Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the host of “Keen On” show, the popular Techcrunch chat show.
Andrew is an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew’s new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo”, will be published by St Martin’s Press in 2012.
What is the future of medicine? The distinguished cardiologist and author, Dr Eric Topol, believes that the 20th century medical industry is about to be creatively destroyed by today’s digital economy. We are at the end of the era of doctor-knows-best, Topol told me when we Skyped earlier this month. The “ossified” and “sclerotic” medical establishment, Topol explained, is being replaced by an industry that will radically empower the consumer and patient. And at the heart of this new industry, he explained, is the digitalization of medical data which will enable doctors to know our “operating systems” from the beginning of our lives. → Read More
Ten years ago, I worked with TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare on a real-time video conferencing startup called Santa Cruz Networks. Like all the other real-time video startups back then, Santa Cruz Networks failed because the market wasn’t ready for live online video communications. But ten years is equivalent to several centuries in web history, and today, real-time video communications is not only becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but might also be offering startup entrepreneurs tremendous new business opportunities. → Read More
With over 137 million worldwide registered users, Badoo is one of the hottest social networks on the planet. But, with its reputation as a massive hook-up network, Badoo is also one of the most controversial. So my first question to Badoo president Amit Shafrir, when we met recently in San Francisco, was about sex. Are all those 137 million users using Badoo, I asked Shafrir, simply to hook up with each other? → Read More
As a forty-year veteran of the venture capitalist industry and the Managing Director of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Jeffrey Harris has unusual insight into what makes CEOs like FedEx’s Fred Smith and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz winners. And to pass his insights into this successful entrepreneurial mentality, Harris has just authored a book, Transformative Entrepreneurs: How Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Other Innovators Succeeded. → Read More
I’m not a big fan of online gambling, particularly poker. I think it preys on weak, addictive personalities and all too often can destroy innocent lives. And my feelings are shared by the U.S. government which has made online poker illegal. But not everyone agrees with either me or the U.S. government about banning Internet gambling. Richard “Skip” Bronson, for example, the co-founder and chairman of U.S. Digital Gaming (USDG), a company that provides a suite of products for legal online gambling, is – not surprisingly – a leading advocate of legalizing online poker. Bronson wants to change the law and transform online poker from what he says is a murky offshore business into a highly regulated industry. → Read More
Anand Rajaraman is one of Silicon Valley’s less well-known superstars. A successful serial entrepreneur, the Indian born, Stanford educated Rajaraman co-founded Junglee in 1996 which he later sold to Amazon for $250 million. After running Amazon’s technology strategy and inventing its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace, Rajaraman then co-founded Cambrian Ventures before going on to found the web guide Kosmix which he sold to Walmart for an undisclosed sum last April. → Read More
Earlier this month, Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s CEO, wrote a controversial op-ed in which he raised questions about the impact of Google and Wikipedia on America’s “democratic process”. So when I Skyped with Sherman earlier this week, I leveraged social media’s democratic process to ask the RIAA CEO some direct questions from my Twitter community about piracy, the music industry and American democracy itself. → Read More
So has the Internet been the best or the worst of things for the music industry? Some musicians, like Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery, argue the latter; while some technologists, like BitTorrent’s Bram Cohen think the former. And this all important question – the real impact of the Internet on both musicians and music consumers – is one that I asked Cary Sherman, the Washington DC based CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), when we Skyped yesterday. → Read More
The most profound of all the digital disruptions that have occurred over the last 20 years has been the breach in trust between the creative artist and audience. It’s this disruption that decimated the traditional recorded music industry; and it’s only by curing this distrust that the music industry can rebuild itself. → Read More
Executives at the big music labels tend to get a bad rap. But some of the most innovative people in the music business began their careers at the labels. Take, for example, Ethan Kaplan, the VP of Product Development at LiveNation.com who used to be SVP of Emerging Technologies at Warner Music Group. Not only is Kaplan an irreverent blogger, but he’s also brutally frank about the failed business model of the music industry. → Read More
While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the Berkeley based company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million and is one of the real pioneers of the evolving digital economy. Gracenote has built its business out of maintaining and licensing a massive (currently 100 million tracks) database of information about music. And today, Gracenote – with its 350 employees in Europe, the US and Asia – is expanding into licensing digital data for video and television content. → Read More
12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech, I met again with Lowenstein, a former popular musician himself, to talk about StageIt’s progress and how he is helping reinvent the music industry by enabling a new kind of intimacy between artist and audience. → Read More
So maybe there really is a sensible middle ground in the music business – somewhere between David Lowery’s pessimism and Bram Cohen’s blind faith in our digital future. That future may be the pop music band Pomplamoose. Its members are Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte, two young musician-entrepreneurs who are not only making a living marketing and selling their music online, but who even own a “nice house” with two recording studios. Nataly and Jack, I suspect (and hope), are the viable future of the music industry – one that will neither revolve around Platinum records nor completely free online content. → Read More
Not everyone agrees with BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen that the Internet has been good for the musician. Indeed, some musicians think the exact reverse. Take, for example, David Lowery, the lead singer for the bands Camper Von Beethoven and Cracker – a Platinum artist who now also teaches “rock economics” at the University of Georgia. According to Lowery, who claims that he has “data” to back up his argument, things are actually worse for the musician now than they were in the good/bad old days of big labels and even bigger limousines. → Read More
I’ve been waiting for this one. Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the P2P file sharing service BitTorrent. And he may also be one of the guys most responsible for the decline in the music industry. So I asked Bram, when we sat down together earlier this week at SFMusicTech, whether he did indeed have any responsibility for killing the music business. → Read More
Most of us know the guitarist and singer-songwriter Bob Weir as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. But Weir is also the founder of Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), a state-of-the-art performance studio which offers musicians the opportunity to distribute their work in high-end digital form. → Read More
Founded just seven and a half years ago, Glam Media is one of Silicon Valley’s few media success stories. Beginning in the women’s interest vertical and expanding to entertainment, health and wellness and now food, Glam acquired Ning last September and is rumored to be preparing an IPO for later this year. Glam’s great achievement, it claims, is to pioneer “vertical media” and thus to “transform the way consumers interact with content”. → Read More
The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.
But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. → Read More
Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who end up doing the most damage. I always thought of Larry Downes, the co-author of the mega-selling Unleashing the Killer App, as an unusually gentle and wise soul. But this was before Downes unleashed his all-too-critical powers on Best Buy, transforming himself from a cerebral author into a bomb throwing critic of America’s leading consumer electronics retailer. In Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, a brilliant article he published at Forbes last month, Downes finally told the truth about the terrible customer service at Best Buy. And the article went viral, of course, amassing close to 3 million page views and even forcing Best Buy CEO, Brian Dunn, to issue a response. → Read More
My own views about SOPA and the need to protect online intellectual property are well-known. But even I acknowledge that SOPA was a flawed bill that didn’t represent a viable solution to policing the Internet against intellectual property theft. So is there life after SOPA? How can the technology and content communities carve out a compromise which will simultaneously protect innovation and the rights of the creative community?
In the spirit of compromise, I invited Larry Downes, one of SOPA’s most articulate critics, into our San Francisco studio to talk about what comes next. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
