SPEAKER_00: Today on This Week in Startups, Dan of Tip Top website wades into the shark tank. We'll chat with legendary entrepreneur Adam Curry. And Facebook's got this whole town on lockdown. All that and more right now on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_05: Hello, everybody.

SPEAKER_08: Welcome to This Week in Startups. We just got back from London town, correct, Tyler?

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, fairly old England. How did we do?

SPEAKER_08: How did we do? That was awesome. Good times. Launched the Open Angel Forum London. Yes. Packed room. Yes. They loved it. Yeah. A little controversy. It was sort of like interlopers coming to London. Some people were like, what are you doing here?

SPEAKER_14: We have our own stuff. Yes. But we sort of settled that down.

SPEAKER_15: We're here to show you how it's done. Yeah, no. That was not what we came with. Much more humble approach than that.

SPEAKER_17: The approach we came with was if London wants this, and they did vote that they wanted that to be the next city, and the entrepreneurs want it, and the angels want it, we're happy to do it.

SPEAKER_20: It works really well. They have a slightly different way of doing things. Yes. It's a little more considerate.

SPEAKER_21: They actually pay attention during the...

SPEAKER_15: Oh, they definitely pay attention. Yeah. That was the best Q&As maybe of any... Open Angel Forum. Open Angel Forum.

SPEAKER_17: At the other Open Angel Forums, I had to tell the U.S. investors, please don't take your BlackBerry app when the entrepreneur is presenting. Right.

SPEAKER_08: And then I told them that, and they were like, well, of course we wouldn't do that. Yeah, we wouldn't do that. Yeah, exactly. A lot of matters. And also, we did the keynote at Future of Web Apps. Yes. What a great conference Carson puts on, so thank him for that. And I'll also be keynoting his event in Vegas in February. I stopped speaking at events, but Carson supported me early on when I was a nobody, and you've got to be loyal to your friends. So anytime he asks me to speak somewhere, I go. And also, let's face it, free trip to London, pretty dope. Right. And any excuse to go to Vegas and be a degenerate gambler, I'm there. Welcome to the program, Adam Curry.

SPEAKER_28: Hey, Jason, how are you doing? Good to see you.

SPEAKER_29: Good to see you, man. We've been friends for a long time.

SPEAKER_30: 20-plus years, maybe, or something like that? Yeah, something like 20 years. Back to the Silicon Alley days.

SPEAKER_33: Back to the Silicon Alley days, and we're going to talk today about your amazing epic career. But we're also going to talk about, why do you think I'm joking? I'm not giving you an epic career, man.

SPEAKER_35: No, I feel so old when you do that. Yes, we're going to go back to the 70s. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_36: You know, I'm having the same thing. I feel old now, too. I think it's what it is. We're getting a little bit older.

SPEAKER_00: You have to face it. It happens. It happens. But in addition to your excellent career, we have an excellent sponsor in .co. Oh, my God, at .co. We love you guys for sponsoring the show. Over 500 .co domains have been registered. Many of you on the show have registered domains. Tweet us a .co name that you've purchased with the Twist hashtag, and we'll pick one of you.

SPEAKER_39: So what are they? They're a domain registrar? Domain registrar, yeah, .co. What country is .co?

SPEAKER_32: I have no idea. Like Columbia? It's a great question. I have no idea, but I do know that it sounds professional. It does.

SPEAKER_41: It sounds like Co, like your company. Like company, yeah.

SPEAKER_08: And so all the .coms are taken. These guys are available on GoDaddy. You can just go there and buy it and go create your own opportunity. I'm using a lot of .co names. I bought at least two dozen right now, and they're not giving them to me for free. I have to pay for them. You get a truly global, recognizable, incredible option for branding your online presence. I've told everybody this over and over again. Your domain name is very important when you're going to raise angel investing, when you're doing branding, domain speak, and get yourself a great one at .co. Thank them on Twitter by saying thank you at .co for supporting This Week in Startups and independent media. And we're going to give one of you guys a free, we'll pay for your domain name. That's what we're going to do.

SPEAKER_00: So just tweet that you bought a domain name at .co, and we'll pick one of you guys and give you one for free. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Let's do the Shark Tank.

SPEAKER_44: Bizarre.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, it kind of went away. I don't know what happened with that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's crazy. You must get asked to be on reality TV shows constantly.

SPEAKER_51: No, not really, not really.

SPEAKER_50: Oh, your ex-wife used to be on shows in the...

SPEAKER_51: Well, she's a singer. She's super famous.

SPEAKER_53: And we did a reality show about our family, Adam's family, in the Netherlands in 2003, I think it was.

SPEAKER_56: So that would be like the equivalent of the Osborne shows there?

SPEAKER_57: It was actually, it was right after the Osborne's, you know. Modeled after it somewhat.

SPEAKER_53: Which was started by a guy who used to be a production assistant on the Headbangers Ball. Ah. And Greg was kind of hanging out with the Osborne's and, you know, they really needed something to... It was just shot footage and then he kind of put it together and then it became this massive thing. And I was like, wow, that's cool. And what was nice about that show is we did it all ourselves, one and a half camera. Literally had one camera guy sleep in our house, stay with us all the time. I did second camera, just, you know, a little Sony Handycam and edited our Final Cut Pro. Wow. So I had one cameraman, one editor, and we did a full hour every week.

SPEAKER_61: It was a big deal. Yeah, 13 weeks. It was fun, though. It was a good experience. And it paid extremely well. Which is the most important part of it. That's why I did it, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_64: You have to get paid. Dan, you're on the line. Where are you calling from, Dan? Florida. From Florida. Okay.

SPEAKER_65: I'm actually, we got two offices, one in Pennsylvania, one in Florida. I want to give a shout-out to Adam in the morning.

SPEAKER_67: Hey, in the morning to you, my friend. Adam knows me from edan.com. He reads a lot of my email.

SPEAKER_69: I sure do.

SPEAKER_70: I sure do.

SPEAKER_71: So, Dan, you know the rules of Shark Tank. You have 60 seconds to present your idea. I'm going to ask everybody in the chat room to get ready to rate your pitch on a scale of 1 to 10. So they'll type pitch, colon, and a number, and then your idea. They're going to rate that 1 to 10 as well in the chat room. Are you ready to go? We'll put the counter at 60 seconds. Are you ready, Dan?

SPEAKER_74: Ready when you are, Jason.

SPEAKER_75: Okay, in 3, 2, 1, go.

