Jon Orlin is the Executive Producer and Production Director for TechCrunchTV at TechCrunch.
Jon founded the video production studios at Yahoo! and also co-founded the live daily streaming webcast, Yahoo! FinanceVision. Before that, he was an Executive Producer at CNN for many years, overseeing daily news programs. His work at CNN won a Peabody and Emmy Awards.
Jon also co-founded ProductClips, a company that produced high-tech videos in Silicon Valley. He has also produced many videos for small businesses and non-profits.
The mundane Address Book was big news this week due to the privacy fiasco, but here’s a post about an impressive address book app with a different approach to privacy. Cobook is a Mac contact management app that’s simple, powerful and actually fun to use. The software, made by a boot-strapped startup, is now in a free beta test, with 60,000 downloads since it launched at the end of January.
Cobook is what the Mac OSX Address Book should be. It sits in the menu bar or can be undocked and instantly synchronizes with Apple’s Address Book. Any data entered into Cobook gets synced to your other computers and devices. Because it’s a native app, adding contacts, assigning tags, and editing contact info is very quick. Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contact info can also be pulled in, and if you hover over it, a pop-up window displays your contacts’ Facebook info, Tweets, or LinkedIn profile. → Read More
TechCrunch TV is using a LiveU mobile pack provided by our partner Ustream for our live streaming coverage from CES. Our camera connects to the pack via a HDMI connector cable. But at the end of our evening Showstoppers coverage, the HDMI plug snapped and broke. At 10pm in Las Vegas, how do you find a replacement HDMI plug? Actually, of all the places in the world to have this happen, we were in the right place. → Read More
As we enter 2012, shouldn’t we all be traveling around in flying cars by now? That was the prediction in the Jetsons cartoon tv show. The futuristic series, first produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1962, was set in 2062, exactly 50 years from today. 2012 is the halfway point, so we’ve still got some time before we are all driving around in flying cars. But, many other technology advances from the Jetsons are already with us. → Read More
Intuit has just released some good news for ”Quicken for Mac” users. The accounting software company says they will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring 2012. Yes, irony alert. Back in July, I wrote about the dilemma facing those users, because Apple Lion OS was dropping support for Rosetta. Without Rosetta, Quicken 2007 wouldn’t run on the Mac with Lion. And I wrote each of the three options Intuit proposed (Quicken Essentials for Mac, Mint.com, Quicken for Windows) had their own flaws.
Aaron Forth, Intuit’s General Manager of its Personal Finance Group which includes Quicken and Mint.com, wrote a note to existing customers saying “I am committed to creating products to help you reach your financial goals. I recognize, however, that we have not always delivered on this promise to Quicken Mac customers.” → Read More
You have a long flight coming up. You don’t want to get stuck sitting next to (fill in the blank here). What if you could use your social networks to select your seatmate, based on your friends or common interests? Would that make for a better flying experience?
Such a service is going to be launched next year. The developer is not some bootstrapped startup. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, founded in 1919 and now part of Air France KLM, confirms to TechCrunch the feature will launch next year. → Read More
A surprising piece of news was buried in an article this week. Friday, The Mercury News reported the three top executives at Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called Hangar One, sits a few miles from the Googleplex and it’s well known the Google executives have special permission from NASA to park their jets at Moffett. → Read More
Customers who used the self-checkout lanes at Lucky Supermarkets have been hacked. The grocer, which operates stores in California, says some of their credit card machines have been altered with sniffers to capture credit and debit card numbers. Lucky, owned by parent company Save Mart, is telling customers who used those machines to close their bank and credit card accounts. At least 80 at-risk accounts have been identified and the supermarket chain has gotten calls from more than 500 calls from customers who fear they are victims of fraud. → Read More
PayPal restored sexy social network Zivity’s account tonight after a weeklong battle over whether the website violates its policy. Zivity bills itself as “Hotness. In Person” where “76,102 people just like you rub elbows with models, photographers, and video artists.” But early Thanksgiving morning, PayPal decided it didn’t want to rub elbows with Zivity anymore after four years of doing business together. → Read More
A San Francisco-based team has just won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. DARPA, the government agency whose work led to the creation of the Internet, challenged the public to reconstruct five shredded documents. The winning team, called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” completed the task in 33 days, spending nearly 600 man-hours building algorithms and piecing together more than 10,000 shreds.
