The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download. Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and…
Category Archives: Enclosures
Gadgets in the living room
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available for your listening pleasure. This week Om and I talk about the latest consumer electronics announcements from CES over the last week and some of the emerging trends for new gadgets in the living room. I liked the Intel Core Duo announcement and its energy-efficient design. New laptops utilizing the technology have over 11 hours of battery life! I was also impressed by XM Radio’s new XM Passport hardware, a tiny 1.5″ square satellite radio tuner that can be inserted into multiple devices similar to a SIM card. Om…
Emerging video trends podcast
Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video. I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge…
Paid placements over broadband pipes
The latest of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about the emergence of paid placement or prioritization of services on networks run by broadband providers such as your cable or telephone company. Cable and phone operators currently prioritize the handling of data packets from their own services flowing across the network. A call placed using a carrier’s Internet telephony product will receive priority handling ahead of calls placed using competing services such as Skype or Vonage. The carriers are now in discussion with other businesses dependent on fast delivery of their content to…
Week of the APIs
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…
Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details
Popular blog hosting provider TypePad.com was unavailable to its members for 18 hours today as a result of a failed storage upgrade during scheduled maintenance late last night. I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco earlier this evening to talk with Six Apart employees about the events that transpired and the current state of TypePad’s blogging platform. I sat down for an interview with Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Vice President of Professional Products, about an hour after TypePad’s servers came back online. We discussed TypePad’s reliability issues over the past two months, what went wrong today, and how…
Podcast with 37signals
Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…
Rich RSS beyond text
I just posted the latest episode of Om and Niall PodSesssions to our podcast site. This week Om and I talk about the possibilities of RSS beyond text and blogs as content such as photos, music, movies, and more are delivered using RSS and other syndication formats. I have been playing around with some of the new broadband RSS services on my TiVo and thinking about new methods of content delivery to the home. Broadband access has been sold as an instant-on service available anytime you wish to interact and retrieve information. I believe the next wave of services will…
PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week’s podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om’s RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more…
Om and Niall PodSessions #3
I sat down with Om Malik tonight to record the latest of our weekly podcasts. We sat across the table from each other in a quiet room instead of using Gizmo Project and you can tell the difference in the quality of the audio file. This week’s podcast is 8.9 MB in size and 19 minutes and 15 seconds in length. We spent most of the podcast talking about startup companies in the Bay Area. Last week Om and I became well aware of the new bubble forming in the valley. I shook my head as I saw two new…