One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful.

Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. I think that’s pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don’t know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that’s about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that’s a very long time.

DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. That too is pretty damn cool.  Today on Alexa it has a US traffic rank of 104, making it one of the country’s highest trafficked sites. And yet what’s interesting is that people think of them as being small. Maybe that’s the charm and what’s so special about their site for artists – it doesn’t feel large.

During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. DevaintART was originally formed during an era where there was no such thing as a social network. Their artist profile pages, ability to add friendships and commenting system was new and filled an amazing market need for people to connect, share and sell their works. Sotira’s inspiration came from the early days of creating a site for Winamp skins. Their artists made other forms of art such as paintings and were looking for a digital home. Ten years later, you have one of the largest and most vibrant community-driven art sites online.

What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? For one thing, don’t be weak. He feels that the new crop of entrepreneurs has it a lot easier than he did and needs to do more with very little. He also feels that his generation built platforms while the new generation will be all about marketing, creating the most powerful generation of marketers the world has ever seen.

The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane. How cool is that?

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During our time at ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut this past week, we were able to peek inside every nook and cranny of the company’s technological side. We discovered some pretty remarkable things about the culture and attitude toward innovation, and while the bulk of that discovery will be seen in a forthcoming Engadget Show segment, we couldn’t help but share some insight from a kind fellow who has been deeply involved in the blinking lights portion of ESPN from day one. We sat down for a brief one-on-one interview with Chuck Pagano — ESPN’s executive vice president of technology — following the outfit’s 3D launch, and while we were both bitter over the 1-1 result in the South Africa vs. Mexico match, he was understandably excited about the future of his firm’s latest channel. For Chuck’s take on 3D, the move to HD and the impending arrival of ESPN streams on your phone, be sure to grab your best reading glasses and click on through.

Continue reading Interview: Chuck Pagano talks ESPN 3D, mobile streaming

Interview: Chuck Pagano talks ESPN 3D, mobile streaming originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I believe we’ve mentioned Moodboard exactly once on the site before, as one of Brett’s picks back when the iPad first released. But it deserves another mention — developer Chris Nurre of A Tiny Tribe (a company founded with a friend to help pay for skeleton equipment and travel) stopped by to see us at WWDC to both show off the app and let us know how is experience on the App Store has been going. While I’m not a designer (a mood board is a real designer’s tool, kind of a collage of photos created to give inspiration or show direction), I was duly impressed by how the app has matured to fill out its space on Apple’s tablet.

Nurre got his app on the App Store the first day the iPad launched — while he’s also published a few iPhone apps, he wanted to try to get something right out of the gate with the bigger device, and Moodboard was it. He built the whole thing on a simulator without a real iPad, which itself is pretty impressive — the app makes good use of multitouch to scale, size and move pictures, and he did a lot of option-clicking to simulate those in the SDK. The one thing he did have to change was a “long press” feature — “it’s a lot easier to keep a mouse still than a finger,” he said, so that had to be adjusted once he actually got a device.

TUAWWWDC 2010: Interview with Moodboard developer Chris Nurre originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s the first few videos All Things D is providing. We expect the full interview to be posted eventually.

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On May 11, Ars Technica and Wired hosted a Smart Salon on cloud computing. The event featured a Q&A with Ray Ozzie on Microsoft’s cloud strategy, a presentation by Nick Carr, opening remarks by Ars’s own Ken Fisher, and a panel on barriers to cloud adoption made up of myself, Ping Li of Accel Partners, Joseph Tobolski of Accenture Technology Labs, and Alex Chriss of Intuit. After the Salon, I was able to catch up with Nick Carr and talk with him more about all things cloud. The first part of our conversation went up last week, so if you didn’t catch that then you’ll definitely want to check it out. What follows below is the rest of our discussion.

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has an interview in Esquire’s women’s issue. In it, she drops a few revealing one-liners:

• “We’ll go through the whole interview, and I’ll say, “I have one last question. I don’t work with assholes. Are you one?”

• “I always do my firing in the morning because that’s when I’m fresh. I mean, why sit there all day thinking: I’m going to fire Joe at 4:59?”

• “I hug employees all the time. I’m a huge contact person. Touch is an extremely important part of the human condition.”

Esquire’s women’s issue >

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We’re fresh off the Palm Developer Day Keynote and a crazy-good interview – both with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer of Palm. We’ll have a full write up of the interview on Monday, but we wanted to hit up the big developer news from this morning’s keynote for those who missed the liveblog.

Though Palm’s dynamic duo didn’t say what version number we’re looking at, they did suggest that ‘by fall’ we should see the features they described today. Primarily we’re talking about new APIs and tools for developers – the main new user-facing feature is an updated version of the App Catalog.

After the break, a preview of some of what’s coming in the next version of webOS.

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Well, things are changing a little in the show and it is moving to a different timeslot which will be in my morning, and my mornings are full to the brim with conference calls most weeks. As such, unfortunately I will be saying my goodbyes to FLOSSWeekly.

