Vanity Fair Comes to SF to Quiz the New Establishment at New Confab

On the 20th anniversary of Vanity Fair’s ranking of digital and media powers-that-be, the Condé Nast magazine is launching its first “New Establishment Summit” that it is titling “The Age of Innovation.” The event will take place Oct. 8 and 9 in San Francisco, in association with the Aspen Institute. Among the speakers onstage: Apple design guru Jonathan Ive, California attorney general Kamala Harris, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, an unlikely pairing of Michael Bloomberg and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel (or maybe not!), Disney’s Bob Iger, Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso, and more. (Full disclosure: Walt Mossberg and I have been on the list, and Peter Kafka has written some of its profiles; in addition, I do freelance articles for VF, and will also do an interview at the event.)

Andreessen Horowitz Pumps $90 Million Into IT Startup Tanium; Sinofsky Joins Board

Asa Mathat

Andreessen Horowitz said on Sunday that it is taking a $90 million stake in enterprise management startup Tanium, with former Windows unit head Stephen Sinofsky joining the company’s board.

The company allows businesses to manage and secure the devices on their network via a Web browser.

“We love the opportunity to partner with enterprise companies that are either working to radically improve the way a given IT need is met with software — or transforming the IT landscape by re-creating or re-defining the traditional categories with unique software,” Sinofsky said in a blog post.

Tanium does both, Sinofsky said. On Twitter, he said that Tanium allows network administrators to learn about hundreds of thousands of devices in seconds, and to make changes at the same speed.

“In practice, the Tanium team accomplished nothing short of a complete rethinking of how IT pros manage, secure, and maintain the endpoints in their network — every node on the network can now be interrogated, managed, updated, and secured, instantly from a browser,” Sinofsky said in the blog post.

Marc Andreessen touted the the investment in a post on Twitter, saying it is the first VC investment in the company since its 2007 funding.

“Collectively partners at @a16z have maybe 200 years experience in systems management,” Andreessen said in a seven-part Twitter post. “Tanium is a breakthrough like we’ve never seen.”

Re/wind: Amazon Goes Mobile, Legere Sounds Off

In case you missed some of the headlines this past week, here’s the news that powered Re/code and the week in tech:

1. Amazon unveiled its smartphone this week, announcing an exclusive partnership with AT&T and a price tag comparable to to the iPhone’s. While the phone has some neat new features, the big thing about it is how easy the Amazon phone makes it to … buy Amazon products. Re/code’s Walt Mossberg has more on what that could mean for Amazon down the road.
2. BlackBerry surprised just about everyone with news that it turned a profit this past quarter. It also announced a deal with Amazon to use that company’s Appstore on BlackBerry 10 devices. Party like it’s 2011, I guess?
3. Thelma & Louise: Perhaps the classic selfie.
4. Google’s Nest purchased the home-monitoring startup Dropcam for $555 million, making Nest one step closer to turning your home into a giant app. Also, the previously defective smoke detector that Nest pulled from shelves last month is now back on the market, and for $30 cheaper.
5. T-Mobile CEO John Legere told a crowd on Wednesday night that other carriers were “raping” their customers with data charges. He subsequently apologized in a tweet. But T-Mobile isn’t apologizing for its continued pressure on the rest of the industry. In other T-Mobile news on Wednesday, the company announced a free weeklong iPhone test drive, an ambitious new data-free music plan, and partnership with the streaming service Rhapsody.
6. More and more full-length videos from the Code Conference became available in the website’s video section this week; here's the session with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich talking about his company’s wearables gambit, and Nest CEO Tony Fadell outlining his vision for the future of technology in the home.
7. Practice Fusion, a provider of online electronic health records, named its new CFO this week — Robert Park, previously of Chegg — indicating that it plans to go public soon.
8. Google said it plans to use its Project Loon to make Internet available in rural areas via balloons next year. No word yet on what the balloons think.
9. If you can’t buy Snapchat, copy ’em! At least that’s what Facebook’s strategy appears to be with its latest app, Slingshot.
10. The Supreme Court has announced that it plans to consider whether violent threats made on Facebook constitute a criminal act. Comment sections everywhere await the decision with bated breath.

