium can do. We need to figure out “how to turn these different platforms into real businesses around these shows.” And until it’s your job to do that, you won’t.

4:25 pm: Kara asks about Hulu.

Levitan: It’s tricky. In the business, we often wonder, “How is this helping our show?” We’ve been asking for about six months, and we now think about two million people are watching our show on Hulu. That seems to be what successful shows get. I’m guessing, “because there’s very little transparency on Hulu.” Anyway, the problem is “we’re not getting any credit for that. Anywhere.” And two million viewers for us would be huge. That could really boost our ratings. And we don’t get money for it, either. “I question partially, the point of it, the ultimate wisdom of it….I know that what we do takes a significant investment on the studio’s part,” so if anything siphons that success away, why do that? “Television is about sustainability.” Lots of people can make one-offs, but to sustain a show, making 24 episodes a year, takes a lot of money and effort. It’s hard.

4:28 pm: Braun–Here’s the counter. You have to make these shows available on the Web, because people are going to get them anyway. It’s harder to steal the files, but not that hard. You have to condition kids not to steal this stuff. They think that it’s like drinking water. They think that buying music is like burning money.

4:30 pm: Now Kara wants to know about Yahoo (of course). What happened there, she asks Braun. Can the media and tech sides really not function together?

Braun: I learned a lot there in two years. But yes, all of the big portals are technology companies. They don’t really get media. And media people don’t really get technology. My media friends can’t tell me how Google (GOOG) makes money. They don’t understand search ads vs. display ads, etc. It’s never been explained to them. I was in the same position when I went there.

Once I got my sea legs, after about six months, “it was very difficult to evangelize ‘here’s what it should be.’…I couldn’t get it across in words.”

4:33 pm: Kara asks Levitan if he can imagine creating a hit for the Web?

Levitan: It doesn’t make sense to do it. During the writers strike we all talked about it, and Joss Whedon made that great “Dr. Horrible” short, but he pulled in lots of favors and leveraged his brand. He got there by working in conventional entertainment. There’s not enough upside for us–“the money, the payoff, the audience, is still at the end of the day, in traditional media, right now.” I have friends who do stuff for “Funny or Die” or YouTube. But it’s a hobby for them. There’s no way to make real money. Seth MacFarlane’s deal with Google, I don’t really know what that was.

Kara: Me either.

4:35 pm: Braun says this is the problem–the creators don’t see a business on the digital side. We’ve been attacking it the wrong way. It’s not about creating webisodes, etc. The way to do it is to get a massive audience coming in every day. A viral Will Ferrell video generates five million views, but there isn’t one to come see the next day, so what? So our question is, “how do you bring brands to life” on the Web. It’s not necessarily scripted television. We’ve done a terrible job educating creative people about this. [Alt theory: People who write funny sitcoms and good dramas don't want to "bring brands to life" on the Web, even if there's some money there. But then again, if there's real money...]

4:38 pm: Levitan: Everyone who tried to monkey around with the Web during the strike, either because they had money and could afford to do it, or because they didn’t have anything else to do–they’re all back writing for TV.

Questions & Answers

Q: Talk some more about Twitter. Can you use it as a promotional tool?

Levitan: [grudgingly] Yeah. Sort of. But really, it’s a feedback tool. When something strikes a chord, we really get a sense of it.

Kara: Would you ever take suggestions from the Web–changing endings, etc?

Braun: Sure. But that’s a stunt. It doesn’t move the needle.

Q: Wenda Millard asks Braun to talk about Wonderwall and Glow, two sites he helped create for MSN.

Gets 12 million uniques for Wonderwall, five million for Glow. These are mass audiences. So we’re programming for 15 million uniques. Add the politics site we’re launching and we’ll get to 20 million. Not users, people. And a billion page views. The question is, how do you program to that?

Kara asks Levitan if he sells ads on his Web site.

Levitan: We don’t have a Web site. ABC puts it out.

Greg Coleman [it's the ex-Yahoo session] asks Braun about…I’m not sure. I think it’s about creating good stuff that he didn’t do at Yahoo. “I love Lloyd Braun.” [Hrm.]

One interesting point from Braun: At big Web companies–or at Yahoo, at least–it’s hard to focus on display, with 50 percent margins, when you can focus on search, with 80 percent margins.

Q for Levitan: Why don’t you make cool stuff for mobile?

Levitan: Here’s the problem. I love technology. I love it more than 98 percent of people in television. And I came into it with a genuine desire. I was grabbing domain names before I turned in that ["Modern Family"] script.

The first thing that happens is, you have to do a show. That’s a big job. It can be 18 hours a day. So then to go, on top of it, let’s do that funny thing for mobile–and we’ve done it; we put a funny music video on the Web, it was an enormous amount of work, no one got paid, and at the end of the day, you go, “we think it helps the show, but the system right now is not designed to promote these things, to nurture these things.” If we got ratings from Hulu, at least we’d get a benefit from that. Or the ABC iPad player. We have no clue how many people are watching on that app, and the people who sell that show don’t get credit for that.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Qualcomm may not be a household name, but it probably should be.

The company commercialized the CDMA mobile standard and its chips can be found in many of today’s smartphones. If things play out as CEO Paul Jacobs would like, Qualcomm (QCOM) chips will soon be showing up in a wide variety of consumer electronics devices as well. As Jacobs said at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, “consumer electronics devices will essentially be phones inside–different shapes, different software, but fundamentally, inside they’ll be phones.”