SPEAKER_77: Hey, Jason and Adam. TipTopWebsite.com is the place to create a website online. In 60 seconds, packages start at only $1.95 a month. Sign up today. I'll give you a free domain. Hostie is included. What differs us from all these other click-and-build website systems out there? First of all, ours is the easiest to use. We've been online since 2005 and have over 7,000 paying members that absolutely love us. Okay. We launched in 2005. Been profitable one week after we launched. How? Because I designed the whole system. Everything's at Rackspace. 7,000 members love us. They pay us every month. We are search engine masters. Jason, you'll appreciate this. Some of the hardest keywords in the industry, like create a website, build a website, free websites. We're on the first page of Google. Jason, I am a gladiator. I played a gladiator in TV in the 1990s. Why was I cast? Because I'm a true gladiator. You are a gladiator. I want you on the board. I want you to take this to the next level and go for an exit in 18 to 24 months. What kind of exit, do you ask? Well, Homestead sold to Intuit for $170 million in 2007. Go down to these value to over a billion dollars. We blow the boat away.

SPEAKER_71: Very good. Well done. You had a lot to say in there. What I got from this is that you are a website hosting company like a Squarespace or a click-and-builder website. 7,000 customers in the last five years. Presentation was pretty clear. I'll give the presentation a 7. The idea, I think, is also maybe a 7 or so. It's a pretty common idea. There's a lot of these out there. Didn't hear anything that was particularly innovative in the idea.

SPEAKER_83: Let me ask the chat room to tell us what they think.

SPEAKER_85: And, Adam, rate the idea and rate the pitch. I'll give him an 8. I like that he had a comp in there, a comparable, saying go that he just evaluated at a billion dollars.

SPEAKER_53: I like that he had an exit number in mind. I mean, sounds like, if I just do quick math, if he's got 7,000 people paying every single month, was it $195? Yeah, maybe some are paying $150. So, he's doing like $150,000. Apparently, it seems profitable. So, maybe this is the kind of thing that just needs to have water added and can scale. Yeah. Let me interject.

SPEAKER_77: The prices start at $1.95 a month. We have many upsells. Our most popular package is $9.95 a month. We're doing like, we're close to a million dollars a year right now. Right. Oh, wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_91: Okay. Well, that's a good number to include in the pitch. Yeah.

SPEAKER_93: Minus one on the pitch. Oh, yeah. I'm 7.5 now, man.

SPEAKER_98: You should have run it. You're looking at the CEO, the founder, the tech guy, the producer. You're looking at everything. You're looking at a one-man shop. And he's handsome, too. He's a handsome devil. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_101: He gets half a point for being handsome. Okay.

SPEAKER_104: Anyway, finish your assessment. The idea, I mean, the idea is not the most revolutionary thing in the world. No.

SPEAKER_106: I can see, though, from a marketing standpoint, I'd like to be done in 60 seconds. Sure.

SPEAKER_107: If that's what I heard him say, okay, that to me sounds, on one hand, like, okay, I'd really want that. Yeah. And I actually would use that because I use like Squarespace and stuff.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, I use Squarespace, too. It's wonderful. Just to rack something up real quick. Yeah. But I can see where if I just need a website in 60 seconds and it's all done, yeah, that would be pretty valuable. I mean, I think I might use that. So it kind of depends on the marketing because it can also be a detractor. You know, it's like, well, you know, what kind of website am I really getting?

SPEAKER_77: Our website's, look, honestly, 100 times better than Squarespace. Leo is all about Squarespace. Chase, you need to jump on board with tiptopwebsite.com. I got it. He's pitching, man. Let's get it. He's pushing real heavy. Yeah, I like it.

SPEAKER_112: Tyler, scores for the presentation, scores for the idea. And Tyler, I got an insight for you, by the way.

SPEAKER_77: Most of the shark takes you have are like a flying car with Wi-Fi. Let's get down to earth. Tyler knows me.

David Friedberg: I actually traded him a domain name for a ticket to your conference last year. Oh, very good. Smart idea. Let's let Tyler speak. Let Tyler speak.

SPEAKER_119: To be clear, it was a domain name for Jason, right? Okay. It sounds like I just like. All right. Yes.

SPEAKER_122: Tyler, are you basically selling access to me? Is that what's going on here?

SPEAKER_123: This was a domain. I think it is a good business. You should start selling access to me. I don't know anything about it, but I want 60%.

SPEAKER_124: 60, 40. Yeah. See, he just said Jason got the domain name. I did get the domain name.

SPEAKER_103: But I mean, I think you should just sell straight up access to me. Set up a meeting with me. 500 bucks. I'll take 300. You take two. Yeah. But I don't know anything about the 500.

SPEAKER_126: Pay to pitch.

SPEAKER_85: And you wonder why these guys call in with this kind of pitch. Listen to the master here. You know how to do it here.

SPEAKER_15: It feels a bit like a Sunday in a snowstorm. Hold on a second.

SPEAKER_136: I've seen that one. Got to write that down there.

SPEAKER_135: Sunday. Sunday. Like a Sunday with ice cream. Yes. With the whipped cream and the nuts and the cherry.

SPEAKER_104: In a snowstorm. Yes. In some way, it's similar and sweet, but you may not be able to see it?

SPEAKER_20: Right. Well, you can't fully enjoy it. Appreciate it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: In some context, it's great.

SPEAKER_104: But in other contexts, like a Sunday in the desert was what you want to be.

SPEAKER_16: You don't want to be a Sunday in a snowstorm. I got it. Okay. So that's awesome. Now, give us the scores. The scores. The pitch sounded like an infomercial to me.

SPEAKER_20: It does sound like an infomercial, doesn't it? And it distracted and detracted, I think.

SPEAKER_08: Well, if you look at the website. I'll pull it up here for a second, if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_144: Because it's an incredibly valuable service and space.

SPEAKER_71: The website feels also almost like an infomercial. It's like really trying to engage you to get you to sell. I'm not against that. And I'm not against it at all. That's not a dig. That's a...

SPEAKER_145: I spent 10 years on the NBC contract. They trained me. Beautiful. There you go.

SPEAKER_104: Apparently, from the interactions on this call, you have been trained in the art of sales.

SPEAKER_20: Right. Scores. Scores. Pitch. Seven. Concept. Eight and a half. Really? Yeah. I love this space. I just feel like the delivery style feels a bit Sunday in the...

SPEAKER_151: Billy Mays? Huh? It's got a little Billy Mays to it. A little Billy...

SPEAKER_16: Exactly. A little Billy Mays. Hey, that stuff works, man. Yes, he was. So here's the thing. You're going to love my nuts.

SPEAKER_71: I have a question. 7,000 customers, a million dollars in revenue after how many years?

SPEAKER_00: Five years it's been in business? Five years. How much have you invested in the business? How much has been invested?

SPEAKER_72: Listen, I take this all out of my pocket. About two years ago, I went to TICC of Connecticut. You may know Jonathan Cohen out of New York, one of the famed investors.