Cloud and Charity: The Full Code Conference Video of Salesforce.com’s Benioff and Workday’s Bhusri

Asa Mathat

As promised, we’re posting the full videos of interviews from the recent Code Conference, which took place three weeks ago in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

A new video of one of the many stellar speakers at the event has been posted every day. (You can see a compilation video of the speakers here.)

Since his is the last full-length interview videos from the conference — you can now see the entire thing on this site — we thought we would end with a bang, with a session in which Salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff told me (loudly!) that Re/code was not very charitable.

It’s true, although we did get up and running only six months ago. Philanthropy among the techies, the tensions over tech expansion in San Francisco and — oh, yes, the enterprise cloud business –were all topics for Benioff and Workday’s Aneel Bhusri.

Here’s the full video of their joint interview:

[Sorry. This video cannot be displayed in this feed. View your video here.]

The iWatch, the Fire Phone and the Big Twitter Shake-Up on This Week’s Video Hit List

Original image; Shutterstock

It was a busy week in tech news, which meant it was also a busy week for the Re/code appearances on CNBC.

Walt Mossberg took to the airwaves to comment on Amazon’s introduction of the Fire phone.

Walt also sounded off on the Aether Cone, an Internet-connected speaker designed to automatically serve up audio of interest, both music and spoken word.

Meanwhile, Kara Swisher was in France for the Cannes Lions advertising shindig.

But even from France, she was also breaking news about Twitter, including the latest in its executive shuffle.

She also appeared on CNBC to talk about the short-messaging service’s ad sales.

Liz Gannes was on NBC’s “Press:Here,” talking about a wide range of tech topics, from Internet switches to location-based technology.

Finally, Ina Fried was on “Street Signs” on Friday to talk about Apple’s coming iWatch and the state of high-tech wrist wear.

And she went on NPR’s “Here & Now” ahead of the Amazon phone launch to talk about what to expect.

Pirate Radio, YouTubers And Video Games

 YouTubers are considered a big boon by some, but also a big threat by others. Game developers in particular sometimes feel that what they’re doing is less journalism/coverage and more like pirate radio, exposing and spoiling their games for profit. Is that true? How will this latest innovation find its place? Read More

Bing Looks Abroad

 Microsoft is working to expand Bing’s international footprint. A job posting, spotted by Neowin, speaks plainly: “Bing is embarking on the most ambitious geographic and product expansion in its history.” Well then. Microsoft hasn’t taken down the listing, so it’s likely not too concerned about having its plans aired publicly. What this signifies is that Microsoft… Read More

A16z Invests $90 Million In Tanium, An Enterprise Systems Management Startup

 Marc Andreessen just announced Andreessen Horowitz’s latest investment on Twitter. The firm is investing $90 million in Tanium, an enterprise security and system management startup which lets IT control an entire network using natural language in a search engine-like interface. Read More

Someone Made A TechCrunch Parody Site And It’s Hilarious

 Something odd popped up in my Facebook Newsfeed over the weekend: Notice the link in this post says “Trapcrunch.com.” Someone went and launched an Onion-like imitation of our site. TrapCrunch.com, a clear parody to TechCrunch, claims in its WhoIs tagline to be, “Breaking technology news from verified sources.” The site was registered just 10 days ago by someone… Read More

Control VR Opens The Door To Virtual Offices

 Control VR is a startup which has created a wearable system that captures precise motion data for virtual reality applications. On its Kickstarter page the most intriguing use shown for its gloves and armbands is using its exact finger-digit tracking to simulate a keyboard in virtual reality, which could open the door to a number of productive VR applications beyond gaming and teleconferencing. Read More