Herb Allen's Sun Valley media summit a-Twitter about tech
— -- Media company executives once were the power players at investment bank Allen & Co.'s annual media summit in the Idaho mountains.
Even if they didn't hatch any big deals or bright ideas, they had a firm grip on the flow of news, entertainment and just about everything else people read, watched or heard.
Things have changed radically since that first summer summit in 1983. The conference, which returns to Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday, now revolves around the technology trailblazers who have turned computers and mobile phones into multimedia hubs that are competing with newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, music labels and movie studios.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams will likely be in high demand as everyone tries to figure out whether the online messaging service is a fad or a revolutionary breakthrough in communications.
Twitter still hasn't come up with a way to make money. That is likely to stir speculation that Williams may be fishing for business partners or even an acquirer as he holds court in Sun Valley.
Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone have consistently said they aren't interested in selling their company.
"Ev is going to be the belle of the ball," predicts Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, a developer of games widely played at online hangouts such as Facebook. Pincus is going to the Allen conference for the first time.
With roots going to the 1920s, Allen & Co. is run by Herb Allen, the grandson of one of the firm's founders. Allen & Co. began sharpening its focus on technology in 2001 and has tried to enmesh more media leaders in the Web by regularly inviting Internet innovators such as browser pioneer Marc Andreessen, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. All are expected back.
Meanwhile, long-established media companies are desperately trying to plumb new revenue sources as ad sales shrivel.
The 18-month-old U.S. recession has stung newspapers and broadcasters as advertisers have clamped down on their marketing budgets. But even before the economy collapsed, the Internet was luring consumers and advertisers from traditional media.
The trend has caused the media business to lag behind the overall economy, with revenue growing slower in good times and falling further during the downturn. U.S. ad revenue for the newspaper industry, for example, fell $7.5 billion, or nearly 17%, last year.
Many of the Internet's best-known companies have problems of their own to hash out in Sun Valley.
•Yahoo, on its third CEO since June 2007, is trying to snap a three-year earnings slump.
•Microsoft, despite investing billions, still can't undercut Google's dominance of the lucrative Internet search market.
•Google's biggest potential problems appear to be Twitter, whose search engine offers a real-time look at the Web, and Facebook, whose data on its 200 million users could threaten Google's status as the Internet's most effective marketing vehicle.