Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor.
Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine, where he was a lead reviewer of development and collaborative platform systems including Visual Basic, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office, and Windows NT. Subsequently, Gillmor served as a contributing editor at InformationWeek Labs, before joining Fawcette Technical Publications first as Senior Editor and later as Editor in Chief of Enterprise Development Magazine, and then Editor in Chief and Editorial Director of XML and Java Pro Magazines.
Gillmor joined InfoWorld Magazine as Test Center Director and back-page columnist. He also served as Editor of eWEEK.com’s Messaging & Collaboration Center and OpEd columnist of eWeek’s print publication. As blogging emerged, he wrote the first blogs for Ziff Davis Media, CMP’s CRN, and CNet’s ZDNet, where he remains a contributing editor. A podcasting pioneer, he developed and hosted the seminal Gillmor Gang podcast with industry notables including Jon Udell, Dan Farber, Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Michael Vizard, Doc Searls and others as regulars. Gillmor has also championed development of industry standards, most notably his role as co-creator of the attention.xml specification and co-founder of the Attention Trust, a non-profit organization to protect user data rights.
That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn’t matter. Except in electronic condoms.
Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn’t win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks’ Target knockoff doesn’t come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Gabe Rivera, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — play toe jam football in the shadow of the Facebook IPO. Try as we might, we can’t shake the weight of Facebook’s dominance of Techmeme and maybe the fate of the global economy. Greece, move over. @gaberivera joins near the 30 minute mark.
@scobleizer tries a reverse Statue of Liberty play around the forthcoming Samsung phone and the threat to Apple (nonexistent) but our hearts aren’t in it. I fail in a weak attempt to roll up everything under push notification. Face it: our hopes and dreams are now tied to our jobs as feeders of the Facebook Empire Please Twitter. Save us. → Read More
Gillmor Gang – Gabe Rivera, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gilmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — turned off their minds, relaxed, and floated downstream on the push notification inbox of tomorrow. Borrowing a page from the Tibetan Book of Windows, the Gang debated the impossibility of multitasking, the existence of a new uber operating system, and the overall impact of surrendering to the void.
Revolver marked the exact center of the Beatles arc; everything before was prologue, everything after continues to expand as the media is transformed. A quarter of a million may seem like a lot of dollars for playing one song once on a TV show, just as we await the size of the Facebook IPO. Recorded first and sequenced last, Tomorrow Never Knows is the end of the beginning. → Read More
With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of all people released Gdrive. We knew of course that it was coming, but not how it would actually feel when it got here. I haven’t signed up yet, but already it’s a big deal for me.
I haven’t signed up because the iOS versions are not done, or ready, or whatever imminent means. When they are shipped, I’m there. Gdrive is the kind of disruption that lurks beneath the surface, behind the marketing campaign, irrespective of even Google’s position in the market. It is like Gmail was when it started, a harbinger with real muscle that marks the beginning of something bigger than a single vendor.
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The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — surfed the Social Holodeck for signs of intelligent life and overload. Meanwhile: @scobleizer and his Facebook UnLike engine, @dsearls and the Intention Economy, @kevinmarks on the patents protection racket.
If @jtaschek is right, the Facebook IPO will unleash a startup spending spree the likes of which we’ve never seen. But what I’m waiting for is the app to end all apps, or at least autodelete an old one every time I download a new one. Now that will be an algorithm to apply to the push notification queue.
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Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording has concluded. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — took the bait and played the Are We in a Bubble game. With Apple’s stock price in free fall, the mobile giant reported another blowout What Me Worry quarter that sent the stock right back up. Meanwhile, Google announced, no, shipped Gdrive, and sent shivers down the collective cloud storage spine.
What Gdrive really does is consolidate Google Office under an attractive layer of collaborative unification, borrowed first from Ray Ozzie’s Mesh service and now emulated by a raft of smaller players bubbling up from Startupville. While we’re all twisting slowly in the Apple wind, the real action is taking place in what the chat room somehow called the Teddy Bear Cloud. It’s the new binky. → Read More
Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — drunk on power and app-pacified to the max, a pathetic unanimity in search of an argument, a raised eyebrow less than a real opinion… You get the idea; Keith Teare’s stellar Techcrunch post of last Sunday on Google’s earning call click problem seemed like a great place to continue a comment argument with @kevinmarks.
But lo and behold, it’s not Web or Apps but both. HTML5 may turn out to be the least relevant part of this refactoring of the world around mobile. Hindsight or HipSwitch or Turncoat, the names don’t matter but the services do. Some people (like me) will do anything to avoid searching for an answer, and apps are just what I am looking for: touch and tap services orchestrated via push notification and intelligent predictive caching. Or not. → Read More
Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — have a lot to work with this week: Instagram, a Google+ redesign, and Ann Romney joining Twitter. But if Larry is Larry, who are Moe and Curly? @dbfarber makes a good case for Twitter owning the realtime media; if you make it on Twitter, you can make it anywhere. We don’t know Moe’s business model, but who cares.
That leaves Zuckerberg as Curly, the intellectual whose empire keeps growing no matter what mistakes he seems to make. In fact, those mistakes usually turn out to be ephemeral. Lose trust with overwhelming growth, buy the most phatic startup and its 30 million users. Facebook is betting only a few will bolt, and where are they gonna go anyway? The Three Stooges are beating each other up, but what they’re really doing is keeping Microsoft boxed out of the social party. Nyuk nyuck nyuck. → Read More
Push notification and the fabric it creates are about what comes next. Not what we know, but what we’re about to know. The next step, the one we’re about to take, the moment when the foot is in the air and hasn’t yet figured out exactly where to land. It’s like putting english on a tennis return, or the release of the ball in a pitch, the moment when you commit to whatever the strategy is.
Sometimes it’s about gathering every possible piece of information and then acting with that full authority. Other times it’s about keeping the beginner’s mind, clear of opinion and calculation. What matters is the context — who or what or why we are following. Realtime is not just the up-to-date quality but the metadata that surrounds each object: why do we find this person interesting, what does this information suggest will come next, and so on. Only when we can be reasonably satisfied of the quality of our pipeline can we begin to trust it. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — proved unequal to the task of rendering the week’s non-news into insight. Whether it was @scobleizer and Sergey Brin circling the famous Google Glasses or @dannysullivan grading Larry Page’s book report, nothing was revealed. No monkeys were harmed in the making of this film. They weren’t helped much either
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Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Rob La Gesse, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rode out of Dodge and straight into an ambush. Well, no, but in service of the OverAggregator Lord here are our talking points: Microsoft trembles at the alter of irrelevance, Google doesn’t get TV but may sneak into the tablet market by giving them away, and HTML5 still can’t get a date.
I snuck in the usual mentions of Mad Men and push notification, the first a reference to the return of the mesmerizing prequel to Seinfeld, and the second the technology that ensures that you don’t have to watch the stream all day to stay up with what’s going on. Combining delayed gratification theatre with premature notification will produce the next big hit of the iPad Age. → Read More
Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Rob La Gesse, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
The push notification platform doesn’t replace Office, it replaces Windows. And, more importantly, it replaces the desktop with the orchestration, the interplay, between services, some of which subsume Excel and Outlook with more collaborative surfaces. No more InBox is about to explode emails with Gmail, lots more analytics streams that answer the questions Excel is used to ask with realtime social data which reaches directly into the emotion of the economy. → Read More
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