With all the hoopla surrounding Mark Cuban's sideline antics as owner of the Dallas Mavericks and his -- blink and you'll miss it -- appearance as The Benefactor, an ABC television show that was a poor man's The Apprentice, it's easy to forget that he founded and led a startup that was sold to Yahoo! Inc. for almost $6 billion. Sure, that was during a time when it was "easy" to pawn off a property to an Internet portal. But, few did it for $6 billion...and even fewer were smart enough to sell their stock payout as soon as legally possible.

But, as it came through loud and clear at the AlwaysOn conference, where Cuban spoke today, his time doesn't go completely to thinking how to get the ball more into the hands of superstar forward Dirk Nowitzki or how to get the ball out of the hands of "heartless" center Erick Dampier. Cuban spends a lot of his time thinking about media and the Internet.

So what's he into? On the content side, he's a major investor in HDNET, a high-definition channel that produces television shows and movies. "The Smartest Guys in the Room" was one of his movies. On the technology side, he's talking up a blog search engine http://blogs.icerocket.com/ that will take on Technorati Inc. To help run his companies, he said he's learned the most about marketing from Bill Gates, Michael Dell Denis Rodman and Paris Hilton.

And looking ahead, he told panel moderator Roger McNamee, formerly of Silver Lake Partners and currently at Elevation Partners, that he's excited about the consolidation of mobile devices. It was a poignant point in light of McNamee's utility belt that consisted of four separate mobile devices. — Joshua Jaffe

alwayson2005

Go to Technorati's amalgamation of blog posts about The AO2005 Innovation Summit
Read Bag and Baggage's account of Cuban's session
Go to the AlwaysOn webcast

Video of Joshua Jaffe's interviews from the conference (Mouse over thumbnail images or double click to watch):