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Posts Tagged ‘Video Interview’

Spawn Labs lets you play your console games on the run (video)

Call it Slingbox for games. Spawn Labs lets you take a console game and play it over the web on a laptop or a computer. As the Slingbox does with video, you can place shift your games and play them in high-definition on any computer, said David Wilson, chief executive at the Austin-based company. While the game is actually running on a console, you can interact with it and view it on a display on a far away laptop, as long as you have a broadband connection. You have to buy a $199 Spawn HD-720 box to make it work. Inside the box are digital signal processing chips that can take game images, convert them into video and play them on any computer screen. You interact with the game and send the signals back to the game console, which then sends the results of the interaction back to your screen. To play, you put a game in the console and leave it on. Then you can log into the Spawn Labs box from any machine and play it. Here’s our video interview with Wilson at his booth at the Game Developers Conference.

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Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on making Intuit more Mint-y (video)

Aaron Patzer, who founded Mint.com and served as its chief executive until it was acquired by Intuit for $170 million, stopped by the VentureBeat office this week to talk about his new job, and about his vision for the future of personal finance. Patzer is now Intuit’s vice president and general manager of personal finance, which means he’s in charge of both Quicken and Mint (which is continuing as a separate product).

“The good news is the whole Mint leadership is over at Intuit, and I run the division,” Patzer said. “So Intuit’s vision for personal finance is our vision of personal finance. We get to define it. So that means we control what the next versions of Quicken are going to be doing, and Mint as well.”

In the video below, Patzer talks about founding Mint, moving to Intuit, and what features are coming in the months ahead.

Going forward, VentureBeat plans to run a video interview with a CEO every Thursday. Okay, we’re breaking the rules with our very first video, but come on, Patzer gets in by virtue of being a tremendously successful entrepreneur. And a big thank you to both Patzer and to you for putting up with some of rough spots as I figure this whole video thing out.

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Macworld 2010: TUAW talks with App Cubby’s David Barnard

Filed under: Macworld, Video, iPhone, App Store

App Cubby has some of the more popular apps in the App Store. Whether it’s Gas Cubby for tracking car maintenance, Trip Cubby for capturing mileage information, or Health Cubby for motivating ourselves to get into better shape, the company keeps customers coming back with well-executed and full-featured software.

We talked with App Cubby’s David Barnard at Macworld Expo 2010 to see what’s new from the company. While we won’t tell you about the new and completely different app he has recently submitted to Apple, David told us a lot about the free version of Gas Cubby — Gas Cubby by FRAM — that provides the functionality of Gas Cubby in an ad-sponsored format.

Check out TUAW blogger Steve Sande’s video interview with David by clicking the Read More button.

We apologize for the sound quality, which was hindered by interference picked up by the microphone.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TUAW talks with App Cubby’s David Barnard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skype: iPhone App for 3G Coming "Soon"

The latest word on Skype for 3G is “soon” according to a blog post on its website today. You may have missed out last week, amid all the iPad hubbub, but Apple removed its restriction on VoIP calls on 3G with the release of its latest iPhone SDK.

The return of Skype to the iPhone is something we’ve not-so-patiently awaited since it was banned only a short time after being released last March, and it looks like we won’t have to wait much longer. And this time around, we’re hoping video chat isn’t far behind.

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Since AT&T first banned Skype over 3g last April, with Apple following suit, iPhone users have only been able to make VoIP calls over WiFi.

According to a video interview with David Ponsford, project lead for Skype for iPhone, the move to 3G will provide “CD quality” when making Skype-to-Skype calls. Ponsford says that the new Skype app will also include a quality indicator, which will use a traffic light style notification to show network quality.

We also chatted with Peter Parkes, the social media communications lead at Skype, and asked him when we could reasonably expect video chat capabilities. He told us that he couldn’t be specific on any time-line or make any promises regarding video chat, but that “where devices can support video calls, we’ll look to develop video-capable apps.”

“But the focus will be on a great experience,” he said. “If all we can get is pixelated and low frame rate, we won’t release it. When it looks great – that’s when we’ll make it available.”

The interview with David Ponsford is included below.

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Mobile game powerhouse Gameloft will make iPad games (video)

French mobile game publisher Gameloft has scaled back its investments in Google Android games. But the company is very excited about making games for the new iPad tablet computer from Apple. Michel Guillemot, chief executive of Gameloft, said he believes in the iPad because it has a great design and Apple has a strong ecosystem. Apple showed off Gameloft’s Nova first-person shooter game, optimized for the iPad, on stage today. Check out our video interview with Guillemot.

