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May 14, 2007, 03:43 PM If you would like to learn about a professional musician who has turned his Apple computer into a symphonic orchestra, this interview is for you.
Suppose you are an aspiring film producer. You don’t have the money of a Hollywood production company. So you want to follow in the footsteps of the Florida college students who made a success of their self-produced Blair Witch Project eight years ago.
While the cost of video cameras and computerized editing equipment has dropped markedly since then, you recognize that every great movie needs a high-quality film score. But, you cannot afford to engage the services of a symphonic orchestra because that might cost $50,000 or more. However, if you know a good composer, you can perform his score at a fraction of the cost with the Fauxharmonic Orchestra.
Using digital instruments The Fauxharmonic Orchestra’s mission is to bring fresh and artistically meaningful experiences of orchestral music to a diverse, world-wide audience. Nearly 500 Gigs of MIDI notes and phrases for all instruments are stored on the Orchestra’s Apple computer. Essentially the computer functions as the orchestral instrument for the composer and conductor.
Our guest today Paul Smith who is the founder of The Fauxharmonic Orchestra.
This interview is about 22 minutes long.
Today’s interview is audio. There are two ways to listen:
(1) by clicking on the may 14th interview at the left, or
(2) Through your iPod or portable player via a podcast. Podcast subscription is available at Apple’s iTunes or on the podcast tab of our website.
May 11, 2007, 10:58 AM If you would like to learn how Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built the company that seeded Silicon Valley, this interview is for you.
I have long been curious about the origins of Silicon Valley's dominance of the electronics industry. While I was aware that Shockley started his semiconductor company there in 1956, I sensed that it was not really the beginning. After all, Ampex, Lenkurt, Farinon, and Varian, among others, were already established in the Santa Clara valley. Even earlier, Philo Farnsworth pioneered television in San Francisco. But Farnsworth's company left no direct descendents nearby.
Therefore, by triangulation, it appears that Hewlett-Packard was the true source in 1938. Michael Malone recently published a book, entitled Bill and Dave, which explains how Bill Hewlett and David Packard got everything started and built their company into a pillar of the electronics industry.
Unlike today's swaggering VCs, the two young Stanford engineers basically formed the company merely to be gainfully employed in their chosen field, and to live in a desired geographic area. It was, after all, the Great Depression.
By comparison to later Valley entrepreneurs, their financial ambitions seem to have been secondary. Yet, after 70 years, H-P remains not only one of the World's most powerful companies, but also one of the most innovative.
I have stared a Wiki on this book at www.billanddave.wetpaint.com and you may email me for an invitation if you want to contribute.
Our guest today Michael Malone who is a noted author of a number of books about Silicon Valley.
This interview is covered in about 35 minutes.
Today’s interview is audio. There are two ways to listen:
(1) by clicking on the May 11th interview at the left or,
(2) through your iPod or portable player via a podcast. Podcast subscription is available at Apple’s iTunes or on the podcast tab of our website.
May 9, 2007, 03:45 PM If you would like to learn about a cell phone that promises to work reliably indoors, as well as outside, this interview is for you.
T-Mobile is going to start marketing cell phones that will use WiFi networks to make phone calls when you are located in a WiFi area. The best example might be the WiFi in your own home if you have such a network. But, you will also be able to use other WiFi hot spots, perhaps including Starbucks.
From my viewpoint this is significant because it holds promise to give me a cell phone that will work inside my house. Right now if someone phones me on my cell phone while I am in the house, the signal strength is so poor that the call normally gets dropped.
I don’t like the requirement to pay an additional $20 a month for the WiFi augmentation, but our guest today says many people will pay it because it will circumvent the need for an ordinary landline telephone thereby providing an offsetting savings.
Our guest today Tom Evslin who is a successful computer industry CEO. He sold one company to Microsoft and took another pubic. His latest effort is the publication of his novel, hackoff.com. Tom comments on things digital at this blog, Fractals of Change.
This interview is covered in about 18 minutes.
Today’s interview is audio. There are two ways to listen:
(1) By clicking on the May 9th interview at the left, or
(2) Through your iPod or portable player via a podcast. Podcast subscription is available at Apple’s iTunes or on the podcast tab of our website.
May 7, 2007, 03:52 PM If you would like to learn how to create your own Wiki at no charge, this interview is for you.
