TalkCrunch

Erick Schonfeld Discusses MySpace Music On WNYC’s Soundcheck

Mark Hendrickson — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:48:24 +0000

Listen as TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld discusses the significance of MySpace Music and free, ad-supported music in general on WYNC’s Soundcheck, a program produced daily by New York Public Radio.

Interview With Mayor Cory Booker About Community Eye

Michael Arrington — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:43:11 +0000

Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker talks about Community Eye, the city’s new video surveillance and gunshot detection system being used to fight crime in an eight-square mile area. More details and the transcript at TechCrunch.

Interview With Barney Pell and Ramez Naam About Microsoft’s Powerset Acquisition

Michael Arrington — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:17:21 +0000

I spoke to Powerset CEO and cofounder Barney Pell and Microsoft Live Search Group Program Manager Ramez Naam today about the Powerser/Microsoft acquisition. Total talk time is around 35 minutes, and the full transcript is at TechCrunch.

Skype 4.0 Interview With President Josh Silverman

Erick Schonfeld — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:16:17 +0000

Skype is getting a major, much-needed upgrade: Skype 4.0. President Josh Silverman calls it the “biggest new release in Skype’s history.” The new software client, which which will be released here in beta tomorrow (for Windows only), takes up the whole screen. Video is front and center.

Interview With Newt Gingrich About Tech, Elections And American Solutions

Michael Arrington — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:29:05 +0000

I interviewed former Speaker of the House Newt Gringrich this morning about his goals with American Solutions, which now has a Silicon Valley office. We also spoke about a number of technology issues, and his thoughts on the upcoming presidential election. More on TechCrunch, along with the full transcript of the conversation.

Total talk time is just over 30 minutes.

Interview With Citi Analyst Mark Mahaney On Yahoo/Microsoft/Google

Michael Arrington — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:49:24 +0000

Citi’s Internet Analyst Mark Mahaney has been at the center of the Microsoft/Yahoo takeover battle since the beginning. On February 2, a day after the Microsoft bid, Mahaney gave his reasons why he believed the deal had just a 60% chance of happening.

Mahaney also estimated (on February 2) that a search advertising outsourcing arrangement with Google could boost Yahoo cash flows by 25% and suggested that the financial markets were underestimating the probability of such a deal (he was right, as we learned two months later).

Later Mahaney updated his estimate based on new data and said a Google deal could increase cash flows “more than $1 billion a year,” a 50% gain in cash flow from 2007.

Last Friday, in anticipation of the expiration of the Microsoft deadline for Yahoo action on the bid, Mahaney made a new set of predictions: 45% chance of a merger at a price somewhat higher than the initial bid, a 40% chance that Microsoft will go hostile, a 10% chance that Microsoft walks away, and a 5% chance for deal at the original bid to be accepted. That means he thinks a deal in some form is 90% likely, up from his 60% chance on February 2.

Given how consistently right Mahaney has been in his analysis, Erick and I reached out to him today to pick his brain on the deal. The podcast is below, and a transcript has been posted on TechCrunch.

Key takeaways:

Mahaney clearly thinks a Yahoo/Microsoft deal is going to happen, either through a hostile move by Microsoft (40%) or via a negotiated deal (50%).
He doesn’t count out the chance for a more permanent Yahoo/Google deal, though. We talk about the various ways Yahoo may be able to get a Google deal past the regulators, particularly via outsourcing only a portion of search ads on a non-exclusive basis.
Mahaney maintains his current estimate that Yahoo can increase cash flow in the near term by $1 billion/year by outsourcing search to Google.

The most interesting exchange came at the end, when I steered away from what Mahaney thought would happen, and asked him what he would do if he were Microsoft CEO SteveBallmer: walk from the deal, or go for it aggressively. Mahaney didn’t hesitate in his answer:

Arrington: So if you’re Steve Ballmer, do you walk from this deal or go after it aggressively?

