Thursday, May 22, 2008

Squawk Box May 22

by alec on May 22, 2008

We started out with a great set of topics for the Squawk Box this morning and then… disaster struck. The recording stopped. Currently we at iotum are working with our hardware partner ThinkEngine to find a resolution to this problem, but occasionally it strikes. Anyway, the result? Although we had a great conversation about four topics, you get to listen to the first two only.

Enjoy the call. We discussed the use of Twitter as a communications bus on the internet, and also Microsoft’s decision to adopt ODF, PDF, and the XML paper document formats.

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#Mesh08: Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram

by alec on May 22, 2008

One of the best sessions at Mesh ’08, Mathew Ingram sat down and interviewed Ethan Kaplan, Time Warner’s VP of Technology. Ingram began with a softball question on whether it was a good time to be an artist, which Kaplan answered with assertion that there wasn’t a better time to be an artist — that artists were no longer defined by their medium, but rather were practictioners in many media.

I jumped up with Nokia N95, and captured 25 minutes or so of the talk. Enjoy!

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#mesh08: Private vs. Public

May 22, 2008

I sat through a late day session at Mesh ’08 yesterday titled Private vs. Public. Chaired by Rachel Sklar, it featured Nancy Baym, Mark Kingwell, and Ken Anderson. The promise? Are society’s notions about privacy changing? Does anyone even care about privacy any more? Once you provide your information, does it belong to you or [...]

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mDialog: I'll pass.

May 22, 2008

I’ve been giving the mDialog application a whirl here at Mesh 08. The promise of mDialog is that you will be able to easily share video, via the mDialog site, with your friends on iPod and via QuickTime. So I uploaded the video of Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram to the site to check it [...]

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Squawk Box May 21

May 22, 2008

On the call, we talked about Microsoft’s new “pay the user” search model. Consensus? A desparate bid. None of us felt that we would change our behaviour as a result of micro-payments.

And what about the rash of lawsuits being launched in the US by consumers against wireless providers? Finally fed up with byzantine contracts, billing plans, and high handed behaviour by the carriers, consumers are fighting back. No surprise to any of us. We’ve all experienced a carrier “sting” after tripping some unknown carve-out in the terms of service.

And finally we talked about Warner Records VP Technology Ethan Kaplan’s comments at Mesh. Unfortunately, a glitch in the conference recording meant that I lost most of the tail end of that conversation.

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