Recently, I read Mike Malone’s new book entitled Bill and Dave which is a history of Hewlett-Packard and a biography of the two founders. Simultaneously, I learned about a website called wetpaint.com that lets you easily build your own Wiki. Not exactly being a rocket surgeon myself (to mix metaphors), I thought I would give wetpaint a try.
As a result, I formed a Wiki about Malone’s book. If you would like to contribute, just send me an email.
In sum, wetpaint worked as advertised. Ordinary people will find that they have the skills required to set-up their own Wikis there.
In today’s interview the founder of wetpaint.com demonstrates how to construct a Wiki as I question him about the steps he takes in realtime on our computer screens.
Our guest today is Ben Elowitz who is the founder of wetpaint.com.
This video interview is covered in about 15 minutes.
Today’s interview was conducted remotely on the WebEx platform. It is available for playback by visiting by clicking on the May 7th interview at the left.
You can also get it a video podcast at iTunes, our website, or via other aggregating software.
May 4, 2007, 12:00 PM If you would like to learn why Microsoft SharePoint collaboration software might be coming of age, this interview is for you. (Part 2 of 2).
As everyone knows, Microsoft introduced its long-awaited Vista Operating System earlier this year. Along with it, they launched a new version of their Office Suite (Excel, Word, Power Point, Outlook, and etc). One of the key points about Office ’07 is that enables significantly enhanced versions of Microsoft’s collaboration software; SharePoint (for asynchronous collaboration) and LiveMeeting (for synchronous meetings).
This interview is divided into two parts.
The first part provides a summary of SharePoint and gives some illustrations by example. The second part tells us why SharePoint seems to be coming of age now, as opposed to when earlier versions were available.
Our guest today is Peter O’Kelly who is the Research Director at The Burton Group. His company is an IT consulting and market research firm specialized in computer and telecommunications software.
This video interview is covered in about 10 minutes.
Today’s interview was conducted remotely on the WebEx platform. It is available for playback by visiting by clicking on the May 4th interview at the left.
You can also get it a video podcast at iTunes, our website, or via other aggregating software.
May 2, 2007, 03:16 PM If you would like to learn why Microsoft SharePoint collaboration software might be coming of age, this interview is for you. (Part 1 of 2).
As everyone knows, Microsoft introduced its long-awaited Vista Operating System earlier this year. Along with it, they launched a new version of their Office Suite of products (Excel, Word, Power Point, Outlook, and etc). One of the key points of Office ’07 is that enables significantly enhanced versions of Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint for asynchronous collaboration and LiveMeeting for synchronous meetings.
This interview is about SharePoint. It is divided into two parts.
In the first part our guest provides a summary of SharePoint and gives some illustrations by example. In the second part he tells us why SharePoint seems to be coming of age now, as opposed to when earlier versions were available, and what some to the remaining drawbacks might be.
Our guest today is Peter O’Kelly who is the Research Director at The Burton Group. His company is an IT consulting and market research firm specialized in computer and telecommunications software.
This video interview is covered in about 27 minutes.
Today’s video interview was conducted remotely on the WebEx platform. It is available for playback by clicking on the May 2nd interview at the left.
You can also get it a video podcast at iTunes, our website, or via other aggregating software.
April 30, 2007, 10:27 AM If you are interested in learning why Software-as-a-Service is replacing packaged and downloadable software in many applications, this interview is for you.
Have you ever bought a new package of shrink-wrapped software and found that after installing it, somehow your computer got all fouled-up? Have you had a similar experience after downloading a program off the Internet?
You are not alone. Many of the biggest corporations are also finding that installing new software on their IT systems can leave them so badly disabled that the only way to restore things to normal may be to consult an exorcist.
A more realistic way around the problem is to adopt new applications in the form of an online service. In such instances the service provider takes on all of the responsibilities for maintaining the software in good working order, and seeing to it that the application does not mess-up the customers’ computers.
WebEx pioneered the concept in Web Conferencing.
Salesforce.com blazed a trail in CRM software.
Concur Technologies led the way in expense account reporting.
Look for ever-broadening examples in the future.
Our guest today is Jeff Kaplan who is the founder of THINK Strategies and the Master-of-Ceremonies at the recent SaaScon Conference which is devoted to the Software-as-a-Service industry.