Mahaney: You go after it aggressively. You know what it’s like to see businesses increasingly concentrate on one provider. The longer you wait to attack that provider, the worse your odds. You can’t walk away.

There are very few people outside of Microsoft who know the company’s business as well as Mahaney. If he says Microsoft needs Yahoo, I’m not going to disagree.

Carly Fiorina On TalkCrunch

Michael Arrington — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:58:05 +0000

As part of our election series, I spoke to Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard and the newly announced Victory Chairman for the Republican National Committee.

We’ve spoken with most of the top presidential candidates over the last few months to get their on record position on ten key technology issues (Ron Paul, Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich). On January 29, just prior to Super Tuesday, we made our presidential endorsements based on these interviews and reader voting.

Senator McCain is now the definite Republican candidate, and he’s staffing up to try and win the election. Bringing on seasoned business leaders like Fiorina is a good move. The question is, will her technology experience help the campaign cut into the big lead that Barack Obama has both in leveraging technology to spread his message and get donations, as well as defining appropriate policies on tech issues.

More at TechCrunch, including a transcript of the conversation.

Talk With WCBS Radio’s Robert Hawley On Our Tech President Endorsements

Michael Arrington — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:50:33 +0000

Last week we fit in a long interview with Rob Hawley at the nationally syndicated Dishin Digital about our Tech President endorsements. Other media coverage of the endorsements is here.

Two things I like about radio - you have a lot more time to express your ideas v. a quick tv spot, and you don’t have a camera staring at you, making you nervous.

The TechCrunch Ron Paul Interview

Michael Arrington — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:44:10 +0000

We were not able to schedule time with Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for president in 2008, until after we made our presidential endorsements this morning. No worries, though. Dr. Paul took the user voting portion of the endorsements in a landslide, although we endorsed rival John McCain over him in the editorial portion of the endorsements.

We’ll have a transcript up shortly at TechCrunch.

Crunchies On Alice 97.3 FM San Francisco

Michael Arrington — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:21:55 +0000

The Crunchies are tonight. Alice 97.3 mentioned it on air today during their morning show, which is no. 1 rated in this market. The event is this evening, see you all there!

Interview (almost) With Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Michael Arrington — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 04:51:54 +0000

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was too far behind in the polls to get invited to today’s ABC/Facebook presidential debate - he was cut along with Duncan Hunter and Mike Gravel. Instead, we scheduled time to talk with him about his positions on technical policies, something we’ve already done with Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel.

Unfortunately we didn’t get past the niceties before Kucinich abruptly pulled the plug on the interview, said goodbye and hung up. There’s not much content here, but he does briefly address his position on the atomic bomb, the internal combustion engine and NASA, and notes that he’s had a lot of support from the Internet. At the end of the interview he promises to reschedule. Something tells me he won’t be able to do that before he pulls out of the race. After coming in dead last in Iowa and polling “NA” in other states, I have a feeling he may not be around for long.

More at TechCrunch, including a transcript of the conversation.

time: 11:03
size: 2.5 mb

Q&A With 2008 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel

Michael Arrington — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 08:58:33 +0000

Next up in our series of talks with 2008 presidential candidates is Senator Mike Gravel, a Democrat. In addition to Senator Gravel, you can find podcasts and written Q&As that we have recorded with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, Governor Romney and Senator McCain here and on TechCrunch.

This discussion was much longer than previous talks. We recorded over 40 minutes of back and forth on issues ranging from net neutrality, spectrum issues and the digital divide to more light hearted stuff like the Senator’s preference of Macs over PCs (he’s the first candidate to say so).

See TechCrunch for more detail and a full transcript of the podcast.

Time: 43:30
Size: 9.95 MB

Interview With Senator John McCain

Michael Arrington — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:30:04 +0000

Next in our series of talks with 2008 presidential candidates on their positions on key technology issues is Senator John McCain. McCain made no stipulations on what we talked about before the podcast, and our conversation sort of roamed over a number of important current events and issues. We’ll have the full transcript up on TechCrunch later this morning. We made deep dives on the recent Yahoo/China issue and H-1B visas, in particular.