With its latest chips, which ably bridge the performance gap between smartphones and larger devices like netbooks and tablets, Qualcomm is delivering on Jacobs’s prediction. And that is increasingly putting the company at odds with some formidable rivals in the ultramobile computing market–Intel (INTC), for example.

Liveblog

3:28 pm: Off to a bit of a late start here. The interview should begin momentarily.

3:31 pm: A few quick words of introduction from Walt, who notes that most of the folks in the audience have likely used Qualcomm products at one time or another, and Jacobs takes the stage.

3:32 pm: Walt–You make chips, right?

Jacobs: We ship 36 chips every second for cellphones around the world. These chips handle radio communications, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, all sorts of things. They essentially run mobile phones.

3:33 pm: Jacobs–Does anyone in this room have a simple GSMA phone? [No one does.] Then you’re all using our intellectual property.

3:35 pm: Some discussion of licensees. Jacobs notes that Foxconn is among them.

3:35 pm: Walt: Typically, your technology is buried in these devices, but now you’re introducing something that will be out front.

Jacobs says the company is working on a new display technology that uses the same thing a butterfly’s wing uses to make color. Because it’s reflective in that way, you can see it outside and in bright light. It does color and it does video. This isn’t a lab project. We’ve got a fab [fabrication], and it’s being developed.

Walt wonders when we’ll see it. Jacobs says Qualcomm hopes to get it to its partners next year.

3:37 pm: The display is called Mirasol, and it employs a bunch of tiny mirrors to display images.

Jacobs has brought a demo with him, and the display does seem impressive, certainly a big improvement over today’s e-ink.

3:39 pm: Walt–Unlike a Kindle, this thing has color, plays video and better battery life.

Jacobs: If we’re using a still image outdoors, the battery will last for a very long time–it uses very little power. If we’re running stuff, animations for example, it won’t run quite as long. But it will still be a significant improvement over what we see in devices like the Kindle and iPad today.

3:41 pm: Walt–What about downsizing these screens? Will they work on cellphones?

Jacobs says they will. In fact, Qualcomm is working with someone to develop a watch that uses it.

Walt: And this can support multitouch?

Jacobs: Yes. The display, because its MEMS technology, there are other things we can integrate into it–antennas and whatnot.

3:43 pm: Walt–So will this be a Qualcomm reader or will you build it for someone else?

Jacobs: We’ll be developing this for partners

3:44 pm: So why did you get out of the device business, asks Walt.

Jacobs: Because we sucked at it. I just said, you know this is not our core competency. So today we’re focused on chips. Technology is moving so quickly these days that if you’re not focused, you just end up doing things badly. We’re very focused on the chip business.

3:45 pm: Walt–You’ve jumped into the brains of the phone business, yes?

Jacobs: Yes we have. It’s called Snapdragon and its a microprocessor that uses ARM. These are very lower-power chipsets.

3:47 pm: Walt–But these chips are going into high-power devices. They can’t have wimpy processors.

Jacobs agrees and notes that Qualcomm is developing multicore processors for smartphones. “You think about the phone, why do you need the phone to turn on to do stuff? You don’t need to turn on the entire user interface to do something like email. So we’re managing power very carefully to extend usage time.”

3:49 pm: Walt–Is Intel (INTC) your biggest competitor?

Jacobs: That depends. Intel is on the high end. There are other smaller companies though that are low-end threats.

Walt: Do you power BlackBerrys?

Jacobs: The Verizon (VZ) Blackberrys run our chips.

3:50 pm: Walt asks for Jacobs’s thoughts on Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign, which made the company a known brand. Has Qualcomm considered doing something similar?

Jacobs: You know we have Qualcomm Stadium, says Jacobs. And sometimes people think we make beer, not chips. The truth of the matter is, I sell to the manufacturers and the operators, but we don’t sell directly to the consumer, so a big branding campaign like that isn’t a big concern.

3:53 pm: Conversation moves on to Qualcomm’s FlowTV service. Walt notes that it hasn’t really been successful, and Jacobs agrees. But he adds that it has great potential for the future, particularly in terms of broadcasting information to smartphones, a la PointCast.

3:56 pm: Jacobs: Today when you think about FlowTV, you think about cable TV on your phone. Tomorrow, it will be more of a data service.

3:57 pm: Walt–Obviously, we’re heading toward a bandwidth congestion problem. Is there a solution?

Jacobs: Fixing the backhaul problem already helps. We’re now going to more and wider spectrum, and that helps as well. Fourth generation will feel like you’re getting a better experience as a user. The big issue, though, is getting more access to spectrum, moving people off of it. Adding additional Wi-Fi access points that are integrated into the cellular network will help as well.

Walt: Is it a good trade-off in our country to reallocate the broadcast spectrum?

Jacobs: That’s a tough question because there are people who still use it.

Q & A

Q: Qualcomm seems to be involved in a lot of sensor work. Can you talk about that?

A: One of the things we’re involved in is the development of sensors, sensors that can be stuck onto your body and can talk to your phone. Glucose monitors, for example. But battery life is very important here. So we’re spending a lot of effort developing these technologies for health care with that in mind.

Q: Can you compare SnapDragon to Apple’s A4?

A: I don’t know a lot about that because we haven’t done a tear-down of Apple’s (AAPL) processor.

Q: Can you talk about your BREW [binary runtime environment for wireless] OS and where it might be heading?

