Archive for June, 2006

Thomas Hawk podcast

Published
by
tom
on June 28, 2006
in Podcasting
. 3 Comments


Episode 39 of the PodLeaders show - 36 mins 14 secs

My guest on the show this week is Thomas Hawk. Thomas is an investment advisor in a non technology related field but it is not for that that he is known. Tom is far better known as a digital media and technology enthusiast - specifically, Tom is extremely well known for the photographs he uploads to Flickr. Tom posts several photos a day, all of professional quality. Last time I looked he had 5,599 photos uploaded. I thought I was doing well with my 200 photos! How he does that and keeps down a day-job is beyond me!

Now Tom has announced that he is going to work for zooomr.

Tom and I had a fascinating discussion on photography, photo sharing sites and the new photo sharing site he is joining, zooomr.

Here are all the questions I asked Tom along with their times during the interview:

Welcome to the show.
Tom, can you give us a bit of background on who you are and what got you into the whole photography gig? - 0:40
What do you see as the main difference between film cameras and digital cameras? - 1:59
What is your hardware setup (camera, computer, etc.)? What is your rig? - 3:33
Apart from the filesize, do you see a big difference between shooting in RAW and JPEG? - 5:37
Typically, you bring the photographs into PhotoShop, what do you do with them in PhotoShop? - 6:43
You save every picture you take? - 7:23
You are spending quite a bit of money on your kit. Where is all that being financed from? - 7:55
How long a day does all this take? - 7:55
I have seen lots of your San Francisco shots but I have never seen any of your family, do you do family shots? - 10:48
What do your family and what do your co-workers make of your photography habit? - 11:55
What about when you are out and about taking photographs, do you get strange looks from people? - 12:37
You have been using Flickr for how long now? - 13:44
Why? Why do you use Flickr? Why do you put photos up there? What do you get out of it? - 14:13
Recently you have let it be known that you have joined another photo sharing site, zooomr, how did that come about? - 15:11
What is your role in Zooomr going to be? - 19:47
So is Zooomr now a two man band? - 20:18
If you are as successful as you hope to be is the architecture in place to manage the traffic flow that will hit your servers? - 20:48
I was listening to a TalkCrunch podcast recently with the developers of Flock. The latest version of Flock has a drag and drop into either Flickr or PhotoBucket. Are their plans to do something similar with Zooomr? - 21:39
Is it straightforward to post photos to your blog from Zooomr? - 22:35
Why should I use Zooomr instead of Flickr? - 23:03
If I have images in Flickr, is there any easy way for me to move my images from Flickr? - 24:16
You mentioned you are a member of six differennt photo sharing sites, can you name them? - 26:29

Audience questions
Keith Gaughan:
will Zoomr be implementing the Flickr API or some functional equivalent equivalent, and if not, why? - 27:58

Walter
Do zooomr need a photo-editing plugin ?

Do you do photo shoots from places outside of San Francisco? - 31:40
What can we expect in Zooomr 2.0 that is not in Zooomr today? - 32:46
You are using MyOpenID as a means of logging into Zooomr, why did you go down that route? - 34:08
And finally, you mentioned your funding earlier - how are you set for money going forward? - 34:54

Download the entire interview here
(16.59mb mp3)

DL Byron podcast

Published
by
tom
on June 22, 2006
in Podcasting
. 0 Comments


Episode 39 of the PodLeaders show - 32 mins 41 secs

My guest on the show this week is D.L. Byron. Byron is an inventor, author, the Principal of Textura Design, now he is evangelising Standards-based design.

An entrepreneur and an inventor, he also consults with clients, co-founded the Blog Business Summit, and publishes a network of successful blogs, including Boeing’s (one of the first business blogs).

Byron and I had a fascinating discussion on topics as diverse as Boeing, book writing, and business blogging strategies.

Here are all the questions I asked Byron along with their times during the interview:

Welcome to the show.

Byron you are an author, blogger, inventor and all the other things I called out in the intro. Which is a) the most lucrative and b) the most fun? - 01:03

With all these things going on, what is a typical day for you? I mean, how do you organise your time between the authoring of blogs, the book, the Clip’n'Seal stuff you do? How does it break down? - 01:48

And you do consulting on business blogging for your clients? - 03:26

The Boeing blog is seen as one of the first corporate blogs, how did that come about? - 04:13

You are also involved with Clip ‘n Seal - was that your idea? - 06:55

You are also involved with the web standards project - can you tell us how that came about? - 11:15

Do you evangelise any particular blog platform? - 12:59

You have recently written a book called Publish and Prosper. It is a blogging for business book. Can you tell us a little about that? - 13:33

And how should a company respond to a pile-on? - 17:15

How does your book differ from Naked Conversations? - 19:50

You co-founded the Blog Business Summit, was that the first business blogging conference? - 21:40

And will that be an annual conference? - 22:23

Is the book available electronically (pdf, mp3, etc)? - 22:35

There’s a trend right now of people bowing out of large companies and joining startups. Are there too many startups? Are we heading onto a bubble? - 24:03

Are you advising your clients to get into podcasts and video casts? - 29:16

And finally, what does DL stand for? - 31:17

Download the entire interview here
(14.9mb mp3).