SPEAKER_77: They bought it for 10%. Uh-huh. So they're looking to help grow. They put me in some great contacts. I've had a few contacts with Brad Greenspan, but I decided not to go with him. Fantastic entrepreneur, but he had different ideas. I'm looking for... Not money. I'm the one guy that's not going to look for money from you. You know, looking for relationships to grow the business and go for an exit. You know, this is not a concept. This is not an idea. Most of them, this is America. Most of the bands in the country, mom and pop shops. Like I said, GoDaddy will upsell you. You're going to be 500 bucks out the door. Squarespace, CSS, no one knows what they're talking about. You send your aunt or your uncle or your mom and dad to this, they're going to have a website online.

SPEAKER_93: Every day I get customers leaving GoDaddy, Homestead, and Squarespace coming to me. Every day.

SPEAKER_00: I have to say, there is something about the pitch of 60 seconds.

SPEAKER_158: I like that.

SPEAKER_00: And $1.99 a month.

SPEAKER_158: That's what I like the most.

SPEAKER_00: It seems like that's the best part of it, right?

SPEAKER_158: A free domain included. .co even, Jason. Whatever you want.

SPEAKER_160: With the domain included? With the domain included, domain's going to cost you eight bucks, right?

SPEAKER_72: Oh, no. Forget it. Forget it. Listen, you're going to get into $1.95. You stay at $1.95. I'm thrilled. Stay forever.

SPEAKER_161: So many people have multiple websites. You're going to probably want to upgrade down the road. If you don't, you're going to tell 10 friends how much you like it. Swore them out. Forget about being ranked on the first page of Google.

SPEAKER_163: You don't make any money until year two or until you upsell, right? You're breaking even or losing money.

SPEAKER_93: Each customer is worth almost $200 to me. If they're a $1 customer, a $10 customer.

SPEAKER_106: Interesting. Hey, what I like is the guy comes in with a ready-made pitch. He's making money. It's profitable. Where do I sign? Exactly. Let's get in on this business.

SPEAKER_72: Jason, I left TV in 1995 to get in the internet. I've been profitable ever since, 1995 through this.

SPEAKER_77: This is my latest project five years ago. I met you last year at TechCrunch. Your head running around. And this is a winner. This is not some pie-in-the-sky idea. Hey, we need bootstrap money. It's not some nonsense. You're talking to a guy that knows his business and does it all himself. I wrote every line of code. It took me two and a half years to build.

SPEAKER_71: So, I think to make this acquirable, there's going to need to be some asset base of developers

SPEAKER_08: who, when they buy it, they know it's going to be stable. So, my advice would be you need to have maybe one or two developers in the valley in a little tiny office somewhere and maybe add a marketing acquisition person so that you can show the

SPEAKER_83: acquisition, like ramp it up to maybe $5 million in revenue.

SPEAKER_172: What is the ultimate goal? Do you want to get out? Do you want to cash out? Who wants money? Listen, I love this.

SPEAKER_77: This is like my third child. I absolutely love it. I love it more than the active business. It's fantastic. I'd love to cash out a year and a half, two years from now and go on to the next project. I heard there's a great office in Mahalo. It has a little space for two developers to sit down to. I used to go to Santa Monica Junior College. This is a partnership deal that Jason, a big name, needs to get into Adam Curry. Adam, I think we've talked back and forth about this before. John and I have talked about C. Dvorak. It's fantastic in the morning to him, too. This needs to get to the next level. It's a ready-made business, Jason.

SPEAKER_180: So, you love it like you're their child and you'd like to sell it in 18 months, which is, what can every parent say about their child?

SPEAKER_179: I love my kid, but I'll sell it. Sold!

SPEAKER_77: No problem. I grew up close to the valley there. You know better than I. Everyone thinks you're smarter than the next guy. So, if someone wants to buy it for 10 times earning because they're going to do wonderful things with it, we'll let them buy it. We'll go on to the next thing. This is a fantastic business. It's one of the few big calls you're ever going to have on your show. The company's already making money and the kind of money I'm talking. You know, you have one person behind the show here. It's a mobile unit. We have, you know, racks-based servers. It's fully scalable. This is a done deal.

SPEAKER_08: Awesome. You did a great job. We thank you for being on the show and we will be in touch by email.

SPEAKER_83: Thank you.

SPEAKER_157: By 10 by 10, Jason. 10 by 10. I'll take those scores.

SPEAKER_83: 10 by 10. Okay. That's it. 10.

SPEAKER_157: Thanks for being there.

SPEAKER_161: Adam, gold coin challenge. You got it?

SPEAKER_191: Gold coin challenge. What is this?

SPEAKER_161: What's your, what's your, are we on no agenda or are we on this thing as startups?

SPEAKER_192: I got, I got all, I got all my coins here. What is this?

SPEAKER_101: You got your, I'm being challenged. I'm being challenged. If I don't have my, my coins, there's my no agenda challenge coin right there.

SPEAKER_195: Congratulations. Hey, you guys, take it easy.

SPEAKER_197: Thanks for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_196: Jason, what is this? Jason, you got my information.

SPEAKER_198: Contact me directly.

SPEAKER_197: I'll give you a good deal.

SPEAKER_198: I'm stoked. Come in. Series A round. Jason, no money out of your pocket. Two introductions. We're going to take this thing. All right.

SPEAKER_200: I'll take your sushi, nice steak, and bowl. All right. Awesome.

SPEAKER_29: Sounds good. I will see you there. Wow. I think I've never been pitched so hard. He did a good job. He did a good job. I like the aggressiveness.

SPEAKER_201: I like a guy like that working for me. He's good.

SPEAKER_202: He's, actually, if you had him working for you, you'd be like, please. You could stay home. Yeah. It's, oh, he, yeah. You could just stay home.

SPEAKER_140: He did a pretty good job.

SPEAKER_204: He did the work.

SPEAKER_140: It's great.

SPEAKER_204: Nice guy.

SPEAKER_140: Nice guy. He's not like your prototypical Valley guy. Which I think is a plus. So he's sort of outside the system, which is. I think that's a plus. Which is a plus. Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: You know, what is it really? But, hey, how often do you get a business that seems to be running, you know, and that can really do it? And it's an established sector.

SPEAKER_83: I think they should just be on television.

SPEAKER_209: That's... You get, like, a dollar a month.

SPEAKER_83: That's actually a very good idea.

SPEAKER_211: Sign up now, a dollar a month, and you're signed up in 60 seconds. A dollar a month, website up in 60 seconds. Boom.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah. That's, well, we kind of hit on that. Yeah. It sounded like an infomercial. Felt like if he was doing it on television, he'd probably triple his business overnight.

SPEAKER_00: It's a great value proposition, but I think the value proposition's a 10, and the execution's like a 6. So, but what's good is, if you've got that great value proposition, you've got to catch it up, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_215: Well, it's not my kind of business, so.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Hosting, not my business either. But I tell you who's also doing a great job. GoDaddy starts at less than five. It's amazing that we have GoDaddy as the...

