It’s possible new media will steal a page from the VCs and the economics of the Cloud, putting these streaming deals together on multiple networks (Facebook, YouTube, Ustream, iCloud) with talent owning the rights in return for low startup costs. Spotify could fight off the independents by offering contracts directly to the artists, and team with the streaming studios to live cast sessions and… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live today at 9am PT.
Recording has concluded. → 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 — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, Twitter, and, oh what was that oh yes, Google+. In a post-Arrington unpaid blogger world, it seems likely the new alignments suggested by the Facebook announcements will quickly migrate across the social spectrum.
Soon we may see Spotify play the role of ABC to iCloud’s… → 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 neat thing about the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie is that starting about a third of the way through and definitely for the last third you’re rooting for the apes. In the tipsy turvy world of Streaming, once you get over the first $10, everything else feels like it’s free. It’s a marketing mirage but then again the Walrus wasn’t Paul. The perception is everything, even when the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked patents and PR, Spotify, and everything except Google+ for the first time in months. It’s not that G+ has jumped the shark; in fact, it is the shark on which realtime video streaming will emerge when YouTube finally goes live. It’s a race with iCloud to get there, with AirPlay-enabled Spotify stoking the… → Read More
Google+ is not on this list, yet. Mostly because I haven’t got a handle on its core value as a news trigger. If you’re Scoble, the value is obvious as he is now demonstrating by turning it into his blog. But sooner or later the service will have to decide what it wants to be when it grows up — a conversation hub with no tools for rapid synthesis of knowledge, a social graph to challenge Twitter… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — covered the gamut between Google+ and well, Google+. The new social platform continues to delight and confound the early adopters in record numbers. @scobleizer remains optimistic that the search giant will roll out filtering features to cut down on the noise of squids, kittens, and well, Scoble comment… → Read More
Waking up, the news of Amy Winehouse chimed from Twitter and tormented the G+ newbies. Last night on the iPhone, I couldn’t figure out how to keep Spotify playing when I switched apps. But unlike G+ which is blocked on the iPad, I could run the iPhone version of Spotify and lo and behold it worked. I surfed the sad news and the glib commentary as she sang in the background. I’d never listened much… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s… → Read More
It’s way early to handicap anything along the scale of winners and losers, but many things are already obvious. Plus has conquered the media, but what of it? Unlike Apple, which changed the media with the iPad, Google has slapped a fresh coat of paint on the social chat room that was Friendfeed and provided a reasonably safe bet that the work we put in will be accessible for some substantial time… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Michael Arrington, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor — enjoyed @scobleizer’s FaceTime tour of Florida’s abandoned Kennedy Space Center in the aftermath of the last shuttle launch. The countdown clock sat frozen amid a sea of media trailers and the huge Twitter Live Assembly building. No, wait; that was where FriendFeed stood until Google + was launched last… → Read More
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