I just want to say a huge thank-you to Randal, Leo, Dane, Colleen, all of our guests, and all of the wonderful listeners who have been so supportive and welcoming of me to the show. It has been a blast and I wish Randal and his new co-host the best with FLOSSWeekly!

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Maria did every line production job in the place and then got “promoted” behind the scenes.  And hated it.  So she put an audition tape together, applied for an on-camera reporting job at the then-fledgling network CNBC, and got it.

Lou Dobbs, her boss at CNN who had given her a promotion to a senior producer position, was not happy with her departure.  In fact, he told her that she was making the biggest mistake of her life.

This interview is part of our Leadership series.  It is presented by Marriott with limited commercial interruption.

See Maria Bartiromo’s Full Interview HERE >

Production by Bright Red Pixels.

See Maria Bartiromo’s Full Interview HERE >

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While conducting an interview with Bloomberg, HTC CFO Cheng Hui-ming revealed that the Taiwan-based company is currently exploring the possibility of creating its own smartphone OS. Although readily stating that HTC has no plans to abandon support for Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Google’s Android, Cheng was not so willing to discuss rumors which would see the company acquire Palm. Oddly enough, right after declining to comment on rumors of a HTC takeover of Palm, Cheng ambiguously stated that “there are many multiple factors to be considered together, rather than a simple statement as to own or not to own.” Many analysts, such as RBS Asia’s Steven Tseng feel that having its own OS would ultimately benefit HTC by giving them more control over their products, but add that overseeing its initial and continued development would require a significant amount of resources.

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When Jon Rubenstein agreed to join a fading Palm with the goal of outdoing his previous work on the iPhone at Apple, I’m sure he knew that he had a shot at the CEO role if his project succeeded. But I seriously doubt that he ever expected to give an interview like the one he just gave to CNN Money:

The conventional wisdom is that Palm has blown it and either is going to run out of money or get sold or both.

Clearly we’ve hit a speed bump. No question about it. It’s really disappointing, and it’s frustrating. But, the company has tremendous assets.

The rest of the interview is pretty much on this pattern, where the interviewer asks a question that amounts to, “Aren’t you guys kind of screwed?” Rubenstein responds with something to the effect that “things have been tough, mistakes have been made, but look at what we’ve still got going for us… and if that’s not enough, then hey, look at what Palm had going for it before webOS.”

Throughout the course of the interview, Rubenstein acknowledges the Pre’s initial hardware problems, but he claims that’s in the past now and that quality is up. He also acknowledges that the recent Verizon launch was a flop, but he blames it on the Verizon in-store sales staff’s lack of experience with Palm. And when he has to make the case, yet again and at this late date, for webOS’s existence in a market that’s already dominated by a few established players, he turns to multitasking. 

Yes, people want easy multitasking, but maybe they don’t actually need as much of it as Palm gives them; maybe they just need the little bit that Android gives them, and that Apple will soon give them.

At one point in the interview, the subject of Palm’s anemic software library comes up, and Rubenstein both acknowledges the “long tail” effect and then completely misses its significance.

“I mean, if you look at the long tail of the 150,000 or 180,000, or whatever number Apple has got these days, it’s an amazing number,” Rubenstein says. “The reality is that it’s the first thousand or so that matter and the rest of it is long tail.”

Yes, the rest of it is indeed long tail, and that long tail of apps is precisely what gives the iPhone such a massive advantage over its rivals. The whole point of the long tail is that’s where the bulk of your business comes from… but if Rubenstein doesn’t understand this, then what hope does Palm have? The answer increasingly appears to be: not much.

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Apple’s “Get a Mac” TV spots featuring Justin Long and John Hodgman may soon be a thing of the past if the suspicions of its two stars are correct. During an interview with AV Club, Long was asked about the future of the now iconic commercials that have been on the air since 2006. His response? “You know, I think they might be done. In fact, I heard from John, I think they’re going to move on. I can’t say definitively, which is sad, because not only am I going to miss doing them, but also working with John.” It’s a bit of a shame considering how hilarious they once were, but on the other hand Apple is in serious need of a fresh approach to all of its ads. We mean, if Palm can do it…

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In a must-read interview (for Palm fans, anyway) at CNN Money, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein candidly laid out Palm’s current situation, the missteps of the past year and a half, and why he’s still bully on Palm’s chances to survive and even thrive as an independent company.

Rubinstein speaks out about plenty of issues that we’ve hit here on PreCentral, from the ‘variety of hardware issues’ that plagued early Sprint adopters, to speed, to battery life, to the lower-than-expected sales at Verizon, to the challenges of launching after the Droid, to cash-on-hand, to inventory, to number of apps, to buyout rumors, to mom-focused commercials …if an investment analyst has complained about it in the past year, it’s pretty much here.