UPDATED: Updated to correct the Flash player pointing to the Jeff Clavier podcast. It is now pointing at the DL Byron podcast (thanks Eoghan).

Any questions for Thomas Hawk?

Published
by
tom
on June 21, 2006
in Podcasting
. 0 Comments

Thomas Hawk is an investment advisor in a non technology related field but it is not for that that he is known. Tom is far better known as a digital media and technology enthusiast - specifically, Tom is extremely well known for the photographs he uploads to Flickr. Tom posts several photos a day, all of professional quality. Last time I looked he had 5,599 photos uploaded. I thought I was doing well with my 200 photos! How he does that and keeps down a day-job is beyond me!

Now Tom has announced that he is going to work for zooomr. Zooomr? Zooomr is the new competitor to Flickr. It is pretty feature bare at the minute but Tom promises more features to come:

Zooomr is nowhere near where it needs to be today. Much of the best functionality is coming in version 2.0 due out early next month.

Tom also says that this does not end his relationship with Flickr - he will still be posting photos there.

I’m interviewing Tom this Friday evening. We will be talking about the future of digital photography, digital media in general and anything else that may arise in the questions! If you have anything you’d like me to raise with Tom, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll ask him.

Jeff Clavier Podcast

Published
by
tom
on June 14, 2006
in Podcasting
. 0 Comments


Episode 38 of the PodLeaders show - 40 mins 06 secs

My guest on the show this week is Jeff Clavier. Jeff is the founder and managing partner of SoftTech Venture Consulting. Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff was the President of RVC Capital, the corporate venture arm of Reuters which invested USD560 million in 82 companies since 1994, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com and Infoseek.

Jeff and I had a wide-ranging discussion on topics as diverse as angel vs. VC investors, to the cultural differences between living and working in the valley vs. living and working in Europe.

Jeff was a great interviewee and my only regret is that I had to cut the interview when I did, so I could go and collect my son from the creche!

Here are all the questions I asked Jeff along with their times during the interview:

Jeff, welcome to the show. Can you give us some background on yourself first? - 0:56

Jeff, I know nothing whatsoever about the world of investing. What is it that an angel investor does that a VC doesn’t do or do they differ? - 3:15

So if you are investing that much earlier in a company are the risks that much greater? - 5:19

Typically what kind of percentage of companies give you a positive return on your investment? - 6:12

Does that apply to angels as well or is that a VC specific breakdown? - 7:10

With all the Web 2.0, or after the events of the last few weeks, maybe I should say, with all the social software that is emerging and all the buyouts and acquisitions, do you think we are heading into another bubble? - 8:06

Again Jeff, for someone who is a complete novice in this area, say I have come up with a fantastic idea and I have a great management team, what do I do next? - 10:41

What is the process then? You write a cheque, you take a lump of equity. What happens next? - 13:27

Audience questions

Adam

Can I have some money to start a data centre in Cork City please? We’re a bit short of competition down here and I have some servers I want to co-lo, plus a few more I can pull in with the right network and power setup. Just EUR20k should get me started, but I’ll happily budget for more if it’s going. Be happy to host reuters.ie, wink wink, what with it being Temporarily Unavailable an’ all atm.

(Hey, you asked. Actually, now I come to think about it, I seem to remember reading somewhere recently that if you had the opportunity to ask a VC something, you should ask for advice, because the advice will often lead to an investment; whereas if you ask for money, what you’ll invariably get is advice. So there you go, there’s a real question, ask him if he finds that is the case.) - 16:23

Salim Ismail

1 - How crowded is the consumer mobile photo space, and what companies does he think will win in that space (and why)? - 19:35

2 - What three areas does he think have promise in Web 2.0? - 22:07

3 - The VC model seems to be in trouble given the low G2M cost of building companies today. Does he agree and what happens to traditional VCs if that happens? SoftTech seems to be adapting to fit this trend, but is it deliberate or accidental? - 24:41

4 - Can he fill in the following blank… “english pig-dogs… I ____ in your general direction” - 28:52

Spirituality

Ask him, how does he manage to gather all the confidence for investing so much money in insecure as well as secure areas? - 29:52

Adam

Cartoon - I’m not a VC, I just happen to like eating babies! - 32:39

My Questions again

What would your take be on O’Reilly’s trademarking of the term Web 2.0? - 33:05

And finally, you are a European working in Silicon Valley. What are the most striking cultural differences you see between Europe and the Valley? - 38:17

Download the entire interview here
(18.4mb mp3).

Any questions for DL Byron?

Published
by
tom
on June 13, 2006
in Podcasting and Questions
. 0 Comments

D.L. Byron is an inventor, author, the Principal of Textura Design, now he is evangelizing Standards-based design.

An entrepreneur and an inventor, he also consults with clients, co-founded the Blog Business Summit, and publishes a network of successful blogs, including Boeing’s (one of the first business blogs).

I’m interviewing D.L. over Skype this week (day and time tbd). If you have questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll ask him.