SPEAKER_00: How coincidental. How coincidental is that? But starting at less than $5 per month and promising 99.9% uptime, I have at least 2,000 domain names hosted at GoDaddy.

SPEAKER_08: They provide 24 hours, seven days a week support from GoDaddy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they have your unlimited disk space bandwidth for less than $15 a month, plus enter the code

SPEAKER_00: TWIST20, and when you check out, you'll save an additional 20% on one, two, three, two, or three years of hosting.

SPEAKER_220: And we've got the TWIST749. You've got a domain name for $7.49. Oh, right. TWIST749.

SPEAKER_00: Actually, that's right. Yes. Adam watching the program and noting that down. Yes. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy. And if you want to just thank both sponsors on Twitter right now, say thank you to at GoDaddy

SPEAKER_36: and at .co. Why not buy a .co at GoDaddy? That would be perfect. That's a double whammy.

SPEAKER_08: And then you're really supporting the show. It is your giri to support the show. If you're listening to my voice, you get a lot out of the show. I get a lot out of the show. Go buy a domain and help the show out. And tell them Adam Curry sent you.

SPEAKER_230: Yes, please do. Advertising is working again, huh?

SPEAKER_107: You know, that's really interesting because I'm now kind of moving away from it. Really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: There's two things I'm doing right now. Obviously, I'm still a co-founder and shareholder of Mevio, which is a really high-volume business. Video network. Yeah, it's a video network. And I think that that is actually kind of established and working well and growing. For me personally, I've always wanted to have a product, whatever it would be. In this case, I have like two virtual products, no agenda, actually three, daily source code, and then the big app show. And I really wanted to find a way for people who liked it so much that they would just give me money.

SPEAKER_107: And that's actually working. So people will pay for content?

SPEAKER_106: Or donate? I don't know if it's content. Well, first of all, it's open donation, but I just call it support.

SPEAKER_107: It's not like a tip jar or anything. I'm serious about it. And if you have enough audience, I mean, if you get 50,000 or 100,000 people, then they can actually support you. Really? And they will. If you have a really good product, they will do that. And I've always kind of thought that I could be a televangelist or something like that. You have that.

SPEAKER_240: Yeah.

SPEAKER_107: Cult leader, perhaps. Yeah, cult leader. But I don't have any real religion in that regard. But with the no agenda show and with the big app show, it's actually working. Now, it's not something you can say, oh, well, honey, I know that we're going to be able to buy a new car because this is what comes in every month. It's not predictable. But what's great is if you do something that sucks, it immediately shows up in how much money, how much support you receive from the audience.

SPEAKER_00: In some ways, it becomes a virtuous feedback mechanism.

SPEAKER_107: Immediate. It keeps on your toes. I mean, I spend a lot of time working on this programming.

SPEAKER_53: And if you just suck or if you miss the mark, then immediately you notice that in the support. And it's a real – I love it right now. I'm really enjoying doing that. We have enough mass online that we can do these things. And I know that I always have to deliver an outstanding product and I don't have to worry about any other conflict of interest or anything.

SPEAKER_246: Oh, in terms of reading a sponsor.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, I don't have to go to Madison Avenue and service the client or any of that, which I've always found a bit tedious.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. I'm not against advertising. I think it's important. We need it in our lives. But it's funny because I went to see the social network. Yeah. What did you think? Well, it's really weird. I don't know if you had this, but when you watch that movie, there's so many things that you – well, there's so much behind that part of the story. Right. Or this is how it really goes. Or here's how a guy really gets screwed up through delusion. And you're like, it feels so incomplete. Right. And then all of a sudden it's like it ends with 500 million people, $25 billion valuation. I'm like, is that the message people are getting from this story? I'm sorry about that.

SPEAKER_248: That felt pretty wrong. Justin Timberlake steals the movie, by the way. Absolutely. JT totally steals the movie. Love that.

SPEAKER_230: The performance was amazing. But you know Sean Parker. I mean, I do.

SPEAKER_08: I know Sean Fanning, not really Parker.

SPEAKER_249: So that was a little weird for me.

SPEAKER_08: Not really – I mean, so people know, not an accurate portrayal of Sean Parker. I wouldn't know. Who is very sort of – I mean, he is a little bit of a ladies' man and very social. And you'll see him at the club popping bottles. It's a dramatization.

SPEAKER_248: It's a dramatization. But the one thing that I think is a big takeaway for everybody is – and, of course, they've

SPEAKER_107: changed that now – is no ads. You know, this is go for it. You're building something cool. Right. And I've always liked punk rock.

SPEAKER_53: You know, I think that's really good. And, of course, Facebook is nothing like that at all. Right. So, you know, they're probably selling more of my information and my profile and my habits than I care to know about. Right.

SPEAKER_107: So, you know, it's not really true to what Facebook is today. But that idea of, you know, ads kind of spoils a lot of things.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. If you don't do them properly, it really sucks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: And certainly the banner ad is the worst creation ever. Display. We call it display, Jason. I know.

SPEAKER_08: But it's always been ugly and just not well done. I mean, you were there at the birth of the Internet. I mean, it's so hard to –

SPEAKER_259: I created a lot of banners, I'll tell you that.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's hard to interview you because you have, like, this sort of three different things. It's so hard to know where to start. I sort of feel like I want to go backwards. You can do that. Podfather, one of the first podcasters. Certainly, you were the largest podcaster for many years. How did you hear about podcasting and how did you get started in it?

SPEAKER_212: Well, it really wasn't called podcasting.

SPEAKER_53: That name came much later. But I was reasonably good friends with Dave Weiner. Right. It was kind of hard to be friends with Dave Weiner, as everyone will attest to.

SPEAKER_248: I've been great friends with him and Mortal Enemies. It goes in and out. Yep. And we actually met in – I'm going to say it was 2000. Maybe 2000. Yeah. And he was really pushing RSS.

SPEAKER_53: Sure. And at the time – actually, he wrote about it. It was a pretty cool little piece that's still on his scripting.com, scripting news. He said, you know, what I want – at the time, we had broadband, which was always on. It wasn't fast. It was always – you didn't have to log into your computer.

SPEAKER_107: It just stayed on. And I was like, you know, what really sucks about the Internet is if you want to listen to an – we weren't talking about video at the time. Right. It was just audio. You have to click and then wait for 20 minutes and it downloads. Right. And the experience is horrible. So what I really always wanted was why can't your computer, which is now always on, in some background process, be bringing this file and only tell you that it's there when it's actually there and then you click on it. Right. So then the magic is kind of you don't know what's happening. It's like the news. You know, you don't know that there's three days' worth of work that went into this one piece. Right. Like, you turn it on and it's there.

SPEAKER_271: You get the finished product.

SPEAKER_107: And from that came the enclosure element and RSS.