Hear the Mitt Romney Podcast here. Next to be published is a written Q&A with John Edwards.

Interview With 2008 Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney

Michael Arrington — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:01:39 +0000

Last week I mentioned that we had scheduled a podcast interview with Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for President in 2008.

In our original post we asked the readers to come up with questions that they would like us to ask Governor Romney. The feedback was great, and we put together a list of what people think are the most important technology related questions that they wanted to hear about.

But there was no way we would get through all of those questions in the time we had with Governor Romney. So we divided the list up and asked about half of them. The campaign says the will try to make time to do a follow up podcast soon. Meanwhile, we are talking to other presidential candidates as well and we’ll use the same basic questions. When we’ve done a few of these, we’ll be able to compare the candidates on the issues.

More details and a transcript are available at TechCrunch. I want to thank Governor Romney and his campaign for making time for this, and also for being the first candidate to step up and talk to us.

Interview With Joe Hewitt, iPhone God

Michael Arrington — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:08:41 +0000

Nik Cubrilovic and I managed to get the very busy Joe Hewitt on the phone for an interview about the new Facebook iPhone application that he built.

Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired in July.

Hewitt has become a major contributor to the iPhone development community. He participates regularly on the Google iPhone discussion group and released his own sample framework and code that is now being used in dozens of iPhone web applications.

Hewitt talks about his fascination with the iPhone and the development process for the Facebook application. More at TechCrunch.

Time: 26:32 min
Size: 6.07 MB

Interview With Ooma Execs Andrew Frame and Ashton Kutcher

Michael Arrington — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:28:02 +0000

The long awaited “Vonage Killer” Ooma has launched into private beta. The product allows consumers to get “free phone service for life” after purchasing special hardware that you plug normal phones into. We have a much longer article up on TechCrunch describing the service in detail.
The Ooma management team, which is very deep, includes actor Ashton Kutcher as the Creative Director. I interviewed Ashton and CEO Andrew Frame yesterday to hear more about the service. Hear the twenty minute podcast below.
Update: we’re having some technical issues with the podcast..will be fixed shortly. Use this link until then.

A Talk With James Hong, Co-Founder of HotOrNot

Michael Arrington — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:00:36 +0000

I finally had a chance to record a call with James Hong, the co-founder of HotOrNot, to discuss their new Hotlist product (see TechCrunch coverage on this today for a full overview).

In the first part of the interview, Hong talks about the history of the six year old company, which has never taken venture capital and has been profitable from its first months of operation. See our post on TechCrunch from earlier this year where we also cover some of the history of the company.

The new Hotlist product allows HotOrNot users to add brands, bands, people, or anything else to their profile to help others quickly figure out what kinds of things they like to spend their money and time on. It not only helps HotOrNot users quickly find other people with similar interests, but it also gives the company an unprecedented amount of information about their user base. That information can be used for super targeted advertising, and spotting of up and coming trends.

Time: 39:35 Minutes

Size: 9.06 MB

Interview With Product Manager For Microsoft Silverlight

Michael Arrington — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:07:10 +0000

Microsoft made a number of major announcements today around their new Silverlight platform at their annual Mix conference in Las Vegas. Silverlight is a new cross-platform, cross-browser platform for creating rich Internet applications, and competes directly with Adobe Flash (and their related Flex and Apollo platforms).

Nik Cubrilovic and I had the opportunity to interview Brian Goldfarb, the product manager for Silverlight this afternoon. Please see our comprehensive overview of Silverlight at TechCrunch. There are more details of the product there.

Time: 22:33 Minutes
Size: 5.16 MB

Zimbra Goes “Offline”

Michael Arrington — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:59:44 +0000

Zimbra announces Zimbra Desktop, a way to access the Zimbra website and all of your user data when offline. I spoke to Zimbra CEO and Co-founder Satish Dharmaraj this morning about the product, and we also talk extensively about the background of Zimbra in general. The company has 6 million paid users, and is moving towards profitability.