A: We actually have a lot of demand for it now. In addition to Verizon, it’s going into AT&T (T) and into Chinese operators. HTC actually just built a phone that’s BREW-based. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said BREW was headed to emerging markets. Now I think it’s headed to the low-end of the high-end market.

Q: Do you think there are other areas in which your technology might be used, education, for example?

A: Jacobs notes an experiment in education where one classroom was given cellphones running Qualcomm tech and others weren’t, and the group with the phones showed a marked improvement in its grades. “The cellphone is humanity’s biggest platform. If we can’t use it to change education or health care, then shame on us.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

When former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin appeared at D6 in 2008, Walt Mossberg asked him why broadband speeds in the United States were abysmal. “You’re the chairman of the FCC,” he said. “How did you allow this to happen?”

This afternoon, Walt posed a similar question to current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Here’s his answer:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Streak tablet marks Dell’s entry into a market dominated by Apple (AAPL). Dell, a company that made its name perfecting the “just in time” production model, hopes that now is the right moment to introduce an Android-based device.

Dell (DELL) took a three-bears approach to design, with the Streak fitting between smartphones and iPad-sized tablets.

Dell describes the Streak as both compact and spacious, with a five-inch touchscreen. It will have access to the full suite of Android apps and is billed as a device for gaming, music, connecting with people and even making voice calls.

Here’s the video of the demo, and the liveblog following that.

[ See post to watch video ]

2:33 pm: Ron Garriques takes the stage to showcase the Dell Streak, a five-inch Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth mini-tablet.

He first shows a video from a projector via a dock that ships with the device.

2:35 pm: Kara asks the size question.

Garriques answers that the device has to be large enough to experience the Internet, but small enough to fit in your top pocket.

He says he has given up the phone entirely in favor of his Streak.

2:36 pm: Garriques says that the five-inch screen is 100 percent larger than the average smartphone screen.

2:37 pm: Kara asks what Dell is calling it. Garriques says he doesn’t call it a phone or tablet.

He says that in Europe, the device is free with a two-year contract, adding that carriers around the world are looking for device partners who can “delight customers.”

Walt asks about the age range for target customers. Garriques’ reply: Nine to 94.

2:40 pm: The Streak will appear in the U.S. toward the end of July and cost about $500 at Dell.com, unlocked.

Garriques says you can store hundreds of movies on the device, but won’t give a hard answer on storage numbers. He mentions that it has both a back- and front-facing camera.

Garriques leaves the stage and D8 goes on a coffee break. Guests at D8 will be able to handle the device at a demo station.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Steve Case is most famous for building America Online, which became the Internet’s first mega-company, and for merging it with Time Warner (TWX), which became the worst corporate marriage in recent history.

But AOL (AOL) is 25 years old, and the AOL-Time Warner deal is a decade old. What has Steve Case been doing since then?

Investing, in a lot of different stuff. His Revolution holding company has stakes in everything from Revolution Health, a wellness/fitness/medical advice Web site, to Cacique, a Costa Rican resort, to Clearspring, a Web widget company. Late last year, Case sold Revolution Money to American Express (AXP) for $300 million. And Zipcar, another portfolio company, has just filed for a $75 million IPO.

Liveblog

“We meet again,” sighs Kara. “I just can’t quit you.” “We’re off to a good start,” says Steve.

1:58 pm: Kara–Let’s go back 25 years. Talk about the beginning of AOL.

1:59 pm: Case–Well, Zuckerberg was one year old.

I got into this when I was in college, reading Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave.” It was riveting.

We started in 1985, in partnership with Commodore. It was a total bet on community. We believed the killer app was community. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.

On the road show, no one believed us. Which was fair, because we didn’t have many customers seven, eight years into it. Needed lots of technology to catch up a bit. And needed people to catch up, too.

2:01 pm: Kara–What put you over the top? All of those discs?

2:02 pm: Case–It wasn’t the discs. It was the content. By 1992, ’93, many more people had computers in their homes, connectivity was better. The Internet was evolving–it wasn’t legal for us to connect to the Internet until 1991.

It took a while before we were considered an Internet company. Even when we went public, we were an interactive company, or online services. Had to morph as market evolved.

2:04 pm: And at some point News Corp. (NWS) sued you?

2:04 pm: Yeah, in 1998. they were upset about an online game they thought we were excluding. There was a lot of antitrust chatter then. Those were the good old days.

Kara: Well, you proved them wrong, the idea that you were too powerful.

Case: “I’m not going to comment on that.”

2:05 pm: On the Time Warner deal: Made sense for us and our shareholders at the time. It made strategic sense. But as Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is hallucination.

I’m recalling, by the way, that one of our strategies was to buy Apple (AAPL), hire Steve Jobs and put him in charge. It was an idea that was floated.

Big point is that with the right leadership, which my group, including me, couldn’t provide, we were set up to succeed. Look at stuff like iTunes, YouTube, etc.–all of that could have come from that company.

2:07 pm: I stepped down after the merger. After a couple of years, I started making one-off investments. Then created Revolution as a holding company. Runs through portfolio, which you can see on his site.

2:09 pm: Kara–You were early on a lot of important trends. Oh, and tell me about your favorite device that isn’t the iPad (thanks, Kara!).

2:10 pm: I’m interested in the social media side, and there’s some stuff bubbling there that reminds me of the early days. Also, mobile and location-based stuff, really. But really, how the Internet can be a platform to change the world. Even companies like Zipcar and our resorts properties only work because of the Internet.

