Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, spoke animatedly at the 140 Character Conference in New York on June 15, 2009, about news as a public service rather than a business and the growing impact of social media services like Twitter. I caught up with her as she was leaving and did a 3-minute video interview, in which she says, “People want to smarten up — and they want Twitter to smarten up” so that it can play a key role in the news ecosystem.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 7, 2009, Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Company, took out time to sit down with a couple of bloggers for an interview. Chris Heuer and JD Lasica interviewed Mulally about how Ford is using social media to drive innovation and transformation.
A tour inside the newsroom of the pioneering citizen journalism publication Following is a Q&A with Jean K. Min, communications director of OhmyNews International, the trail-blazing citizen journalism publication in Seoul, South Korea. The exchange — with questions put to him by myself and Matthew Lee of the Center for Citizen Media — took place in January 2007.
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica bumped into Paul Griffin, CEO of Griffin Technology, at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif., on Friday. The self-effacing Griffin discusses the panoply of products his company puts out for gadget lovers, Apple’s dominance in the portable music market, and what’s ahead for Griffin in the peripherals space. How long ago did you found your company? We started 13 years ago. What products did you start out focusing on? We started off making video adapters and later on started making serial adapters. We’ve been focused since the early days on making connectivity products, and later on we began making stand-alone products or peripherals that didn’t rely on
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Christian Bubenheim, vice president and general manager, Thales’ Magellan Consumer Products Business about portable GPS systems, how you use them in the wild, and how to find your car in Shea Stadium’s parking lot. Why don’t you give us the nickel tour of Thales and Magellan? Thales Navigation is the result of four GPS companies that came together over the past few years. The business really comprises three business units: Magellan on the consumer side, which includes outdoor handheld products and vehicle navigation; on the professional side we service survey and GIS or mapping customers, and on the OEM side selling into the automotive industry, avionics, lots of consumer
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian about the rollout of the Slingbox, its disruptive effects on Hollywood business models, the notions of place-shifting and personal broadcasting, and an announcement he’s making right here on Engadget about support for a new operating system. This week I’ll be combining my questions with a few that our readers have posted on the site. I saw those, and I was like, “Wow! Pretty impressive.” Let’s start with the basics. How many employees do you have, where are you located, and when did Sling Media get started? We have 30 to 40 folks. We’re headquartered in San Mateo in the Bay Area, as well as
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Orb Networks CEO Jim Behrens about the growing importance of personal media, catching television on the road on nearly any device, and our networked, always-on, access-your-stuff-from-anywhere future. Tell us about the background of Orb Networks. How did Orb get started? We actually got started as a company called Bravo Brava! in 2000, primarily centered around technology-based education products. We began using interactive television as a solution, and we took a different approach than others were taking. We wanted to allow people to use any device that connects with the Internet to be the interactive portion of the experience. The content creators could continue to give you a unidirectional signal,
For this week’s Engadget Interview, journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Steve Heiner, the head of Nikon‘s digital single lens reflex systems, about how Nikon is faring in the transition to a digital world, its new line of D70S and D50 cameras, and the hullabaloo about Nikon’s encrypting white balance metadata in RAW image files in some of its cameras. Or at least he tried. Heiner, an accomplished photographer, spoke from Nikon’s headquarters in Melville, NY, with two media representatives listening in. Let’s start with the big picture. In the age of film, Nikon was always known as the class of camera manufacturers. How has Nikon been faring now that we’re transitioning to the digital age? Nikon has had a line
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Bluetooth SIG executive director Mike Foley from his headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., about wireless headphones, hands-free phone gabbing, and what kinds of Bluetooth-enabled gadgets we’ll be seeing in the years ahead. For those who aren’t familiar with Bluetooth, what is it and why should we care? From the big-picture perspective, Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology with its mission in life to replace cables and to allow devices to communicate with each other without having to plug them together. Work on this began in the mid- to late ’90s. Since then, work has been done on enhancing the specification, creating a good test program that devices go through before
For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Dave Ulmer, director of marketing for Motorola Media Solutions about Motorola’s upcoming release of iRadio and how the technology may forever change how we listen to radio. Oh, and no satellites involved. Shine that spotlight on the big picture, would you? Why is iRadio a big deal? Sure. Well, iRadio is rather unique for Motorola in that it’s not a piece of hardware but a music service. It enables a consumer to have their choice of hundreds of channels of commercial-free radio and talk and their MP3 collection wherever they happen to be – whether at home, on the go or in their car. The car is the focus
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