SPEAKER_53: Right. And then from that, although many people have – I don't want to take any credit because I only get all kinds of for that, but I wound up with an Apple script that would literally

SPEAKER_107: fish out the enclosure from an RSS feed and then into iTunes, update it so that it would be on the iPod. And I started the Daily Source Code, which I think was – if you want to talk of podcasts,

SPEAKER_273: delivered in that outside of what Dave was doing with – he did a show. Coffee Notes?

SPEAKER_53: No, no, no. Before that. No, no, before then with Dan – the guy at Harvard. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_107: I forget his name. So that was – Dave was already putting his shows into an RSS feed. But I kind of popularized it, started getting – because what we then needed – we had the transmitter. We then needed the receiver. Right. So we needed aggregators. Yep. And so the Daily Source Code was literally me talking about what we could do with this,

SPEAKER_276: building an audience, and then giving live feedback to developers. Andrew Grumet was one. We had the iPod – the Lemon – the – Lemon something. Lemon, iPodder. Yeah, iPodder. All these things. Right.

SPEAKER_107: And the whole idea was you can't develop a receiver if you don't have someone broadcasting continuously. So my job was to – every day there would be a new file.

SPEAKER_277: You were like sort of the test case.

SPEAKER_107: Well, yeah, there would be a new file, and then we could see what broke.

SPEAKER_248: So, you know, we learned all these interesting things, like if I changed my GUID, then all

SPEAKER_107: of a sudden one aggregator would re-download the entire feed. Yeah, yeah. We learned a lot of stuff that had to be hashed out. And then, you know, then the name came, podcasting, which is actually the worst thing ever.

SPEAKER_279: Yeah, because it tied it to the iPod.

SPEAKER_248: Not only that, but it became analogous to amateurism, which is really unfortunate. Right. And, you know, so then it kind of got pushed into this amateur guy in the basement.

SPEAKER_17: And this is all 2002, if I remember correctly, 2003?

SPEAKER_284: Well, no, that really was 2004.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, because I had started Weblogs Inc. already. So it was like right as Weblogs Inc. was starting.

SPEAKER_276: Yeah, so there was quite a gap between – I mean, Dave and I were already sending enclosure

SPEAKER_107: files back and forth to each other in like 2000 with his Radio Userland stuff. Sure. So it really didn't happen until somewhat later.

SPEAKER_50: What an incredible innovation on Dave's part. I mean, it's –

SPEAKER_107: Yeah, and he also, you know, stands on shoulders of giants. Sure.

SPEAKER_248: You know, there's the guys from Netscape who had –

SPEAKER_287: Built RSS. Or XML or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_248: You know, so it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it's there.

SPEAKER_107: What I find fascinating, though, is the one problem that we always had that we could – that no one could figure out was how to subscribe. Yeah. And either to RSS or podcast.

SPEAKER_276: And, of course, what we wound up with is an iTunes button. Yeah. Right? And so some commercial entity owns it.

SPEAKER_107: And so, you know, what – if you kind of fast forward to today, we have – instead of subscribe, we have follow and friend. You know, and – but follow, I think, really has become the subscribe mechanism.

SPEAKER_53: Because Twitter, to me, is no more than an RSS feed. Just headlines. It's like no body. And it's my news now.

SPEAKER_290: I mean, I don't look at anything – I don't need to look at anything because I just follow the right people and I get my news that way.

SPEAKER_00: I remember listening to those early shows of Daily Star Square and just being fascinated that, like, wow, there's, like, a serious broadcaster using this stuff and I'm getting it every day. I mean, I listen to the first hundred episodes religiously and it was just like, this is

SPEAKER_36: a revolution. It's amazing. Yeah. And now – and then it was like at some point, I don't know when, Apple actually said, we're going to put this in. Yeah. Did Steve Jobs contact you or something? Because I remember you talking on the show about – Yeah.

SPEAKER_225: There was some clandestine meeting or some weirdness that occurred.

SPEAKER_295: No, it was really fun. So it was the D Conference.

SPEAKER_107: I don't know which one it was. And I got a call from Eddie Q, which, by the way, is the best name ever for a guy who works at – Eddie Q. Q, C-U-E. Q, C-U-E.

SPEAKER_248: He ran the iTunes – it still runs iTunes. Wow. And he said, yeah, you know, I want you to come to San Diego. I want you to meet with Steve. I'm like, hell yeah. Sure. So flew to San Diego. I had like an hour-long sit-down with him.

SPEAKER_298: Wow.

SPEAKER_248: And it was the most fascinating meeting I've ever had in my life.

SPEAKER_19: This is 2004 or 2005.

SPEAKER_255: This is just about – just before 2005. Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_15: I was thinking of when Steve was down at the D in 2007. No, no, no. He was there. He was at the original World Series.

SPEAKER_248: Oh, right, right, right. This is the second year of D. And so – but it was kind of funny because he had already baked it into the iTunes he was going to show at that moment. Right. And so he was basically asking me permission. He says, is it okay – Podfather? Yes. May I? He lists, by the way, which was really – he has a –

SPEAKER_304: He has a little bit of a list? Yeah. Close up? Adam Curry? Do you have the favor? It wasn't quite like that. Let me hear it.

SPEAKER_248: Okay? But he's a very endearing guy. Right. And he had all these great insights about Apple.

SPEAKER_107: He said, we're a really small company and we say a lot. You know, the kind of standard stuff that he says. But I was like, uh, I'm here with Steve Jobs.

SPEAKER_273: You are a starstruck. Totally. And you know all the stars in the world. Totally. I mean, from your MTV days. For me, yeah, this was –

SPEAKER_309: Bigger than meeting any rock star.

SPEAKER_273: Yes. Yeah. Literally? Yeah. I would have to say so. Wow.

SPEAKER_107: Without a doubt.

SPEAKER_310: You are a nerd.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. Oh, but I mean, I've been a paying beta tester of his stuff for years.

SPEAKER_276: You know, I pay to beta test, you know, Apple's products. Absolutely. That's what everybody does. While the laptop is burning your –

SPEAKER_248: Right. Yeah, whatever. And then – and I said, yeah, this is great. I said, you know, would you help us – because we had the iPodder.org directory at the time. Ah, yes. I said, yeah, man, take the whole – Sure.

SPEAKER_53: The whole idea is it's OPML, and that is a Dave Weiner creation. Yep. So you can suck it all in and do whatever you want, and that's fine. It's become political anyway. I'm not interested in it. Yeah. Who gets listed in there? Yeah.

SPEAKER_248: I said, please, take the whole thing. Just suck it all in. You know, whatever you need. Let's get this – let's kickstart this thing. And then he showed iTunes with podcasting, and my podcast was what he demoed. It was kind of funny because I literally start that show off with, oh, my Mac is acting up again. It was a little – Cut to Steve Jobs. A little embarrassing for him. But no, that was great. And then from that, of course, we went on to create a company. Right.