Kara: What’s the relevance of the Internet to a company that helps rich people travel?

Case: Booking tickets on the Web [hmm]. Health care is the one that can really benefit from the Web. Runs through Revolution Health portfolio.

2:13 pm: Case–Turns out I’m much more interested in businesses that touch consumers. Like Steve Jobs said, I like that better than enterprise.

And health care is really a wellness push. Because health care as we define it is really sick care.

2:14 pm: Kara–Talk about Twitter and Sarah Silverman.

Case starts to answer, but Kara interrupts and steers him somewhere else.

Case: I really didn’t want to do a blog in the last 10 years, because that seemed like work. But Twitter made sense. I signed up early, like three years ago, but like a lot of people, it didn’t make sense to me. About a year and a half ago it made sense. Less about what you’re doing than what you’re interested in.

2:15 pm: I’ve always liked that interaction part. I wish we’d thought of Twitter–we were headed in that direction with buddy lists, etc.

2:16 pm: Kara–Tease out the different big Web businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare.

Case: Facebook’s obviously a real company with real revenue. Twitter and Foursquare are much earlier, but they could be on the cusp of a real business with real revenue.

Kara: If you were a 19-year-old college student, what would you be looking at?

Case: I’m hoping that the Internet just becomes everyday life. You don’t call it email, it’s just mail. Etc.

2:18 pm: Big opportunity for Web integration in health: Wi-Fi pedometers, Internet-connected scales, etc. In most cases, remote diagnostics would be able to help you solve and correct problems.

And I think letting people know about healthier choices can solve a lot of problems, and the Web can help with that.

2:19 pm: Kara–Make some predictions. You’re a visionary!

On Yahoo (YHOO): Case pauses. “I don’t know.” This industry changes a lot. I don’t feel like I’m in a good place to make a judgment. Do remember that iconic brands, with large audiences: You should never give up for dead. Remember what happened to Apple.

On AOL: Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

On Apple: Nobody would have imagined this 13 years ago, when Steve came back. Remember that it was worth $1 billion and left for dead. By the way, I’ve told Steve this–I’d love to see Apple focus on health care.

2:22 pm: On Facebook, social networking: Really big. Not going away. That kind of communicating is fundamental to human behavior.

On Hollywood: I do think it’s puzzling. We had a hard time getting VC money into the Internet, but Time Warner would spend $1 billion a year betting on movies. They were very comfortable with that, and so many fail.

2:24 pm: Kara–How do you want to be remembered?

Case: “That sounds kind of like a gravestone question.”

Kara: “Okay.”

Case: I want to be remembered, and my team to be remembered, as mostly a force for good, able to get tens of millions of people to take the Internet seriously and integrate it into their everyday lives. We helped get America online.

2:26 pm: A question from analyst Mary Meeker: Please remind us of the market value of AOL when you went public. And please talk about challenges you had when you were growing (“America offline,” etc.)

Case: We raised $10 million or $15 million, had about $30 million in revenue and were valued at $70 million.

As to the challenges–all of them were double-edged swords. For instance, regarding downtime, it took a better part of a decade to get people to take us seriously, and we let them down. Then again, the fact that people cared about our service problems made it clear that they took what we offered them seriously. It took us a year or so to work through that.

2:29 pm: We had a lot of ups and down. Mostly downs. It was a decade of building. One of my worries now, is that there are so many companies that are built to flip. I wish people took a longer view, and I wish VCs did as well.

2:30 pm: Case: I went to school in Hawaii with Obama.

Kara: How was he?

Case: I don’t know. I was a senior and he was a freshman.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Skype is doing pretty well these days; yet last year, eBay sold off a significant piece of it. Why? And why couldn’t eBay (EBAY) make it work in the first place? CEO John Donahoe answers these questions in the video clip below.

[ See post to watch video ]

It has been a tough spring for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

In April, a federal appeals court found that the FCC had overstepped its bounds when it censured Comcast (CMCSA) for violating its net neutrality principles and in so doing, called into question the agency’s authority to regulate the Internet. In May, 282 members of Congress, from both political parties, petitioned him to suspend the FCC’s plans to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a move that would, once and for all, put broadband under the agency’s purview and clarify its jurisdiction.

And so today, Genachowski heads an agency whose legal authority is in question, as is its ability to implement a much needed National Broadband Plan. And his ambitious policy agenda is, for all intents and purposes, on hold.

What will he do now to regain momentum and fix the country’s ailing broadband policies?

1:19 pm: You’re a different sort of FCC chairman, aren’t you, Walt asks. You have somewhat of a tech background.

Genachowski: I do. I spent the last 10 years in the tech space. I’m probably the only FCC chairman who worked for the same company as Jeffrey Katzenberg.

1:21 pm: The conversation quickly moves on to an issue top of mind today: broadband and how lousy it is in the United States. Genachowski talks for a moment about broadband, saying the U.S. is grievously behind. He cites a survey that ranked the U.S. 40th out of 40 when it came to rate of change of capacity. “That means we are moving more slowly than any other country in that survey.”

1:23 pm: Walt jumps in to note that U.S. broadband customers are being screwed on performance AND cost. “They have slower broadband than lots of other people and they pay more for it,” he says. “You’re the head of the FCC: Why won’t you fix this?”

Genachowski: Because I thought you might invite me, I spent the last year working on a broadband plan. But there’s no silver bullet. There are things we can do to drive more innovation. Unleashing mobile is the most important thing we can do. There’s no doubt in my mind that mobile broadband will drive innovation. We have an enormous chance with 4G.