We also discuss GrandCentral and Spinvox near the end.

Zimbra website

Time: 33:51Minutes
Size: 7.75 MB

Talk With Yahoo Music Execs on the Fate of DRM

Michael Arrington — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:54:09 +0000

About a year ago, Yahoo Music GM David Goldberg stunned attendees of the Music 2.0 conference by urging major labels to abandon DRM and give unrestricted MP3 sales a try. The biggest side effect of DRM, he said, was that it tended to lock users into a single service and a single device - not something that made them happy.

A lot has changed in the last year. Physical CD sales continue to drop, and labels seem to be more willing than ever to try anything that might help increase digital music sales and make up at least some of the difference. Suddenly eMusic’s model of selling non-DRM’d music seems to make a lot of sense, and others are experimenting as well. Amazon is rumored to be considering a MP3-only music download store. MySpace sells no-DRM music. Yahoo has experimented with no-DRM downloads. And so on. Even Bill Gates admits DRM is a deeply flawed solution.

I spoke to Goldberg and Yahoo Music VP of Product Development Ian Rogers last week about their views on DRM today and going forward. While they won’t say DRM is dead, they do provide valuable insights as music industry insiders on what we can expect in the future. Including, possibly, side by side sales of DRM and non-DRM music, with a discount for customers who can stomach the DRM. We also talk briefly about the proposed music tax in Europe to replace DRM entirely.

I’ll be writing more at TechCrunch about my own views on DRM as well.

Time: 40:07 Minutes
Size: 9.18 MB

Interview With Digg Team - New Stats, New Features

Michael Arrington — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:50:20 +0000

Digg is launching several new features this morning that signal a strategic shift in the company’s all news focus to date. They’ve added a podcasting content area, enhanced the video area and are signalling that new content areas are coming as well. Among the changes, users will now be able to consume audio and video content directly on Digg. Another key feature addition is the launch of “Top 10 Stories,” which is a quick view of the ten hottest stories on Digg at any given time. See TechCrunch for the full story and screenshots.

I spoke to Digg founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and VP Marketing Mike Maser for a few minutes to talk about the changes. We also discussed how Digg acquired the SpikeTheVote domain name, Digg’s current user stats, their upcoming financing and other issues.

Time: 38:59 Minutes
Size: 8.9 MB

Here Comes Adobe Apollo

Michael Arrington — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:20:17 +0000

Steve Gillmor and I recently spoke with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about the upcoming release of the Apollo platform. Apollo, the code name for “a cross-operating system runtime” is a platform that will allow developers to create to desktop applications using existing web development skills such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax. Web applications can be run online or offline through Apollo, which will also have the traditional benefits of desktop applications - speed, drag and drop functionality from the desktop to the application, and accessing the file system. Apollo is cross-platform, meaning any application developed for it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. And they are promising easy porting of existing web applications to the Apollo platform.

Adobe is counting on platforms like Apollo to drive future revenue growth. Look for a developer release in the near future and a full release in 2007. More on TechCrunch, including screenshots.

Time: 37:32 Minutes
Size: 8.6 MB

Interview With Jeff Bezos

Michael Arrington — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:41:41 +0000

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has been talking about their web services business unit a lot lately. Moments after he left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to speak to him about three of their most recent web service offerings: Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a short podcast but you get a glimpse of how important this new business line is to Amazon’s future. The full post is on TechCrunch.

Time: 16:57 Minutes
Size: 7.8 MB

Reddit Acquired: Interview With Founders

Michael Arrington — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:10:46 +0000

Condé Nast announced the acquisition of Reddit, a social news site, this morning for an undisclosed price. Reddit was founded in 2005 and has just four employees. This is a model company for young entrepreneurs looking to create a new startup with limited resources.

Marshall Kirkpatrick and I interviewed founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian today just hours after the acquisition was announced. While we couldn’t get them to disclose the acquisition price, they did talk about traffic and fundraising - Reddit is currently attracting around 70,000 unique visitors per day and 700,000 page views, and the company has raised just $100,000 in seed funding, all in the summer of 2005.

