PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

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)