1:25 pm: Genachowski–The FCC plan that I inherited provided for new spectrum coming on the market that’s about a threefold increase over now. Until you see the new demand being driven by devices like the iPhone and the iPad. It’s 40 times. And we need to address that.

Walt jumps in, noting that spectrum is finite. Is there enough spectrum available to solve the problem?

Genachowski: There’s enough available if we have the right policies in place. We’ve got to work on policies that themselves create better efficiency, policies for trading spectrum, for example.

1:28 pm: Genachowski recalls that a few years ago there was a band of spectrum that no one knew what to do with. Finally, someone said, ‘why don’t we just put this spectrum out unlicensed and see what people do with it?’ And the first thing that people came up with were garage openers…and later someone discovered that it could be used for Wi-Fi. Obviously, an important innovation, but also part of the congestion problem. So what we’re trying to do is identify things like that,” he says. We’re also looking into spectrum-related efficiency.

1:30 pm: Walt–Are you going to take spectrum away from TV broadcasters?

Genachowski says he has offered them the opportunity to put their spectrum up for auction. We think this creates a mechanism for freeing up spectrum that’s currently tied up, he says.

1:31 pm: Walt asks about Genachowski’s broadband plan. Does the FCC have the power to bring it to fruition?

Genachowski: First thing to understand about the plan is that we were asked to develop a plan that would apply to the FCC and other parts of the government as well. It includes recommendations for the FCC, for Congress, etc. So focusing on the things we recommended for ourselves, there’s no dispute that we have authority. With respect to others, there’s a court ruling that’s created problems for us. So what’s important is that we move forward on the broadband policies and strategies.

We run something at the FCC called the Universal Service Fund. It promotes universal phone service and it does a good job of that. One of the recommendations of our plan is that this fund be used to support broadband instead of legacy phone service. This court decision is preventing us from doing that.

1:34 pm: Genachowski–No one really cares what section of the statute we point to except for the lobbyists and lawyers. It would be unfortunate if that process slowed us down as a country on improving our broadband infrastructure.

1:36 pm: Genachowski–We need to have enough of a broadband infrastructure in the United States that companies want to do business here.

1:37 pm: Walt wonders if it’s even possible to get some sort of policy implemented that would improve broadband for consumers.

Genachowski says it is, but concedes that “some elements of the system are broken” and prevent the country from moving as quickly as it could on its infrastructure initiatives. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think that the infrastructure will come simply because we want it to come….We need dramatic investment and we need an environment that encourages innovation.”

1:39 pm: Walt recalls a question from yesterday’s session with Steve Jobs about AT&T’s capacity problem. Noting the dramatic increase in demand for data on AT&T’s network, he asks if Genachowski can fix it so that people who complain about not being able to make calls on AT&T (T) will be able to make calls.

Genachowski: I think on an issue like this where AT&T hears from its consumers every day about how bad it is, I don’t worry so much. I worry more about issues where consumers are disempowered. Things like the number of consumers who don’t know what their broadband speeds are, for example. Ultimately, we want to give consumers the information they need to be better consumers. … What we’re looking at is digital labels that will show consumers what their actual broadband speeds are as opposed to the speeds they’re told they’re getting. I think we’re in an era when information technology creates opportunities to empower the consumer to make the market work more efficiently.

1:44 pm: Walt talks a bit about the state of the set-top box. The boxes that the cable companies give you are awful, he says. But there’s a law meant to promote options. Why aren’t you enforcing it?

Genachowski says he is, noting that consumers can buy CableCards.

Walt: Why don’t you make companies make better CableCards and better cable boxes?

Genachowski concedes that the CableCard strategy hasn’t quite worked out the way the FCC had hoped. The agency is now looking to see if there’s a sort of universal gateway that will solve the set-top box issue and allow innovation in the living room, he says. But the pay folks are concerned about how this will preserve the integrity of the pay stream. We’re at the point technologically where we can explore devices that preserve that pay stream while improving the broadband experience, he says, and we’ve set a goal of 2012 for developing a device like this.

Q & A

Q: Why is the FCC putting the 4G spectrum next to the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth bands?

A: I don’t think that will happen. At the FCC we have terrific engineers who understand these interference issues.

Q: What do you think about rewriting the Telecommunications Act of 1996?

A: I think it’s true that the act gives us the authority that we need. But I also think that by virtue of its structure, it’s not quite ideal. I’m doing everything I can with the following goal: We need solutions, speed, etc., because we’re not just competing with ourselves, we’re competing with the rest of the world.

Q: Does Obama have an iPad?

A: I don’t know whether he has an iPad yet, but I’m sure that will be taken care of.

Q: Your thoughts on malware and security?

A: The dangers are very serious. The systems that should be in place aren’t in place yet. I’m very concerned about the substance of this and whether in Washington we can do what needs to be done to ensure the security of our networks.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

What happens to laid-off journalists? Some of them wise up and get other work, but others doggedly insist on staying in the industry. Those are the ones NPR CEO Vivian Schiller wants to work with, via a network of new media sites, she explained at the D8 conference on Wednesday.

[ See post to watch video ]

A few years back, John Donahoe’s position was an unenviable one. As incoming CEO of eBay, he was taking the reins of a company that, while the clear leader in the online auction space, had seen growth stall amid increased competition from formidable rivals like Amazon.com, as well as from upstart auction sites like Etsy. And his first efforts to reinvigorate the company’s business by tweaking its marketplace and auction listings to be more like Amazon’s met with some vociferous blowback from eBay’s core sellers.

