The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — gears up for a rough and tumble Social Shakedown. Facebook, Path (?), Gmail filters, News.me, Media Redefined — we’re swimming in signal without a paddle. But some of us (@scobleizer) are happy to see the big get personal and the little get better.
Whether you live to serve the social beast… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took advantage of the early rays of the new rising sun to record. It must have been fun to watch the caffeine kick in, but the show was half over before I arrived. I’d been up late mourning the death of Flash, which finally received an auto-update from reality it couldn’t refuse.
Next for a wake-up call is… → Read More
Apple has done the one thing it must do to stand up to Google and the loss of Jobs: go to the Cloud. Take the Beta designation — all Google products were beta until Google Apps went after enterprise sales. With Google+ now reworking the front end of all of the products, it seems beta is back in business. For Apple, it means something different: “We’re looking for your help in creating the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — returned to the Social Wars with renewed vigor courtesy of two weeks of material. These issues included the Klout algorithm crisis, more fun with iOS 5 push notifications, the incredible shrinking Google+ numbers, and @scobleizer’s fabulous Verb Wall aka Spotify Motel where data goes into Facebook and never comes… → Read More
Already we’re seeing microbridges being set up, like the one that puts Twitter into your Contacts list as an SMS address so you can ask Siri to Tweet out a message. As these hacks accelerate, it will be incumbent upon Apple to expand API access to the routing layer so that third parties and especially users themselves can construct these macros. The more they’re used, the more the business… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rebounded from a seven and a half minute gap to explore the mysteries of the Siri platform. As machines give up being trained by us and reciprocate by rewarding us for compliant behavior, our gestures are being finetuned to a social pitch.
While no one was looking, Apple has provided a fresh and… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Gabe Rivera, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — marked a watershed moment in the history of realtime. When @gaberivera posted a summary Tweet rolling up the WSJ-induced VC semi-panic, he bookmarked a discussion that started and largely finished not in the blogosphere but on Twitter.
By the time the swarm slowed down, it was decorated by numerous… → Read More
Steve Jobs didn’t invent Twitter. In a week of relentless tributes, somehow that gives me some relief. Not that I buy the anti-Steve story, that we are imprisoned as artists in the closed architecture of the Apple walled garden. How soul-crushing it is to enjoy things for their beingness. Bah. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — take the first tentative steps in the post-Jobs era. As a showman, technolgist, and business leader, he was unparalleled. But as a teacher, he gave us something even more valuable than ideas, products, and opportunity. Fired, he rebuilt. Dying, he lived even larger. Gone, he connected… → Read More
Driving on the left side stretches the muscles, especially including the one in your head. When Larry Page named Google as Google’s biggest problem, he was talking as a leader not just of the search giant but of the whole industry. Anticipating the first Apple event since Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO, it feels good to see others step up to the task.
It’s not that any one of these leaders… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — lauded Amazon’s entry into the mobile media universe with the Fire. We were unanimous in our praise for the impact the device will have on the tablet scene, with a price within reach of a whole new audience that has found the iPad resistable and Android tablets even less or more, whichever is… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rallied from big media’s confusion over how to grapple with reality. For @dannysullivan, the notion that Apple dominates the social moment (@stevegillmor says this) flies in the face of reality, or at least last years’s model.
For @scobleizer, Google+ is becoming the home of conversation, while… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang -— Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — calmed down after a week of Dreamforce, the annual salesforce.com user conference. As the editorial independence of TechCrunch is questioned, let us be clear that Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBSNewsOnline, Robert Scoble is Chief Scobleizer Officer of Rackspace, and the rest of us are… → Read More
One of Steve Jobs’ most devastating talents is in knowing when he is right. By he I mean he and his team of talented designers, engineers, supply chain wranglers, and technologists. Standing pat when the alternative is worse is a difficult move to make, but one Apple under Jobs has made a trademark.