SPEAKER_276: Called Pod Show. Right. Raised a huge, sick amount of money. Yeah, totaled like $48 million for over three rounds.

SPEAKER_53: The first one was 12, and then we had a follow-on, which was a big one. The second was big.

SPEAKER_243: And this is all in the 2006?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, 2005, 2007. We raised another round just before all the crap happened with the economy. Yeah, 2008. Before 2008.

SPEAKER_273: We knew we needed money. I think you raised money around that time, too.

SPEAKER_32: So we kind of all saw that coming. Well, this is the experienced people, I mean, who saw the last time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: So you knew something told you SpideySense. The market's not going to be –

SPEAKER_303: You could see it. You could feel it and everything. We also changed the name to Mevio.com.

SPEAKER_248: Why did you do that? Well, the main thing we saw with advertising agencies is, you know, they have their budget, and they love the whole idea of what we're doing.

SPEAKER_276: And then, of course, with every agency, with every media buy, they got to – Well, we got to chop some stuff off and always be, oh, what's this pod stuff? Yeah, X. Exactly.

SPEAKER_248: I'm like, no, no, no, this is no good. And literally changing the name of the company saved it. Wow. Yeah, because we took the pod out of the company.

SPEAKER_107: And so now it's running cash flow positive, and, you know, it's all about just what is the economy doing. So we do that in the economy, and everyone's getting paid, and we all have health care.

SPEAKER_276: Yeah. That's great. You know, is there an exit? I don't – you know, who knows? Right. You never know.

SPEAKER_328: You can't build a company based on that. You've got to build something that connects with customers.

SPEAKER_53: It was never built on the idea – at least not for me – built in the idea of an exit.

SPEAKER_330: I just wanted to build a place where people could come, upload their stuff, and have a professional show.

SPEAKER_36: And you did that with Ron Bloom, who was your partner on Think New Ideas, which was your online ad agency. What did we call them back then?

SPEAKER_246: We called them web shops, I guess.

SPEAKER_248: Yeah, in 93, I was working at MTV, and I set up MTV.com, which is a whole other story.

SPEAKER_333: I mean, that's a wired cover story, I believe, or a big, huge wired story.

SPEAKER_248: Yeah, yeah. And actually, so I left MTV thinking, you know, somehow we're going to broadcast on this Internet thing. I'm not going to show what it is.

SPEAKER_334: No, no, but let's talk about the domain thing, because that's a really interesting story. You registered MTV before they did.

SPEAKER_255: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so here's what happened – this is before the web, by the way.

SPEAKER_248: This is, you know, Gopher is what we had. And so I'd heard about the – I was on AOL or Vienna Online, whatever it was called back in the day, and Prodigy and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_107: And I'd heard about this thing called the Internet. Really hard to get on, but once you're there, that's where all the cool kids are. Yeah. And the one problem with MTV is their audience is at college, or at least it was. Right. And now it's changed a little bit. So, like, okay, I've got to get on there, because who was on the Internet? College kids. Perfect. Because they had access to terminals. So I learned how to do a slip connection. Right. You know, I got, like – PPP. PPP, you know, do all that.

SPEAKER_248: And so, I mean, yeah, I got my 2400-baud modem, I think, at the time. Yeah. Maybe 12, even. And – And you're in New York at this time? Yeah, yeah. I was living in Jersey, but working in New York. And immediately, news groups, e-mail, and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. You know, and I'm getting e-mails about stuff that's happening at concerts around the country. So I – all of a sudden, I had access to all this information. And it was all the intelligent people. It's hard for people to understand how weird this was at the time.

SPEAKER_107: I mean, MTV had a Wang system for the scripts, and the teleprompter literally was a rolling belt, where a teleprompter operator would turn a wheel, and the belt would move along with a script sitting on top of it. Wow. I mean, this is the technology of the day. And I'm like, wow. And then there was this gopher thing, which you could connect. It was hyperlinking. Yeah. And with the arrow keys, you could connect from one link to the other to a different server. I'm like, I've got to have one of these. Yeah. So I found these guys called Digex, and they were above a Chinese restaurant in Reston, Virginia, of course, where all the pipes were at the time. And I got a hold of these guys, and I said, hey, man, Doug Humphries, great guys. He'll set you up with a shared headless Sun 3. I'm like, yeah, whatever. And so I literally learned how to Unix, and I learned how to compile the gopher server and set it up. And they said, well, you need a domain name. So, oh, MTV.com. Sure. That's obvious. Okay. So register to MTV.com. I'm not even thinking about anything other than the trademark.

SPEAKER_36: No, it was, like, logical. But, I mean, just to put this in context, you were a VJ at the time. Yeah. I mean, you were like an on-air talent who counted down the videos and interacted with the artists on MTV. Yeah. I remember growing up, you were very famous. But I've always been geeky that way.

SPEAKER_71: Right. But, I mean, it's sort of interesting that MTV's got to get pulled into the revolution by the on-air talent. I mean.

SPEAKER_57: Well, I mean, isn't it always that way with big companies? Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: And so, actually, a side story, which is kind of funny, is the University of Minnesota, who had developed the gopher server, sent me an email.

SPEAKER_248: Cease and desist. This is a commercial. Because at the time, you'll remember. No commercial.

SPEAKER_351: No commercial. You couldn't do anything commercial on the Internet. You weren't allowed to have that yet.

SPEAKER_248: You couldn't go into a news group, a Usenet group, and say something that might even be deemed commercial.

SPEAKER_107: You got thrown out and flamed. And I'm like, dude, I'm not making any money on this. I'm paying for this server out of my own pocket. And, you know, we need $5,000 license fee. I'm like, dude. Anyway, so I struck a deal with him. Yeah. And you can still find it on YouTube, that I would wear a University of Minnesota gopher t-shirt on air. Sweet. And then they would give me a license for the gopher server in perpetuity.

SPEAKER_248: There's quick thinking. So that worked out. And then I got an email from this guy in Illinois. He said, you've got to try this thing out that I'm doing.

SPEAKER_53: And here's the code to the HTTPD. Wow. And, of course, you know, this was the server for Mosaic.

SPEAKER_354: Wow.

SPEAKER_53: And it was Mark Andreessen who sent me the email. Wow. So I compiled that. You know, it was like HTTPD 1.4 or something.

SPEAKER_107: I was going to go late to the game. And once I saw that, Jason, and I saw this page, remember how the interlaced GIFs would come in first black and white and really slow? I'm like, this is it. The revolution is here. And I said, I've got to quit MTV. I've got to go do this.

SPEAKER_53: So I literally left after the number one video on the top 20 video countdown, which that day was Beck, I'm a loser. And walked out. And on Saturday, so this was maybe a Tuesday or whatever it was, I get a knock at the door at 7 a.m. And I opened it up and it was like, you know, you're being sued by MTV copyright infringement on a big stack of papers.