But much as they irritated, those changes seem to have had a positive effect on eBay’s business. In its most recent quarter, eBay (EBAY) showed modest growth, narrowly beating analysts’ estimates thanks to some impressive growth in its PayPal online payment business. Add to this Donahoe’s unloading of most of Internet calling service Skype, a much criticized acquisition engineered by his predecessor, Meg Whitman, and his revamp of the company seems to be gaining momentum. But is it enough to reinvigorate eBay’s business and fend off Amazon (AMZN)?

Liveblog

11:31 am: A first question from Walt. You’re viewed by people as a sort of Web 1.0 company, and you’re all about auctions. Today you seem to be morphing into more of a no-haggle auction store, a buy-it-now venture.

Donahoe: We’ll never be a retailer. Initially, eBay started selling long-tail inventory and they sold it in an auction format and that made sense at the time. Today, eBay is 30-35 percent auctions. A lot of the inventory on eBay today is brand new. Now they’re not necessarily the same items you’d get in a retail store….But what you have on eBay that you don’t have anywhere else are items that have been returned or refurbished, items that are cheaper. EBay gives you a choice of inventory.

11:36 am: Walt–Do consumers get that? Do they understand that you’re only 30 percent auctions now?

Donahoe says they do. “I think perception does lag reality; I think there’s more inventory than people are aware of, but we’re correcting that….What eBay is very good for is if you have bulk inventory, we’re a good way to get rid of it.”

11:37 am: Walt asks about eBay’s other businesses: PayPal and Skype. Skype seems to be bigger than ever these days. Why couldn’t you make that work?

Donahoe says Skype is a fantastic business. But the challenge was one of focus. “In the Internet today, you can’t be all things to all people….And we didn’t have synergies with Skype…so we sold a portion of it.”

Walt–Well if there wasn’t synergy, why did you buy it?

Donahoe says that at the time eBay made the purchase there appeared to be synergies and the company hoped to make good use of its technology, but that didn’t quite pan out. “I’m not sorry we made the acquisition,” he said. “And I’m not sorry we divested it either.”

11:41 am: What’s the point of PayPal, asks Walt.

Donahoe: What PayPal’s done is to provide consumers with a safe way to make purchases online.

Walt jumps in and notes that it’s just as easy these days for people to use their credit cards. So why bother with PayPal?

Donahoe notes that things like cash and credit cards can be lost. PayPal cannot. “It’s a digital wallet,” he says, adding that he expects mobile payments to come into broad use within the next three years.

11:44 am: Continuing his riff on PayPal, Donahoe talks about the PayPal iPhone app, which allows people to “bump” payments to one another. “I think the idea of the digital wallet will facilitate digital commerce growth and PayPal’s growth as well.”

11:46 am: Walt–How big is your phishing problem? I get emails fairly often warning me that my PayPal account is in trouble for some reason. You are the target of a lot of phishing, aren’t you?

Donahoe: Phishing was an issue for eBay a few years ago. But over the last five years, we invested quite a bit of money fighting it, and I think we’ve done a good job.

11:48 am: Walt–So who’s your main competitor?

Donahoe says the usual suspects–Amazon, Etsy, Wal-Mart (WMT).

11:49 am: Donahoe–Wal-Mart is the largest offline retailer in the world. Costco (COST) competes in the exact same segment with the exact same business model very successfully. So does Target (TGT). The same thing can happen online. Amazon can be successful and eBay can be successful, too.

11:50 am: Is the iPad another big platform for you, Walt asks.

“I think more devices are becoming part of the shopping experience,” says Donahoe. The line between online and offline is blurring and I think these new devices are enabling that. He adds that he thinks eBay’s iPad app is the best eBay experience he’s seen to date.

11:52 am: A quick poll of the audience–Who has an iPad? Quite a few folks, evidently.

11:53 am: Walt–You say the iPad app is the best eBay experience, but this is a new device. You’ve been on the Web for years. Why isn’t that the best experience.

Donahoe: The core eBay Web experience–in the last few years we’ve gone from a [score of] 2 to a 4. But we’ve still got a long way to go, and we’re still focused on making it the best eBay experience in the world. But these new devices allow us to start over and make new customized applications that help us serve users in the way that they want to shop.

11:55 am: Why so much focus on fashion?

Donahoe says eBay is the largest seller of fashion in the world. What we’re doing is driving more vertical shopping experiences on eBay, he adds. We’re trying to offer more customized experiences in different categories.

11:56 am: Walt asks about StubHub. There’s a lot of controversy over the secondary ticket market.

Donahoe: StubHub is a marketplace. It never buys tickets. What it’s doing is enabling season ticket holders to resell the tickets they aren’t using. Sometimes for above-market prices, sometimes for below-market prices. What StubHub has done that the scalper market never could, is that it’s completely transparent. You know who the buyer is, who the seller is, and StubHub guarantees every purchase. It provides complete transparency.

Q & A

Q: Can you talk about PayPal’s role in paying for content?

A: Digital is going to be a big opportunity for PayPal. If you go on Facebook, you can buy game credits with PayPal. In the media world, we’ll have payment solutions such that content providers can have a PayPal button on their content and people can use it to purchase it. It will provide a seamless experience inside the content itself. Digital’s going to be a big opportunity.

