Jon Orlin

Production Director

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.

Disclosure: I do not own shares in technology stocks, except for AOL, where I have an insignificant number of shares related to my employment at AOL. I previously worked at Yahoo.

April 20th, 2012

James Cameron: The Future Of 3D Will Be Defined By TV

cameron

Blockbuster movie director James Cameron made the top two worldwide grossing films of all time – Titanic and Avatar. This week in Las Vegas he spoke not to the movie industry, but to television broadcasters at the NAB convention about how important TV is to the future of 3D. TechCrunch also got a chance to talk to him about 3D on tablets and tweeting from the bottom of the ocean. → Read More

April 17th, 2012

Survey: MP4 Is Top Format For Web and Mobile Videos

mp4

When you watch a video on the web or your mobile phone, the odds are pretty good you are using the MP4 video format and the H.264 codec. There are a lot of choices when it comes to video formats. But, MP4 is the top pick for both web and mobile viewing, according to a new survey released this morning by Sorenson Media.

69% of video professionals use MP4 regularly for the web, and 58% use it… → Read More

April 16th, 2012

Director James Cameron On The Secrets of Making 3D Profitable [Live Video 10:40am PT]

90168545-titanic-movie

Update: The live event has ended. We will put an archived video below if it becomes available.

James Cameron, director of the just-released 3D version of Titanic, as well as Aliens, Terminator, Avatar and so many other major blockbusters, is spilling some secrets today. He’s speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas about how to make money making 3D movies. → Read More

April 11th, 2012

Taming Email Overload With SaneBox

sanebox

Calling email overload “a crisis in communication”, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington issued a challenge back in 2008: “Someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.” The entrepreneurs at SaneBox read this and other articles by Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet, and set out to build a better inbox. After a month of testing, SaneBox has… → Read More

April 1st, 2012

Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button

hate

In 2010, TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook was going to release a “Like” button for the whole darn Internet. Now, TechCrunch has learned Facebook is considering a “Hate” button as well.

According to Facebook’s S-1 filing, users are now generating 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day. With the Hate button, Facebook expects to at least double that. The S-1 noted “popular Pages on… → Read More

apple stock
March 21st, 2012

AppleStock($AAPL)Up50%SoFarThisYear

Apple is hot. I’m not talking about the temperature of the new iPads, I’m talking about its stock. At around 3pm ET today, Apple traded at a new all-time intraday high $609.65 a share, up more than 50% for the year. The stock finished 2011 at $405 and closed today at $602.50, up nearly $200 a share (+48.77%) year-to-date. One share is now worth more than a new 32GB iPad. → Read More

March 12th, 2012

Live Now From SXSW: TCTV’s Webcast with Highlight, Path and Hipmunk Founders (3pm CT)

From the floor of the Austin Convention Center, TechCrunch TV is live with all the latest news from SXSW. Find out what TechCrunch writers have to say about their favorite apps, events, and surprises. TCTV’s Colleen Taylor leads a roundtable with our TechCrunch writers. There was huge pre-show buzz for the app, Highlight. We’ll talk to the Founder Paul Davison and about whether it lived up to… → Read More

March 12th, 2012

TCTV Will Be Live From Austin 3pm CT (1pm PT) With What’s Hot From SXSW

Austin

Mark your Calendar. Tune in to TechCrunch later today for a special show, live from the Austin Convention Center at SXSW. TCTV’s Colleen Taylor will host a roundtable with TechCrunch writers who have been running around the city non-stop. They will tell you about the best and worst of what they saw and might discuss TechCrunch Real World Austin. We’ll also speak with the Founder of the much… → Read More

March 4th, 2012

A Yelp Review Of Yelp Stock

With Yelp stock beginning its second day of trading tomorrow morning, I wondered what a Yelp review of Yelp stock might it look like. → Read More

February 17th, 2012

Cobook, A Slick Address Book App That Doesn’t Upload Your Data

cobook-01

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. … → Read More

January 12th, 2012

It’s 10pm And You Need A HDMI Cable – No Problem This Week in Vegas

hdmi

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… → Read More

the jetsons
January 1st, 2012

It’s2012AlreadySoWhereAreAllTheJetsonsFlyingCars

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… → Read More

December 22nd, 2011

In A Reversal, Intuit Will Make Quicken 2007 For Mac Work With Lion

quicken2007mac

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… → Read More

December 15th, 2011

Choosing Your Airline Seat Based On Your Social Network

passengers

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… → Read More

December 11th, 2011

Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets

air google

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… → Read More

December 8th, 2011

Not So Lucky Supermarket Customers Get Hacked

index

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… → Read More

December 5th, 2011

PayPal Restores Zivity’s Account After Saying It Was Obscene, But Now It’s Not

Zivity » The home of independent artists, models and rock-stars. GET EXPOSED.

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… → Read More

puzzle1_(1 of 1)_400dpi
December 2nd, 2011

“AllYourShredsAreBelongtoU.S.”Wins$50,000DARPAShredderChallenge

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… → Read More

December 1st, 2011

Solving Email Overload With A Company-Wide Ban

shutterstock_email

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 billboard
November 17th, 2011

Yahoo’sIconicSFBillboardComesDownAfterOutlasting4CEOs

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… → Read More

November 8th, 2011

Online Video Ad Budgets Expected To Rise Sharply In 2012

shutterstock_77427421_resize

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… → Read More

November 4th, 2011

Top Videos From TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing (TCTV)

The sun has set on our first ever TechCrunch Disrupt conference outside U.S. soil. The Beijing event ended this past Tuesday, as OrderWithMe won the Disrupt Cup. With the 12 to 15 hour time difference between the U.S. and China, watching it live wasn’t the easiest option. We produced more than 60 videos. But here’s a look at some of the highlights you might have missed: → Read More

October 31st, 2011

TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing – Watch Day 2 Streaming Live from China

[tc_ustream_iframe id="9601267"] → Read More

October 30th, 2011

Live from Beijing – Watch TechCrunch Disrupt!

First up, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, and then YouTube’s Steve Chen. → Read More

October 19th, 2011

A Restaurant, Dive Shop, And Bakery Share Their Groupon Experience (TCTV)

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… → Read More

October 19th, 2011

TechCrunch TV Launches On Your TV

AOL HD

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… → Read More

October 14th, 2011

Steve Wozniak Is “A Little Afraid” About The Future Of Apple (TCTV)

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… → Read More

October 14th, 2011

Steve Wozniak On How The iPhone 4S Will Change His Life (TCTV)

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… → Read More

October 6th, 2011

Crowds Gather At Apple Stores To Remember “The Inventor Of Our Time” (TCTV)

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

October 4th, 2011

Is It Really True The iPad Makes Flying More Fuel Efficient?

ipad cockpit

Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook made a lot of strong claims about how well Apple products are doing at today’s iPhone event. But one of those claims sounded like quite a stretch.

Cook talked about how the iPad is being used in many different places, such as schools and airplanes. Cook said “in the cockpit, pilots are using it. They are replacing 40 pound flight bags full of paper manuals and… → Read More