SPEAKER_107: And I was like. You could have called. If they had just asked. Yeah. All I would have asked for was maybe adam at mtv.com. Right, sure. And they could have had it. I said, you know what, screw you guys. I'm going to fight it. Yeah. And I immediately hired a publicist. Perfect. David and Goliath story. You know, the whole thing. The viewer post was all over it. Yeah. And I was like, oh, you know, what's happening here? And then we settled. And from that, I started my first company, OnRamp, which I really didn't know what it was going to be. I just knew it was going to be.

SPEAKER_53: I was in offices of my radio syndicator at the time. We were syndicating my top 30 hit list. Hey-oh. Everybody. And then I actually, I met this real dick from L.A. who had like a ponytail.

SPEAKER_107: And, you know, he's like, I can do something with the Grammys. And that was Ron Bloom.

SPEAKER_276: Right. And we. Accurate description. Well, we went out.

SPEAKER_248: And we went out and we pitched the Grammys to do the first cybercast backstage of the Grammys. Right. And we got it. And for no money. And it was totally his relationship with Mike Green. I said, we're partners. I'll give you half the business.

SPEAKER_107: Right. And let's rock and roll. And we did that. Actually, you know, an entrepreneurial story. So we had, you know, we're financing on credit cards, essentially. We had, you know, no money. And then we tried to go out and sell it. Oh, by the way, one caveat. You can't sell to the Grammy or CBS's existing sponsors. So we couldn't sell to MasterCard. So we went to Visa. Right. And we were like, you know, we were seeing our money was gone. And then all of a sudden it picked up. And we did get, like, a Canon camera, digital camera.

SPEAKER_248: We got Visa. And so we made, like, $2,000. Huge. No, a little bit more than that. But then, and we had, you know, like, six or seven people. We did this thing. You know, we had Rob Glazer dropping, you know, his progressive network server in there.

SPEAKER_164: We had to get a T1 line put in. Right. It was the early days of the net. A lot of work. It was fun. I love that it was called the CyberCast, by the way. Right.

SPEAKER_367: Back in those days, everything was, like, cyber. Cyber. Totally cyber. My handle used to be CyberSurfer.

SPEAKER_370: We had the CUCMe cam with one frame a second.

SPEAKER_371: CUCMe, wow. Which was the original, like, what is that called? Chat Roulette. Chat Roulette.

SPEAKER_372: Except it had eight windows at a time. It was actually a minute, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_373: Well, you had to have a repeater.

SPEAKER_248: You had to have a repeater server. And, you know, then it was like, okay, we're going to be in business. And crickets, you know, it was like no one called.

SPEAKER_53: Nothing was happening. We thought we could license content and put it online. And no one wanted to hear from us. And then we got a call from a guy named Bob McCauley from Anheuser-Busch. And he said, I saw what you guys did.

SPEAKER_107: Do you have, like, a consultancy department that, you know, that can help us build a website? Hold on, Bob. Yes, this is the consultancy department. And so they hired us and we built Budweiser.com, Budlight.com, and literally created all the content. In fact, there was this thing on the cans that had a barcode and on the bottles. And you were out in St. Louis and learning about it, and that barcode can actually, down to the quarter hour, tell you when that beer came off the line. So we had a little widget that we put on Bud.com, fill in the code, and we'll tell you when your beer was born. Today, if you look at a can or bottle of Budweiser, it says born on date. So that was actually our idea. Sweet. And to get something on the label of Budweiser, that doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_36: And that's really hard to actually build at that time because there were no databases that hooked into the web.

SPEAKER_107: We had to rebuild everything. I mean, that was crazy. I mean, that's really where I got nuts. Anyway, so fast forward. Then Omnicom, big advertising agency, holding company, wanted to buy us and a couple other companies.

SPEAKER_273: Yeah, Razorfish or whatever. Razorfish, what was the? Agency? Agency.com.

SPEAKER_164: The guys from Wired. Organic. Organic. See, I was a journalist at this time, so I know these names. Right, right, so you knew what was going on.

SPEAKER_107: But at the same time, we got a call from someone who wanted to take us public. We're talking 95. Yeah. And this was kind of before big IPOs. The Netscape had gone out. Netscape had gone out.

SPEAKER_376: And then actually, Morgan crashed after they went out after a while.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah, this was not a good time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: But Ron and I looked at each other and said, well, we have this opportunity, maybe once in a lifetime, to run a public company. Let's do it. Yeah. Who cares? Let's see what this works out to be. And so we wound up going public for an amazing $12 million raise, of which nine was left after the lawyers and everyone took it all. Yeah. But we built that from that into a company that we eventually wound up selling for $450 million. Wow. And had 700 people in, you know, like eight offices.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is back when building a website was a multimillion dollar deal.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, and it had to be because you didn't have packages. You had to really build a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_378: You had to give a million dollars to Oracle for their server.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. And then we sold it in 99 to another publicly listed company.

SPEAKER_53: And it became AnswerThink. And it's still around today, I think, is the Hackett Group, still public.

SPEAKER_380: And you did okay in all of this? I mean, you didn't sell at the peak, but you didn't sell at the bottom. You were able to get out a little bit.

SPEAKER_248: Well, we sold out just before everything came crashing down. Oh, wow. Everyone was saying, you guys are stupid.

SPEAKER_381: So you're set for life then after that?

SPEAKER_248: Well, then I got into helicopters and airplanes.

SPEAKER_382: Yeah. Burning money in the air is a good way to get rid of a lot of it.

SPEAKER_383: So, yeah, you were like a major pilot. I mean, that was the daily source code with 10,000 planes in the airplane.

SPEAKER_107: So I had all this FU money and went to Europe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: And with a friend of mine who I'd known for a while, he'd also sold this company. We were like, hey, we're going to start a fractional helicopter company.

SPEAKER_107: You know, NetJets was kind of working. Yeah. Luxury, twin engine, six passenger, Augusta 109 e-power. That's a good idea. These are $4 million helicopters. And we basically would oversell it. We'd be clients ourselves. We had two. Right. Right. And then two things happened. First, this guy sends an email to everybody in the world, including Augusta Helicopters, the banks. My name is not Simon Cavendish. I've been wanted by the Scotland Yard for 15 years.

SPEAKER_53: I've run away to Colombia, Cambodia, sorry, and I have no money and that's it. And I'm standing here with like, okay, we had a couple of businesses. I got like helicopters and all this stuff. Like, okay, I can do this. I can keep going with this helicopter company.

