I was interviewed recently by Nathan Lively for the Sound Design Live podcast. We cover the state of live streaming, what it takes to get started, remote wireless live streaming and how to communicate with potential clients about streaming. Detailed show notes are over on Nathan’s post. Here’s a link to the SF Bay Area Webcasters and Live Video Streamers Meetup group I mention.
Today’s the fifth birthday of Twitter, a service that has fundamentally changed the way humans communicate on this planet. The power of Twitter to help foment revolution, change regimes and amplify insane celebrity voices is well documented by now. Living in San Francisco, the epicenter of much Internet innovation, I’ve been lucky to witness and participate in the rise (and fall) of dozens of Internet-based services.
At the end of 2006, I was working for a web video company called PodTech, along with my Geek Entertainment TV cofounder, Irina Slutsky. One of the shows I was tasked to produce was called LunchMeet, a web series where we interview founders of tech startups and get them to do a product demo for us. For episode 11, we visited Twitter’s first San Francisco office on December 1st, 2006. Twitter was barely a 9 month old toddler at the time. Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams sat down with us for about 10 minutes to give us the history, vision and idea around Twitter. Jack then gave me an on camera demo (skip to 9:05) of what the product looked like back then. It’s pretty telling on a lot of levels. SMS and IM were very much an integral part of the platform, there were no rounded corners, the term ‘firehose’ didn’t exist and @Jack had a mere 90 followers at the time.
Enjoy the trip back in time and please excuse my amateur on-camera performance. I’ve always been more comfortable behind the camera. Happy birthday Twitter! –@ekai
I was in Washington, DC this weekend to check out Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear that took place down on the Mall. Since my initial mission was thwarted, I ran around and grabbed video footage of as many creative signs as a could. Here’s the resulting montage.
The guys behind the Life Hacking documentary stopped by and interviewed me about coworking at the Hat Factory. Me in my natural habitat.
Featured today on Boing Boing Video is this excellent piece I shot of pals at Interpretive Arson, creators of the fire-in-your-face DDR reimagined Dance Dance Immolation. Charis and Aaron, also pals, prove to be perfect hosts and fire dance guinea pigs.
I’ve had a bunch of fun watching what the producers of German hyper new media & TV show Elektrischer Reporter have done with the footage I’ve shot for them. It’s all in German so I can only guess as to commentary with their copious English references to Twitter, Creative Commons and backgrounds of retro animated mainframes w/reel-to-reels. Lots of fun clips sourced from the Internet Archive help visually create a nice retro future tech mood. My german speaking friends say it’s really well put together and informative in kind of a hip NPR kind of way.
In this segment on nerd culture, you can see Doctor Popular laying on the nerd thickly with his classic yo-yo moves and some speak-n-spell jamming, all while dubbed in German. Yes, that is the Hat Factory where I shot these frames of Doc.
Elektrischer Reporter – Nerds: Weltretter mit Hornbrillen?
I shot an interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren for this segment:
Elektrischer Reporter – Vorschlagsysteme: Mit den besten Empfehlungen
For this one, I was hired to shoot an interview with EFF‘s Danny O’Brien at their San Francisco offices:
Elektrischer Reporter – Urheber 2.0: Jeder Nutzer ein Pirat?
I’m guessing this segment is about mobile communities, since those words are in English and there’s plenty of shots of mobile devices, location based services and maps. I shot the interview with Tony Jebara of Citysense at Etech in San Jose.
Elektrischer Reporter – Mobile Communities: Unterwegs und unter Freunden
Back in December I was lucky enough to be in Vienna, Austria for the 10th annual incarnation of Roboexotica, the conference for cocktail robots. I shot copious amounts of video of the various booze bots in action and Boing Boing has just published a nicely edited, whirlwind tour of the mayhem from my footage.
I was asked to come up with a couple questions for Adobe Edge, a monthly newsletter aimed at users & developers of Adobe products. I asked about the compatibility of Quicktime in the new Adobe Flash Player now that is supports h.264. They gave me the right answer. No embed in their player unfortunately (!!), so you’ll have to link through to see it.
It seems as though the Double L gyroscopic undead attractor was activated last night which led to countless zombies converging on the San Francisco library where a debate among mayoral candidates was taking place. One mayoral candidate didn’t make it out alive. Chicken John Rinaldi was captured and turned into a zombie as this footage indicates. Best to stay away from the west coast of the US at all costs.
Friend and fellow video blogger Josh Wolf, who had 7 months of his life taken from him by the federal government, made a stellar appearance on the Colbert Report last night. Josh was solidly on his game, even catching Colbert off guard a couple of times. It’s rare to see both Thomas Paine and Charles Manson invoked in an interview, but it all makes complete sense. You gotta watch!