Take the iPhone 4 and its famous dropped calls crisis. Jobs responded by delivering a software… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — explored the legacy and impact of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. @dsearls called him the Beethoven of Business, and we spent the hour and 15 minutes matching that to what I called Jobs’ ability to listen to the future. In recent years, Jobs has turned his focus on perfecting the microcomputing experience… → Read More
Jobs is not a child of the ’60s, but he has inherited the family business. Having used the legacy to build an adult toy based on the music of his youth, he harvested the audience and connected them via the phone, broke the carrier’s hammerlock, and changed the firmware from CD to DVD to iPad and WiFi. Just as Dylan broke the song barrier, Jobs created the new record, razor and blades, a… → Read More
Apparently we are now in the endgame, the victims of information overload ready for the triumph of socially curated automation flows. You’d think people might be wary of placing big bets on impossible goals (what were they thinking at HP?) but that’s not what keeps happening. In retrospect, it seems stunningly obvious: TouchPad? Why Pad? Why Touch? Why not make it HunchPad as in HP, as in I’ve got… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Seth Goldstein, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — sat in awe of Apple’s massive hammerlock on the tablet market. What the New York Times called 97% of the purchased category became crystal clear as HP folded its cards and went home to an uncertain future. @seth, founder of the viral music startup turntable.fm, seemed as thrilled with Spotify as he… → Read More
Let’s reverse engineer this new Twitter release to get at the heart of the problem. Before the change, there were two ways to navigate the stream. A last in, first out stream of those you follow and their retweets of those you might not. And second, the @mention stream of posts containing a reference to your @username. The @mention stream is by definition high value, but it relies on your personal… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — waxed and waned about the latest in social media buildout. Most notable was Twitter’s new Activities and @mention views, which rolled up not only your @mentions but follow and favoriting signals in a realtime notification stream. Activity view did the same thing for those you follow, with an aggregate stream of… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — were rendered iCloudy in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ WWDC announcements. Even stalwart Google fanboys Taschek and Marks found it difficult to withstand the halo surrounding Apple’s aggressive move to the Cloud and iOS as the dominant platform moving forward. Betaworks’ John Borthwick applauded the… → Read More
One evening last week we sat at the bar downstairs at 1 Market after a long workday. John Taschek and several others were extolling the virtues, no, the imperatives of motorcycle ownership. You know, the usual keep the motor running head on down the highway testosterone. The kind of stuff Gary Busey still can’t get out of his head no matter how much he resists wearing a helmet. Gary, you’re… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — shuddered with expectant glee at Apple’s presumed iCloud announcement at next week’s WWDC event. It’s clear from all the leaks, most interestingly from Apple itself, that the record companies are finally healthy enough to move into the new streaming era. With Lady Gaga selling five times as many records as the… → Read More
At 35 thousand feet you can see the future of push notification more clearly. The in-flight WiFi won’t sustain FaceTime or Skype video, but it handles IM just fine. GTalk is buried in the Gmail menus; it has no iPhone or iPad version. Neither Skype nor Facebook Chat have iPad versions, but they do support push notifications through iPhone. Facebook Chat sends push notifications but goes offline… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new kind of Gillmor Gang. To the undisclosed, it looks the same: silly chat, mangled technology disruptions, and dead air. To the more clueful, who recognize we’re entering a new age of social media, the intersection of social monitoring and proactive brand creation tools spells big trouble for… → Read More
The news from NBC/Universal/Comcast is that the cable giant has finally made deals with both ABC and Fox to carry selected shows on their on-demand service. This is big news for the iPad set, because all four major broadcast networks are now available in a single service, on the iPad, without Flash.
Across town we hear talk of hardware acceleration linking up with Android to make Flash finally… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things… → Read More
As Mark Twain, or Yogi Berra, famously said, reports of Twitter’s or Foursquare’s death are exaggerated. There’s way too much left from picking over RSS’s carcass. No, seriously, I really mean that. There’s way too much value lurking in Jack Dorsey’s original pivot from a bike messenger dispatch service to be mined, and who better than Dorsey to lead the charge as the iPad drives the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — plus an active set of realtime commenters on Building 43′s realtime Friendfeed chat, added up to an interesting tour of the emerging AirPlay platform. The Apple TV-delivered streaming service hooks content from iTunes and iOS devices up to the big HDTV screen. According to @Scobleizer AirPlay support is growing… → Read More
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