Time: 24:36 Minutes
Size: 5.63MB

Interview With Jingle CEO and Venture Capitalist

Nik Cubrilovic — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:16:36 +0000

Michael Arrington interviews Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman about today’s big financing news as well as the history and future of their free, ad supported 411 service called 1-800-Free-411. Key facts from the discussion: Jingle currently has costs of around $0.25 per call, and revenue of $0.20, although Garrick feels that potential revenue per call will approach $0.50 as the market matures. Garrick and Kopelman also discuss upcoming potential competition from Google and other search players, and how Jingle will compete in that market. The service, which is growing rapidly, now claims 3% of the total U.S. 411 calls, a roughly $8 billion market.

Time: 31:39 Minutes
Size: 7.24 MB

MediaTemple Launches Grid Server

Nik Cubrilovic — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:00:22 +0000

If you are looking for a hosting provider, you need to check out Media Temple’s new Grid Server product that launched this morning. For $20 per month (the same price as most low end shared hosting providers), they are offering a fully scalable hosting product that will grow (or spike) along with your site. See TechCrunch for more details, but there are aspects to this that are superior to shared, virtual dedicated, and even dedicated server hosting.

Michael Arrington spoke with Demian Sellfors (CEO), Chris Leah (Director of Technology), Alex Capehart (Director Marketing) and David Feinberg (Product Manager) for 30 minutes yesterday about the new product. The podcast is enclosed.

Time: 34:48 Minutes
Size: 7.96 MB

Episode 14: Interview With Pageflakes Founder

Nik Cubrilovic — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 01:47:49 +0000

Ajax home page Pageflakes, headquartered in Germany, is just settling down after its recently announced venture financing from BenchMark Capital. In the next few days they’ll be launching Pageflakes 2.0, a “significant upgrade to the current offering” CEO and co-founder Christoph Janz tells Michael Arrington. Get the details at TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington’s conversation with Christoph and Pageflakes designer Jeremy Baines here. Topics covered include the state of Pageflakes as well as some hints at the new product.

TechCrunch coverage of Pageflakes is here.

Time: 33 Minutes
Size: 7.5 MB

Episode 13: PayPerPost Raises $3 million

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:34:19 +0000

See TechCrunch for the details on PayPerPost’s announcement of its $3 million Series A round of financing by Inflexion Partners, Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Michael Arrington and Rob Hof (Silicon Valley Bureau Chief at Business Week) took a few minutes today to talk to Ted Murphy (founder and CEO of PayPerPost) and Josh Stein (a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson) about the funding and the controversial nature of PayPerPost’s business. It’s a somewhat heated discussion, but we managed to keep things fairly civilized.

See our previous coverage of the company in our post “PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.” The company facilitates a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to write about the company’s product. Disclosure of payment is optional.

Time: 53 Minutes
Size: 24.2 MB

Episode 12: Featuring Om Malik, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington

Nik Cubrilovic — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 08:40:56 +0000

Episode 12 of TalkCrunch features Robert Scoble at Scobleizer, Om Malik at Gigaom and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. They speak for just over an hour about their favorite startups and the hot news this week in tech. Topics covered include the state of VOIP, next week’s Yahoo Hack Day and Robert Scoble’s hot new tv show that’s launching Monday, ScobleShow.

Companies mentioned include Digg, Facebook, Myspace, Skype, PicksPal, TechMeme, Jajah, PersonalBee, Scrapblog, Rebtel, Hullo and GrandCentral.

Time: 60 minutes
Size: 27.7 MB

Episode 11: Elliot Noss Talks About Kiko Acquisition

Nik Cubrilovic — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 06:34:15 +0000

Kiko, one of the first online Ajax calendars, gave up in the face of intense competition just a year after funding (by Ycombinator) and launch. The founders put the site up for sale on ebay…and it sold for $258,100.