Q: What do you tell sellers who feel they’re being nickel-and-dimed by eBay’s many fees?

A: I think for years, eBay was nickel and diming. But over the past few years, we’ve restructured our fees. Today, consumers can list for free and businesses can list in the fixed-priced format. We’ve tried to simplify and streamline our pricing. We’re still cheaper than Amazon.

Q: Why do my PayPal purchases default to my bank account when I’d like to use my credit card? Will you move toward a model where consumers can choose how they pay through PayPal?

A: Consumer choice is important to us, says Donahoe, adding that the vision is to offer multiple means of payment.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

For home theater aficionados these days, one question is top of mind: To buy 3-D TV or not to buy 3-D TV. DreamWorks Animation (DWA) CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg spoke about this during his D8 appearance today, saying that the industry doesn’t expect viewers to run out and replace their current TVs with 3-D versions, but does expect they will in the next few years.

[ See post to watch video ]

Our garages have no flying cars, our cities are still built on the ground and our robots just barely clean the floor. But today, Kno, the secretive start-up formerly known as Kakai, hopes to answer one of technology’s promises by replacing the dense poundage of textbooks weighing down backpacks everywhere with its new tablet device (also called Kno).

The clamshell device resembles Microsoft’s (MSFT) recently abandoned Courier project with a pair of touchscreens that open and shut like a book. Details have been sparse from the company, but we do know that it will offer an online store linked to the device for purchase of materials. Kno shares a co-founder with Chegg, the online textbook rental service, and early partnerships with Cengage Learning (CHC-WT), McGraw Hill (MHP) and Pearson and Wiley indicate that the device will include access to both textbook-style and reference-database content.

Now up, the unveiling of the Kno tablet, via video (below) and liveblog.

[ See post to watch video ]

11:13 am: Walt and Kara take the stage again to begin the Kno demo.

11:13 am: The Kno co-founders, Osman Rashid and Babur Habib, take the stage to showcase the Kno. They say 90 people have been working for a year on the Kno.

They say their hope for the Kno is to change the way students learn.

11:15 am: The founders are unpacking what they are calling a “typical backpack.” Their example has two to four textbooks.

They say students have asked to replicate the analog experience of the book.

11:16 am: The Kno is revealed. The device is large, with two 14-inch screens that open like a book.

Rashid says that 95 percent of textbooks will fit on these screens. He adds that he feels e-textbooks have failed because textbooks don’t fit on other devices.

11:18 am: Walt, donning his Personal Technology columnist hat, asks for the weight. Kno weighs 5.5 lbs.

11:20 am: The founders announce a platform for getting books as well as several major partnerships for content.

11:21 am: The device has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and supports all document-creation formats and PDFs. The software is Linux-based.

The founders say a virtual keyboard is coming and the Kno will have a laptop mode for content creation.

11:23 am: Kno guys say that the stylus is important for learning, and the Kno will have one.

The software looks very slow, but this is a very early prototype, the founders remind the audience.

11:25 am: Kno will allow for highlighting and stickies, and includes a UI element to help students know how much more they have left to read.

Answering Walt’s pushback on the technology, the founders add that the OS is Linux-based with WebKit- and hardware-accelerated Flash and a full browser.

11:28 am: Walt asks if the device will include Facebook and Twitter. The answer is yes, but the founders say the feedback from faculty and staff is good and they hope for acceptance from professors.

Pricing will be announced over summer; they say it will be below $1,000.

Kara reminds the crowd that the company is in stealth mode.

Rashid says the company will be raising funds over the summer.

11:31 am: They finish with an examination of the “binding,” which is made of seat-belt-like material that allow for flexibility between the twin panels. They have plans to customize colors for school affiliation.

11:33 am: The Kno guys leave the stage with Kara as D8 transitions to the next guest, John Donahoe, CEO of eBay (EBAY)

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Here are photos from Kara’s interview of Comcast COO Steve Burke. Photographs were taken by our conference photographers, Asa Mathat and Lori Makabe.

Web video gets you whatever you want, whenever you want, more or less. So who needs a cable company? Comcast (CMCSA) COO Steve Burke made his case Wednesday at D8.

[ See post to watch video ]

Radio was supposed to be gone by now–wiped out by iPods, on-demand streaming and an endless buffet of personalization options. But the digital wave doesn’t always break the way people predict, and it turns out that National Public Radio’s audience has grown through the Web era: It now attracts a record 28 million listeners a week.

There’s still plenty for CEO Vivian Schiller to worry about, though. Like how to hoover up the donations that power her nonprofit in a recession. Or how to cover international news when it’s increasingly risky to do so.

But this isn’t Schiller’s first time at a media company facing big challenges. Her last gig was at the New York Times, where she ran the publisher’s flagship Web site.

Liveblog

Prior to Schiller’s appearance, we’re treated to a gag reel: Your favorite NPR personalities trying out inappropriate digital memes: A Karl Cassell iPhone app, Scott Simon in a motion-capture suit, etc. Good stuff.

Kara: Before we get to your current job, tell us about your old gigs.

Schiller: Walks through bio: NYT.com, cable, Russian interpreter, etc.

Kara: Okay, back to radio. Where are you?

Schiller: First of all, note we don’t call ourselves National Public Radio anymore. We’re NPR. That said, we’re still growing our radio audience. We have 34 million listeners a week. But our job is to inform citizens, via universal access. That used to mean radio, but we don’t think we should be limited to that anymore.

