interviews Archives - Page 3 of 5

The Engadget Interview: Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Napster CEO Chris Gorog about why the original Napster kicked ass, whether it’s better to rent or buy digital music, whether DRM still sucks, and when we’ll see a true celestial jukebox. Let’s begin with a moment of silence for the old Napster. I’ll admit I used it. Did you? Oh, I absolutely used it. What was the attraction that drew 60 million users in about a year’s time? I had a very passionate theory about that, and many questioned my logic, but I felt that it wasn’t ever about free. It was always about the glee of being able to instantaneously access virtually any song you could think

The Engadget Interview: Elliott D. Frutkin, CEO of TimeTrax

TimeTrax is software that lets you turn your PC into a TiVo for satellite radio. In this interview for Engadget, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with CEO Elliott Frutkin about the upstart startup’s prospects, its diffident relationship with the RIAA, the future of music subscription services, and whether the recording of satellite transmissions will be outlawed. Tell me your backstory. I understand TimeTrax was created by Scott Maclean, a lone programmer in Toronto who didn’t like missing cool radio broadcasts in the dead of night. I found out about TimeTrax the way other people did, through an online tech news roundup. Scott wrote an app to record a Blondie concert that was on in the middle of the night. There

The Engadget Interview: Michael Malcolm, CEO and founder of Kaleidescape

The Engadget Interview returns! Veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviewed Michael Malcolm, founder and CEO of Kaleidescape, a DVD movie jukebox that lets you save perfect copies of DVDs to a server stashed out of sight for streaming to your home theater. It recently won home entertainment awards from Sound & Vision Magazine and Popular Science. They discussed the emerging video server category, the lawsuit brought by an overprotective industry group, and why their bare-bones product costs more than J.D.’s car. Give me the 30-second rundown on Kaleidescape – what do you do, where are you located, when were you founded? We were founded four years ago this week. We’re a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., with engineering

The Engadget Interview: John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, Inc.

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviewed John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, Inc., about the company’s soon-to-be-released digital music system, the state of home entertainment, and how to throw a wireless party. Please give me the 30-second rundown on Sonos – what do you do, where are you located, when were you founded? We’re in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass. We’ve been going at this for a little more than two years now. We’re a group of people with prior successful backgrounds who all enjoy music, and we all wanted a better way to experience music around the home. How big is your staff? We’re a little north of 50 people.

The Engadget Interview: Tom Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica caught up with Thomas J. Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics of Youngwood, Penn., at the RoboNexus trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., last month. As robots whirled by on the floor, Burick talked about robots coming down in price to the consumer level, battling PCs for supremacy in the home, and why he didn’t care for “I, Robot.” Before we get into White Box Robotics, tell me about the field. Robotics has come a long way in the past few years. It really has. I’ve been working on the 9-series robot for the past five years. Quite honestly I started out by thinking about applying computer parts to robotics in

The Engadget Interview: Niklas Zennstrom of Skype

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviews Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström about the future of voice communication, using Skype through wi-fi handhelds, and the coming death of the telecom dinosaurs. Please give me a quick backgrounder on Skype. We were founded on Aug. 29, 2003, and now have 70 employees, about half in London and half in Tallinn, Estonia, and some in Luxembourg. With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense. If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things

The Engadget Interview: Mike Ramsay, CEO of TiVo

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist and Engadget correspondent J.D. Lasica cornered TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay in a hallway at the Web 2.0 conference, where the head of the pioneering digital video recorder company talked about TiVo DVD recorders, government meddling in new technologies and what the future of television holds. Talk to me about TiVo not as a company, but as an idea. TiVo owners are passionate about their TiVos. Why does the cult of TiVo command such power? The insider language around this is, Oh my God, we’ve created a monster. It’s apparent we’ve got this compelling consumer proposition. At the end of the day, it has to do with fact that people are discovering they can

The Engadget Interview: Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku

For this week’s Engadget Inteview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spent a few minutes with Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, to discuss digital media, digital music, DRM wackiness and Mona Lisa smiles. For readers who aren’t familiar with Roku, what are you guys about? We’ve been around since October 2002 and we’re based in Palo Alto, Calif. Our focus is building digital media players for home. Our core expertise is to produce great-looking products and great user interfaces. Such as? Our product line includes the Roku SoundBridge and the HD1000. We tell people, wouldn’t you love to see a slide show of your family pictures in full-quality digital on your flat-panel TV in your living room? That resonates. And

The Engadget Interview: Hank Nothhaft, CEO of Danger, Inc.

Last week we kicked off The Engadget Interview with outgoing MPAA president Jack Valenti. This week journalist J.D. Lasica tries out the Sidekick II and speaks with Hank Nothhaft, CEO of Danger, Inc., about the device’s upcoming release, the market for wireless handhelds, the cachet of having Derek Jeter and Paris Hilton as Sidekick fans, and whether, if forced to at gunpoint, he’d buy a Blackberry or a Treo. Give me the 30-second lowdown on Danger. You started back in 2000? That’s right. We’re a 3 ½-year-old private company in Palo Alto, Calif., backed by such big venture capital firms as Redpoint, Mobius and Softbank. Most of our 140 employees are in Palo Alto, California, though a handful are in

The Engadget Interview: DivXNetworks’ Shahi Ghanem and Jordan Greenhall

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spent a few minutes with CEO Jordan Greenhall and President Shahi Ghanem (pictured below) of DivXNetworks. The San Diego company has morphed from a codec-centered technology startup to a full-fledged CE business.The execs offered tantalizing hints about looming deals with Hollywood studios and Netflix, DivX movie kiosks, high-def camcorders and the coming grassroots video revolution. I’m sure some readers have never heard of DivXNetworks. What do you folks do? Ghanem: First, let’s talk briefly about what DivX is. DivX is a compression-decompression technology, a codec. DivXNetworks is the company that invented that technology. We were founded in 2000 in San Diego and now have 110 employees. What’s your business model?