Rubinstein doesn’t candy-coat any of it and straight up says that Palm’s main goal right now is simply selling devices, getting ‘to scale.’ Unfortunately, Palm doesn’t have the cash for a huge marketing blitz to juice the numbers (they’re hoping to get ‘viral,’ which could be fun). Instead, Palm’s $590 million is going to R&D and to those next devices we’re all waiting for:

it may take us a while, but we will work our way through this, and we’re continuing to invest very heavily in engineering on both webOS development and on new product development.

Go on and read the whole thing and then let us know: doesn’t it feel good to have a CEO lay it all out? What do you think Palm’s next step should be?

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Uncle Walt has weighed in, and most of the other big tech pundits are starting to weigh in on the Apple iPad. The Chicago Sun Times columnist and Mac geek extraordinaire Andy Ihnatko has offered his input, not only in the first of what he says will be many posts about the device, but also in an interview on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Live MacBreak Weekly.

The headline says it all — Ihnatko says that the iPad is one of the best computers ever. He starts his review by saying that the iPad meets or exceeds all of the hype that preceded the release, and then goes on to mention that “it’s a computer that many people have wanted for years.”

As in Walt Mossberg’s review, Andy comments that it can easily last 10 hours on a charge, it can hold just about any piece of media you ever want to carry with you, and that it does the “dull compulsories of computing (Mail, the web, and Microsoft Office-style apps) so well” that the iPad will, in many cases, take the place of a standard laptop computer.

Ihnatko, who has had the pleasure of playing with an iPad for the last week, gushes about Apple’s innovation, saying “I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?”

The result? As he says, “The iPad user experience is instantly compelling and elegant… It’s a computer that’s designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations.”

Ihnatko thinks that Apple got the design of the iPad right because “the excitement slips away after about ten seconds, and you’re completely focused on the task at hand… In situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and menagerie.”

During his TWiT Live interview, he stated that “battery life is frickin’ incredible.” With the most aggressive use, he was able to get 6 – 7 hours of use, but when he set the device for more sedate battery usage (volume and brightness both turned down), he was able to get over 11 hours of use. For those of you who are used to getting your laptop scorched by a Macbook, you’ll be glad to hear that the iPad never gets warm. Ihnatko was demonstrating web browsing on the device, and was amazed at how fast scrolling occurred.

We’ll try to get Andy’s TWiT Interview link up a bit later for your viewing pleasure.

TUAWAndy Ihnatko: iPad is pure innovation, one of best computers ever originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In an interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company’s plans to launch color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink’s parent company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won’t be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon.

“Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially,” Peng told Xconomy. “But we have already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011.”

Peng went on to insist that E Ink’s color capabilities compare favorably with that of newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy magazines.

I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I wasn’t too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits with what Peng says in the interview.

Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color to E Ink screens. It’s likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing.

While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren’t standing still. I didn’t care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm’s CES booth, but the company claims that it has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better. I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn’t able to go. We’ve rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month.

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Been holding your breath waiting for the "I am T-Pain" auto-tune app to come to Android? Ain’t gonna hAAAaaa-pen. At least right now. In an interview with All Things D’s Peter Kafka, Smule co-founder and CEO Jeff Smith lays out his reasons for avoiding Android, including having to contend with multiple versions of the operating system.

"Android is not in the plans for Smule," he said. "We just don’t see an opportunity for us to make money short-term on Android."

"We love what Google’s doing, we’re really excited about it … and people are using their products. The challenges with Android are — the retail distrubution is not clear for us, and we don’t see how we could monetize through their current distribution. It’s not one platform. … So, from the developer standpoint, it’s expensive to get into Android."

Hard to blame the man for wanting to make a living. So, no official T-Pain auto-tune on Android. And you know what, we’re OK with that.) Video of the interview after the break. [All Things D]

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Carol Bartz appeared on CNBC to talk Yahoo since today is the company’s 15 year anniversary. In the course of the interview she heard the usual questions:

• Would she have sold to Microsoft for $36? Of course.
• Is the stock underpriced? Yes.
• Would she sell the company? She gives a flip answer saying, at the right price, sure. Then CNBC started hammering her asking what that price might be. She then backpedaled as far away from the question as possible.
• Why isn’t Yahoo as huge as Google? Because they do search, Yahoo does something else.
• Why isn’t it as hot at Facebook? She gets this one a lot, and her response was sort of funny: “Remind me what’s their revenue.” A cute answer for now, but Facebook looks like a rocket, ready to start generating serious revenue. This sort of snide comment will probably haunt her in two years.

Weirdly, she used the beginning of the interview to trash the government saying the it is holding back the consumer from having confidence in the economy. The government is sending out too much negative news, she says.

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See Also:

• Yahoo Is Getting Very Efficient — At Dying
• Yahoo Finally Announces Deal To Integrate Twitter
• Yahoo Just Put Out Two Videos To Convince Employees It’s Still In The Search Game

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