This interview is covered in about 19 minutes.
Today’s interview is audio. There are two ways to listen:
(1) By clicking on the April 30th interview at the left, and
(2) Through your iPod or portable player via a podcast. Podcast subscription is available at Apple’s iTunes or here.
April 27, 2007, 12:43 PM If you are interested in learning how the interactive features of the Internet might also accelerate an increasingly popular technique of collaborative selling, this interview is for you.
Popular blogs and online newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, have learned that one way to maximize their audience is to routinely provide a methodology for readers to contribute. Bloggers are learning to habitually provide a “comments” link at the end of each article, and the newspapers are also doing so with ever greater frequency.
If developing an interactive relationship with your readers optimizes the audience by empowering them to contribute, might the concept be applicable to the broader issue of customer relations?
Our guest today thinks so.
He wrote a book entitled Close Like The Pros, which teaches that selling should be an collaborative process with the customer. Unlike typical sales books, that are essentially variations on the “positive thinking” manifesto, this one emphasizes the importance of establishing a team relationship with your customers through an incremental and interactive process. The goal is to replace relationship tension with task tension.
As online collaboration builds through such features as Wikis, shared spaces, and Web Conferencing, interactive customer relations is likely to become even more important.
Our guest today is Steve Marx who is the author of Close Like The Pros, and the CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy.
This interview is covered in about 20 minutes.
Today’s interview is audio. There are two ways to listen:
(1) By clicking at the April 27th interview at the left.
(2) Through your iPod or portable player via a podcast. Podcast subscription is available at Apple’s iTunes or here.
April 25, 2007, 01:43 PM A number of industry analysts conclude that Cisco bought WebEx partly because of the promise of the WebEx Connect strategy. If you would like to learn what that’s all about, this second part of a two-part interview is for you.
Perhaps one reason Cisco Systems bought WebEx Communications is to leverage the WebEx Connect strategy into a platform that will enable third party software vendors to escalate their independently developed software apps into on-demand collaborative sessions. To the extent that software becomes more web-centric (software-as-a-service) it is thought that online collaborative functionality shall become a routine expectation.
Microsoft will have the advantage of integrating collaborative functionality in its apps with Windows and its own LiveMeeting and SharePoint software. In contrast, independent software vendors (ISVs) will have good reasons to find a more open, neutral, platform.
In part two, of this two-part interview, our guest demonstrates how a hypothetical business software application can be enhanced by the ISV to provide on-demand collaborative functionality. Moreover, we learn how the ISV can place the collaboratively-enhanced version of his software into an ecosystem marketplace promoted by WebEx itself.
Our guest today is Shanker Iyer who is the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at WebEx Communications. One of his jobs is to develop the WebEx Connect ecosystem.
This video interview is covered in about 11 minutes.
Today’s interview was conducted remotely on the WebEx platform. It is available for playback by visiting clicking on the April 25th interview at the left.
You can also get it as a video podcast at iTunes, our website, or via other aggregating software.
April 23, 2007, 04:55 PM A number of industry analysts have said that Cisco bought WebEx partly because of the promise of the WebEx Connect strategy. If you would like to learn what that’s all about, this part one of a two-part interview is for you.
A number of industry analysts concluded that one reason Cisco Systems bought WebEx Communications is to leverage the WebEx Connect strategy into a platform that will enable third party software vendors to escalate their independently developed software apps into on-demand collaborative sessions. To the extent that software becomes more web-centric (software-as-a-service) it is thought that online collaborative functionality shall become a routine expectation.
In part one of this two-part interview, we learn just what the WebEx Connect strategy really is. Later, in part two, our guest demonstrates how a hypothetical business software application can be enhanced by the ISV to provide the on-demand collaborative functionality. Moreover, we learn how the ISV can place the collaboratively-enhanced version of his software into an ecosystem marketplace promoted by WebEx itself.
Our guest today is Shanker Iyer who is the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at WebEx Communications. One of his jobs is to develop the WebEx Connect ecosystem.
This video interview is covered in about 12 minutes.
Today’s interview was conducted remotely on the WebEx platform. It is available for playback by visiting clicking on the April 23rd interview at the left.
You can also get it as a video podcast at iTunes, our website, or via other aggregating software.
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