The buyer was a twelve year old Toronto-based Internet company called Tucows. Tucows CEO Elliot Noss wrote about why he purchased Kiko on his blog here. Earlier this evening Michael Arrington got Elliot to speak with him about the transaction, which is attached here. Interesting facts: Tucows isn’t interested in the domain name and may sell it later, and the final price jumped over $100,000 in the final two minutes of bidding.

TechCrunch posts on Kiko are here.

Time: 19:35
Size: 4.5 MB

Episode 10: Digg 3.0 Launches - Interview With Founders Kevin Rose & Jay Adelson

Nik Cubrilovic — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:00:51 +0000

Digg 3.0 is set to launch on Monday, June 26, 2006. Screen shots and a feature overview are available on TechCrunch and Read/Write Web. Here on TalkCrunch, Richard MacManus and Michael Arrington interview Digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson on a wide range of topics, including the history of Digg, features included in Digg 3.0, and their thoughts on the new Digg-clone that AOL launched at netscape.com. We also review current Digg stats (now bigger than the New York Times) and growth rates (site traffic is doubling every two months). This is a long podcast, but worth it.

Time: 55:20
Size: 25.3 MB

Episode 9: Flock Launches - An Interview with the founders

Nik Cubrilovic — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 23:30:25 +0000

Flock is launching it first public beta this evening (Tuesday, June 13, 2006). See the launch post on TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington interview Flock founders Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young, as well as Shasta Ventures investor Jason Pressman, in the attached podcast. The conversation touches on Flock features, the business model and upcoming releases.

Time: 40:06
Size: 18.4 MB

Episode 8 - Gil Penchina On Leaving eBay for Wikia

Nik Cubrilovic — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 08:17:33 +0000

Gil Penchina leaves eBay (see TechCrunch post) to become the first CEO of Bessemer funded Wikia, the new for-profit venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch speaks with Gil about his decision to leave, his game plan for Wikia and some of the hot startups he’s recently invested in.

Running Time: 27:40
Size: 12.7 MB

Episode 7 - Live PBS Recording on Web 2.0

Nik Cubrilovic — Wed, 10 May 2006 08:09:03 +0000

Tom Fudge, host of the KPBS San Diego show “These Days“, had CNET Editor-at-large Brian Cooley and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his live show on Monday, May 8, 2006. The topic? Web 2.0 and what it means to the average Internet user. With KPBS’ permission we are adding a recording of the show here at TalkCrunch.

Running Time: 19:07
Size: 13.1 MB

Episode 6: Sphere Launch

Nik Cubrilovic — Tue, 02 May 2006 04:58:13 +0000

The long-awaited blog search engine Sphere launches at 10 PM tonight. In this episode of Talkcrunch we speak with Tony Conrad and Toni Schneider about the Sphere story.

Tony Conrad is the CEO and co-founder of Sphere. Toni Schneider, formerly the CEO of Oddpost, is currently the CEO of Automattic (wordpress.com, wordpress.org, etc.) and an advisor to Sphere. In the podcast we talk about the motivation to starting Sphere, what problems it solves and how it competes along with some of the challenges and technical problems involved in developing a blog search engine. There are some very interesting insights here from two guys who have been involved in working with blogs and new web technologies for a long time.

The TechCrunch post on the launch of Sphere is here.

Running Time: 58:05
Size: 51.3 MB

Episode 5: Riya Launch

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:37:02 +0000

According to Riya there are 300 billion digital photographs stored in various places today, and they want to help us organise them. Riya is a photo sharing and search site that will tag and index your photos automatically using intelligent recognition. Riya took the web by storm when it launched it’s beta last year and amongst the hype, rumors of an acquisition, and $15M Series B round of funding has managed to build a great service. Riya released their public beta 2 weeks ago and since has seen great uptake of the service - living up to many expectations.

In the fifth episode of Talkcrunch we are joined by founder and CEO of Riya, Munjal Shah, and Riya’s online marketing and blogging head Tara Hunt. We talk about the launch, how Riya was developed, the challenges they faced in developing the application and other topics.