Michel Guillemot of Gameloft wants to make iPad games from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

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Survival Of The Fittest: DST’s Yuri Milner Talks To Us At The World Economic Forum

Yuri Milner, the CEO of Russian investment and operating company Digital Sky Technologies, had quite a 2009. I had a chance to sit down with Milner today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a short video interview.

The company now holds substantial equity in two of the hottest pre-IPO startups, Facebook and Zynga. And their innovative way of structuring deals, where they buy both preferred stock from the company and common stock from employees, is becoming the hot new way to invest in startups. In fact, people are now referring to “DST-style deals,” even where DST isn’t one of the investors. See Yelp, for example:

The size of the rounds is in the $50 million range, but includes both a primary investment component as well as a secondary offering for long time employees. These deals are now being referred to as “DST deals,” since DST first invested in Facebook in May 2009 at a $10 billion valuation and later funded employee buyouts at a $6.5 billion valuation. They did a similar deal with Zynga.

I first met Milner the day he announced his investment in Facebook, where he and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the details and rationale for their investment in an exclusive TechCrunch video interview.

The price he paid for his Facebook stock – a $10 billion valuation – was scoffed at in May. Today, it’s clear he got a great deal as Facebook common stock is trading at $14 billion and above. The Facebook common stock purchased by DST last summer cost Milner just a $6.5 billion valuation.

It was just a few months later that Milner was in the news again, beating out the competition to become the lead investor in a huge venture round for Zynga.

We’ve had our fun with Milner and DST, watching as the Russian firm stepped in and paid higher prices for hot startups than local VCs would even consider.

But the reality is that DST’s investment decisions look pretty damned smart with the benefit of hindsight. And the entity isn’t really “Russian” anymore – Milner is making almost all of his investments outside of Russia, and most of the new investors he’s bringing in to fund all this activity are non-Russian.

More and more, Milner is just looking like a really smart and really aggressive investor.

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TechCrunch Interviews (The Very Happy) Skype CEO Josh Silverman

Skype CEO Josh Silverman can’t stop smiling in this video interview we recorded in Menlo Park this morning. And no wonder – despite serious legal and spinoff drama, Silverman has managed to close his multi-billion dollar spinoff of Skype from eBay. His legal troubles have evaporated. Skype is growing like a weed. And he’s managed to keep his job running the business. Life is good.

All he has to do now is manage board meetings with two of the more forceful personalities on the planet – new investor Marc Andreessen and cofounder/new investor Niklas Zennstrom.

Well, that and keep this train on the tracks. Skype has exploded to over half a billion users, and is adding 300,000 new ones every day, Silverman says in the interview. 1/3 of usage is video, despite the fact that video calls can only be 1-1. Voice calls are multi-party. And revenue is cruising along at $185 million/quarter with 24.2% margins. Up to 20 million people are using Skype at any one time.

We talk a little about Skype’s business in the interview. But most of the focus in 2010. “You’ll see Skype become a lot more ubiquitous in a lot more places, both mobile devices as well as embedded devices,” he says, adding “expect to see us on a lot more platforms.”

We also spoke about Skype as a developer platform. Extras is now long gone, but Silverman reiterated that soon Skype will push far more powerful developer tools that can turn Skype into a service. That means Skype can run outside of the Skype client. That doesn’t necessarily mean Skype in the browser, they still say Flash isn’t powerful enough to run Skype in browser. But perhaps we’ll see Skype code being build directly into browsers.

We also spoke briefly about Chrome OS. Google’s new operating system doesn’t let users install software, meaning Skype is out. Flash is the only third party plugin Google will say will be included. Things like Silverlight and Skype are in limbo unless and until Google decides to include them. Silverman ends the interview with “If the Google folks are interested in building Skype into Chrome we’d certainly be interested in having that conversation.”

I hope they do have that conversation, soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Yowza: A Video Interview with Heroes Actor Greg Grunberg

When Heroes actor Greg Grunberg tells you to download an iPhone application, you can’t help but listen. Best known as television’s mind controlling savant Matt Parkman, Grunberg demoed location-based coupon startup Yowza at today’s Under the Radar Mobility Conference. Grunberg’s iPhone app offers users deals from nearby stores, restaurants and gyms. Now that Foursquare has begun advertising location-based deals it’ll be interesting to see if there will be overlap between the two companies. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Grunberg to find out what’s keeping him out of the actor’s studio.

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Photo Credit: Albert L. Ortega

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