Schiller: This wasn’t done in response to declining audience, by the way. We just wanted to reach more people, on more platforms. We want to make it as widely available as possible. So all our RSS feeds are full-text. And we’ve got a very robust API, etc., which allows us to do cool things like the iPad app, which we made very quickly. And an Android app, which a developer built on his own. We just made the code for his app totally public.

We get over a billion requests on our API. Very few media organizations can say that. So we’ll see more cool stuff. Like combining NPR stories with information from local stations and creating “news products” that track trends, like the oil spill or the flu epidemic. “We don’t know what could be created, but we know things will be.”

10:43 am: Kara–How hard is it to change a radio organization into a multimedia organization?

10:44 am: Schiller–Within NPR, they were already starting to do it when I came on board. You don’t want to force people into it. You let early adopters show the way. There were concerns that we were taking resources away from traditional radio to go into digital, which was not the case. We put all 300 journalists into a digital training course, though.

10:46 am: Schiller–Outside of NPR, at the affiliates, it was a different story. Some smaller affiliates weren’t really set up for digital, so we had to provide tools for them so they could be part of the process. Some of this was tools for photos, etc. But fundamentally, helping them deliver audio streams. Radio towers are going away within 10 years, and Internet radio will take its place. This is a huge change and we should embrace it. Mobile will play a big part.

10:47 am: Our biggest shows are “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Those are tent poles. We produce and distribute those. Others we only distribute, like “Fresh Air.”

10:49 am: Kara: So do these shows become Internet shows or radio shows?

10:49 am: Schiller: I think of them as shows. We’re agnostic about the way they listen to it. All of our revenue streams work equally well with each delivery method. And to the listener’s ear, it’s identical. So why should we care? Forty percent of weekday listening is in the car, which makes sense. When cars are Internet-enabled, that should be the same thing.

10:51 am: Kara–Will you ever charge for this stuff?

10:51 am: Schiller–Nope. That’s our mission, to provide this stuff for free. We ask our listeners to contribute, and about 10 percent of them do, pretty consistently. That said, on a B2B level, this could change. Our stations don’t pay for our Web programming right now, but that could change. They get it free with the radio license fees they already pay.

10:52 am: Kara–Do you think commercial radio will be able to charge for their shows on the Web?

10:53 am: Schiller–Question of the moment. There’s a disconnect. Do publishers need the money? Yes. Do people want to pay? Not in large numbers.

10:53 am: A memory trip back to NYT.com and its Times Select pay wall experiment.

Schiller–We got up to 200,000 subs, $10 million a year. But that was a pittance compared with ad revenue we were generating. And we had to weigh that against the audience weren’t reaching. We figured the $10 million wasn’t worth it. So we dropped the wall, and within a couple of months, our unique monthly users went from 12 million to 20 million. Did that immediately translate into revenue? No, not right away. But eventually.

10:55 am: Schiller–What they’re doing now, by the way, is not the same thing. It’s not going to cut off Tom Friedman from a kid in a Bangalore Internet cafe. So I think that could work.

10:56 am: Schiller asked to talk about Web news in general. A bow in the direction of “creative destruction”–in this case, laid-off journalists creating interesting stuff on the Web. The problem is that all of these sites, like the one in San Diego, etc., don’t have enough reach. So we should be able to partner with them, and create a “supernetwork”–”not a mega-portal” but partnerships between the smaller regional stations and the mother ship, etc. We already doing that with Pro Publica, etc.

10:58 am: Kara–What devices are most important to you?

10:59 am: Schiller–Of course, I need to praise the “magical device.” It’s “all things to all people.” I do wonder if it’s going to obsolete the iPod touch….We’ve had 300,000 downloads of the NPR iPad app. The trick is to create an app that takes particular advantage of the device.

Q&A:

Is there a way to support NPR without supporting the local station?

Schiller: No, not really. The lifeblood of NPR is the local station. You’ll note we always route the membership drives through the local station. However, we do have a philanthropic support through the NPR Foundation, but that’s not for small individual donations.

But the listener can go directly to NPR in the Web model, and doesn’t need to go to the local affiliate. So what’s the local affiliate’s role in the new paradigm?

Schiller: The fact that so few journalists are covering state and local news is scary. We’re committed to providing that local coverage via the affiliates. “We’ve got to have that local coverage, and NPR can’t do it….To the extent that [local coverage] doesn’t suit your needs, then we have to work together to make it meet your needs.”

Would NPR consider working with for-profit organizations to help solve the local news problem?

Schiller: We’re not constitutionally opposed to working with commercial entities. But I also think that some of the small, local nonprofits we’ve been talking about can make this work, too. Especially if we can leverage our strengths, which is one way to generate more philanthropy.

Are we always going to be counting on philanthropy to fund news coverage going forward?

Schiller: Yes.

How are you working to develop new shows that will become your next “All Things Considered,” “Morning Editions,” etc?

Schiller: We used to have a sort of TV-like development process where we spent a lot of time and money working on new shows. Instead, we’re incubating smaller scale things, like “Planet Money,” which isn’t a full show, and isn’t supposed to be a full show. But it’s a podcast and a touring show, etc. We can help people iterate without committing a lot of money.

You mentioned that both commercial publishers and not-for-profits get about 10 percent of their users to subscribe or donate. Is that 10 percent a universal truth?

Schiller: I hope not. I hope we can increase those numbers. “I don’t know what the answer is, but we’re going to try everything and see what sticks.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.