During the podcast we learn that Riya is more than just web-based photo sharing in many ways, it makes it easier to find images and to access the metadata associated with your photos. Munjal and Tara take us through some of the plans that they have for the future of Riya now that they are a public service.

TechCrunch posts on Riya are here.

Download size: 18.2MB
Duration: 39:20

Update: There was a small problem with the original file which has been updated now. Apologies.

Episode 4: Battle of the Online Feed Readers

Michael Arrington — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 08:17:28 +0000

The fourth episode of TalkCrunch is a discussion with executives of four of my favorite online feed readers: NewsGator, Attensa, Rojo and Feedlounge.

I brought on Frank Gruber as a co-host, who wrote a comparison post of nine online readers last week on TechCrunch. The conversation focuses on feature comparisions, issues around slowdown as all of these companies are seeing massive growth, and upcoming products in the pipeline.

I did my best to create controversy, even calling “bullshit” on a statement by Chris Alden that the online guys aren’t trying to beat eachother up, but rather grow the RSS market together. We also discussed Feedlounge’s prospects as the only non-free online feed reader on the market.

Guests:

Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO, NewsGator
Eric Hayes, Founder and VP, Attensa
Chris Alden, Founder and CEO, Rojo
Alex King, Founder, Feedlounge

Running time: 57.00m
Download Size: 26.1MB

Episode 3: Amazon’s New Grid Storage Service

Michael Arrington — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 07:38:19 +0000

The third episode of TalkCrunch is all about Amazon’s game changing new S3 Grid Storage web service that I wrote about on TechCrunch last week when it launched. Co hosted with Keith Teare and Nik Cubrilovic, we bring on two guests from the Amazon Web Services group: Adam Selipsky (VP of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services) and Dave Barth (Product Manager for S3).

In the first segment Adam gives us a high level view of all of Amazon’s web services. In the second segment, David gets into detail on the new grid storage service itself, including an in depth review of features.

Keith and I also try, without success, to talk Nik into building his new online storage company Omnidrive on top of S3. It’s a lively conversation, to say the least.

Other companies mentioned include PayPal, Jigsaw, Plaxo, Yahoo, Google and Riya.

Running time: 51:25m
Download Size: 23.5MB

Episode 2: Social Networks 3.0

Nik Cubrilovic — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:28:12 +0000

In our second episode of TalkCrunch we talk to LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman and August Capital VC David Hornik about social networks on the web. We also talk a bit about the main news from the past week, and other topics such as web video and podcasting. Podcast hosted by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Nik Cubrilovic

Notes:

Web 2.0 news - companies mentioned: DabbleDB, Digg and recent fundraising (SixApart, FMPub, PodTech)
Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn profitability and the ability to view Linkedin profiles without being logged in
What is Social Networking 3.0?
Microformats and social networking
Web Identity: porting of Linkedin reputation and profile
Podcast ends with discussion of VideoEgg, YouTube and user-generated content in general

Runtime 43:40m, Download 10.2MB

Episode 1: Google Calendar v. the Competition

Michael Arrington — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 04:16:18 +0000

For our inaugural podcast, we invite Ethan Stock, Founder of Zvents and Narendra Rocherolle, Founder of 30boxes, to discuss Google’s new Calendar product, to be called “CL2″. We also talk about how Zvents and 30Boxes will (somehow) find a way to compete as the big guys enter the space with next generation calendar and event search products. Also participating are Nik Cubrilovic and Keith Teare.

Podcast Notes:

Narendra talks about how he sold, bought back and re-sold Webshots.com for a total of $150 million
We discuss the very low costs of creating a new web startup today
Mike talks about why CL2 will be very hard to compete against
Ethan and Narendra defend their startups
Discussion of the importance of synching in and out of calendars to Outlook
Ethan and Narendra talk about new upcoming features
Discussion of marketing strategies for CL2 competitors
TechCrunch profiles on Zvents and 30Boxes