9,000 teams registered to compete. The winning teams gets a $50,000 prize paid for by the U.S. Treasury. → Read More
The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants his “zero email” policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the Daily Mail only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that “email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.” → Read More
Yahoo’s famous, long-standing billboard on the San Francisco skyline is coming down. In two weeks, the space will be available for some other company, according to a report in the San Francisco Egotist. The billboard outlasted 4 Yahoo CEO’s. It was put up under Tim Koogle in 1999, and survived through Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, and now Interim CEO Tim Morse.
The retro billboard was put up in a dot-com era before Facebook and Twitter. There’s some speculation now on whether a new dot-com might take over the space. → Read More
Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.
Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending. While some have feared online video might start replacing TV ad spending, the report claims television ad budgets, especially for cable, are safe for now. A majority of advertisers say online video ads are a direct compliment to TV, not a replacement for TV ads. → Read More
[tc_ustream_iframe id="9601267"] → Read More
First up, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, and then YouTube’s Steve Chen. → Read More
With Groupon reportedly set to begin its IPO road show early next week, it’s a good time to revisit the deal site. Is Groupon a great, lucrative deal for its merchants, a swindle or something even worse?
Rather than talk to analysts or observers, we decided to go directly to three Groupon merchants to find out if selling Groupons is a good deal. We picked 3 business in the San Francisco Bay Area that ran Groupons. A restaurant, a dive shop, and a bakery. We asked each of them to tell us how it went and whether or not they would sign-up again. → Read More
TechCrunch TV is now really TechCrunch TV. When TCTV launched last year, the focus was on viewing our videos on the computer. Not on TV. Ok, we called it “TechCrunch TV” because it sounded a lot better than “TechCrunch Video”. But today, we are launching on the AOL HD platform and you can find us on your connected TV set.
Our videos are live on Roku, Boxee, Divx and Yahoo Connected TV platforms. Together, these platforms reach over 12 million devices. And that number is growing. Don’t be surprised if more platforms get added as well. (AOL, the owner of TechCrunch, didn’t want me to say anything about that. Oh well.) → Read More
As he was waiting first in line to buy the new iPhone 4S, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he is “a little afraid about the future of Apple” even though “it could go positive.” Some of his concerns are based on Apple’s iPhone 4S product demo. He says the company talked about its dual-core processor, but “Steve (Jobs) doesn’t want us to think about dual-core processors, all we need to know is how do we get our answer, how do we connect to the internet.”
In this video, shot with an iPhone, Woz also shared his reaction to the recent death of Steve Jobs and the last phone call they had together. Woz also talked about the Apple’s planned spaceship campus and its connection to Apple history.
Steve Wozniak likes to be the first person in line to buy the latest Apple products. This evening, the Apple co-founder and designer of the Apple I and II, was #1 on line outside the Apple store in Los Gatos, California to get the iPhone 4S. He tweeted about it and he’ll be staying up all night. TechCrunch TV caught up with Woz and asked him why he does it. He explains what feature the new phone has that will change his life. Woz also tells us why “search engines should be replaced by answer engines.”
We’ll post another video soon on his thoughts about Steve Jobs and some concerns he has about the future of Apple. This exclusive interview was shot, fittingly, on an iPhone 4, so excuse the shaky camera. → Read More
As the news of Steve Job’s death spread last night, fans held spontaneous vigils at Apple stores around the globe. They came to pay tribute to a man they never met but who profoundly touched and changed their lives. We asked people outside the Apple store in downtown San Francisco to talk about the impact Steve Jobs had on their lives. → Read More
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