As the Chief Strategy Officer at Time Warner Cable, Peter Stern is responsible for planning the long term future of America’s second largest cable company. Much of his job involves rebuilding both the appearance and reality of the cable industry in a 21st century world of ubiquitous online video and revolutionary consumption devices like the iPad.
Stern is at his most provocative in his… → 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
Peter Stern is not only the Chief Strategy Officer at Time Warner Cable, but he’s also one of the smartest analysts of today’s complex media landscape. So it was a real honor to interview Stern last week in our New York City studio about why cable has a future, why the wired network is critical for wireless to succeed and why he believes that cable at, he says, an average price of 30 cents per… → Read More
August Capital was doing very late stage deals when most VCs refused to. And its early 2000 era buyout of Seagate was one of the better returns in the firm’s history. So why is it mostly sitting out this round of late-stage mega-deal mania?
In the final segment of our Ask a VC on the road with David Hornik, he explains why the answer to missing out on Facebook early isn’t dumping money in at a… → Read More
Let’s be honest: One of the reasons David Hornik actually agreed to be on camera at All Things D is that he didn’t have a startup about to file to go public any second. So we talked about some of his more high profile investments that haven’t always lived up to the hype.
Hornik explains why reports of Blippy’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and why he says the investment still wasn’t a… → Read More
We haven’t done Ask a VC for a while thanks to my hectic travel schedule, so I pulled David Hornik out of the hallway at D to catch up on his thoughts on his portfolio and the industry.
But first, we chat about the highlights from the All Things Digital conference. Or we started with that and then talked about how the motivation for starting companies is changing in Silicon Valley, given the… → 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
After two years in stealth, Adam Bosworth is finally ready to start talking about his health startup Keas. Keas is not a Mint for health, although it began that way. Bosworth, who previously launched Google Health at Google and before that was known as the father of XML at Microsoft, founded Keas two years ago with $10 million from Ignition Partners and Atlas Venture. He thought he would build… → Read More
We’re continuing to highlight some of our favorite moments from the many hours of backstage content live-streamed during Disrupt last week. One of my favorite sit-downs was with Bing Gordon, general partner of Kleiner Perkins.
A fireside chat with Gordon is always…unique. We didn’t get poetry this time, but we had a fascinating talk about how the cost of entertainment has collapsed from $1 an… → Read More
One of the most interesting panels at last week’s Disrupt featured a discussion about social music between Steve Jang the co-founder and CEO of Schematic Labs and Alexander Ljung the founder and CEO of SoundCloud.
Jang and Ljung are both developing apps and services that enable us to share music, sounds and our musical taste. Jang’s product is Soundtracking, an iPhone app that allows us to… → Read More
Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in Airbnb (whose CEO Brian Chesky was … → Read More
This week’s Gillmor Gang comes at the end of travel — to New York for TechCrunch Disrupt and Las Vegas for the Forrester Analyst Forum. Disrupt continues to gather a head of steam, with the social effects of an emerging app ecosystem now being built out across the media and the enterprise. Although it seems still to be at the early stages with Twitter heading off a second front from Bill Gross… → Read More
Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever not only doesn’t want to sell his hot start-up but – as he told me backstage earlier this week at Disrupt – he even has an explicit non-goal of not selling the company.
Non-goals or not, Cheever has a lot to smile about. Traffic is up to record levels at Quora and the site continues to be a paragon of innovation in the social space. In this interview he… → Read More
Brightcove is no longer just for videos. Starting today, it is launching an entire new product line for making mobile and web apps called Brightcove App Cloud. Developers will be able to use App Cloud to create their apps once and then deploy them to the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and beyond. It creates HTML5 apps as well as mobile touch websites, and it is not limited to video… → Read More
One of the winners at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is Docracy, an open source site where users can share and sign legal documents, similar to what GitHub provides for code. The site is the brainchild of mobile app developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who are the founders of app development startup Larva Labs.
Docracy is an online, opensource hub for quality legal documents like… → Read More
At the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon today, local hackers Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman presented an e-commerce plugin for flash sales site Gilt.com that is worth a look. Called Gilt-ii, the bookmarklet allows Gilt members to auction their items in their shopping cart during the actual buying process.
So here’s the basic premise behind Gilt-ii. Everyday at noon ET, Gilt releases daily price cuts on… → Read More
Talent scouting at the 2011 Hackathon in Manhattan today, TCTV caught up with three alumni hax0rz and one n00b, who gave us a sneak peek of their apps and ideas. They included: a couple of dating sites, one with a hyper local twist, a mobile web application that lets you see nearby job opportunities using data from your Foursquare network and… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor — got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup’s successful IPO. Amid the fear mongering about another tech bubble, it seemed more likely that LinkedIn was the first of at least a trio of big social plays going public. Facebook and Twitter seem no brainers, each with their own dynamics in terms of revenue plus… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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