SPEAKER_107: I think it's okay. Then 9-11 happens. Oh, boy. Like, there's no one wanting to fly anything for any reason whatsoever. No, everything's around it. So I get rid of one, and they go off to Argentina, by the way. Yeah. That's where the helicopters go to die. Yeah. For like $2 million, so I took a bath. And I started over slowly, and I only had one pilot, a great marine helicopter pilot, female, who are often the best helicopter pilots.

SPEAKER_388: Why is that?

SPEAKER_339: I don't know. Oh, okay. It's just the type of flying women apparently do it very well. And she developed a fear of flying. The pilot?

SPEAKER_390: Yes. Wow. A seven-year marine veteran pilot.

SPEAKER_391: So I guess you're that string of luck of getting on MTV.

SPEAKER_107: I look up at this guy, and I'm like, this helicopter company's not meant to be, but I like the flying, so I said, I'm going to learn how to fly.

SPEAKER_53: So I learned how to fly helicopters, and then later transitioned to fixed wing. But I'm only a guy who will fly if I'm going somewhere. I don't like fly around the airport or stuff.

SPEAKER_29: So you've basically gotten your ass kicked for a couple years in there? Sure.

SPEAKER_71: And then you decide, screw it, everything's coming back, I'm going to start Mevio, a pod show, and take another bite of the apple, take another swing.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: Well, literally, I'm going to do nothing, and I'm going to sit around and do nothing, and then within a month, I was hacking together the Apple script, and then all of a sudden the BBC shows up. Oh, podcasting, it's amazing. And just at that time, I decided to move to London with my family. So I wound up commuting for five years between London and San Francisco, which I also think didn't really help myself or my personal life or anything.

SPEAKER_401: Kind of brutal.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, and so just recently, in the past, since February, moved to L.A. I've always wanted to live in L.A. I started the big app show, which is kind of the next evolution for me. Because I always wanted to program an iPhone app. Right. And I'm really an amateur kind of engineer. Right. So I got the book, iPhone Application Development for Dummies. Right. Got my Hello World screen. You know, got online, found some guys who had frameworks who I knew, the Tap Links guys, I knew them from the News Gator days.

SPEAKER_107: And so I built an iPhone app. I'm like, what should it really do? Well, the biggest problem with apps is there's a quarter of a million of them, but the only way you can really find them is either someone shows you or you go through the app store

SPEAKER_248: and you see pictures and text and ratings, which are all gained. And one that gained all hell. Of course. I mean, what does it mean?

SPEAKER_405: But there are companies that you can just buy it from.

SPEAKER_164: Yeah, so it's crazy. You just buy 100 views at a time for five bucks each. So to me, this is like someone, they need a guide.

SPEAKER_107: They need a VJ, a DJ, an AppJ. So now seven days a week, if you get my free app, the big app show, I show you an app running as if it's running on your phone.

SPEAKER_410: Oh, like a screencast.

SPEAKER_107: It's exactly like a screencast. It is. I shoot it in portrait mode so that it really looks like it's running on it. And if you want that app, you tap on Get This App and you go and get it. You don't have to hunt around for it.

SPEAKER_390: And I just released it on Android as well for the Android market.

SPEAKER_159: So, and of course, people don't know in terms of the history, going all the way back to the beginning, you were a VJ, one of the first VJs? No, second wave, actually.

SPEAKER_415: Second wave of them? N of 86.

SPEAKER_416: So when did you, N of 86, I mean, that's only, what, year five of?

SPEAKER_57: Yeah, but it was year one that they moved to basic cable. So that's why people often incorrectly think that I was one of the first. The first wave.

SPEAKER_53: Because they were on, like.

SPEAKER_214: How old were you when you got that gig? 22, I think. How did you get it?

SPEAKER_53: I was on television and radio in Europe before that. My first gig, when I was 15, I built my own transmitter, had my mom drive me around the block, see how far it would reach. Wow. And this is in the Netherlands where they, it's very government-controlled airwaves. They only had one station, whatever, went off the air at 7 p.m. And so then I started putting records on, literally, like that. Yeah. And then kids in the neighborhood were listening. I'm like, okay, well, hold on a second. And I built my own mixer so I could have two turntables. Sweet. And then microphone. And then before you know it, I'm doing, like, a little show. And then I worked at a hospital radio station, which was a very captive audience. They weren't going anywhere. Yeah. But it was professional. They had a real professional studio, and I honed my chops. And then I started getting involved in pirate radio, some really big stations. This is right after the pirate radio ships, so, like, the movie Pirate Radio. So I know a lot of those guys. In fact, one of those guys actually hired me at the official station, Radio Veronica, when I was 19.

SPEAKER_334: These guys were basically putting signals offshore, into England, into London, or whatever. Yeah, and it was all...

SPEAKER_107: And why were they doing it? Just to be punk rock? Because there was nothing. You couldn't listen to anything. Ah.

SPEAKER_390: The BBC, and, of course, they had some local stations. But the same in all of Europe, essentially. It was government-controlled airwaves. You know, and you think rock and roll was bad? I mean, this was evil, Satan, Antichrist. You couldn't play any of that. Yeah. It was necessary. It was a total revolution, punk rock movement, not music punk rock, but just guys, we just want to broadcast. And that's my roots, really. Yeah. But they also had a television show called Countdown. And at the time, the European market was a great place for artists to come into the Netherlands. First of all, a great place to hang out in Amsterdam. Sure, no doubt. Because I grew up there. And then move your product from there, so it was a great test market.

SPEAKER_248: So we had every superstar came through, and I interviewed all of them. And I could speak English. Right. Big deal. Yeah. And it was actually Sammy Hagar who said, dude, this MTV thing, there's something going on in the States.

SPEAKER_390: Usually check that out. And I swear to God, I got a call at my desk one day from Steve Leeds, a talent coordinator at MTV.

SPEAKER_107: He said, yeah, we've seen your stuff. We heard about you. And you want to come work for MTV?

SPEAKER_416: Did Sammy Hagar drop that dime, you think?

SPEAKER_107: Maybe. Maybe. If he did, I'd love him for it.

SPEAKER_248: And I'm like, actually, it probably came through Joan Jett and Lieber Krebs Management. I think they found me. And they were tight with Steve Leeds, who was another legend in the music business, old school. And I'm like, you mean in New York? I said, yeah. I said, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_390: And literally, like three months later, I was in New York at MTV.

SPEAKER_08: Why do you think it is, I mean, you found the pirate radio revolution, MTV clearly a revolution, the internet, the next revolution, you know, Web 2.0 revolution, podcasting revolution, now app revolution.

SPEAKER_36: I mean, how did you know that these were all going to be revolutions? I mean, every time, you seem to get there a year or two before everybody else. Is it something in your DNA? Yeah, no, it's... Or are you always looking on the fringes? What's your technique?

SPEAKER_431: I'm a broadcaster. That's what I do. And if I'm good at anything, it's highlighting other people's stuff. So I'm good at, you know, talking up records.

SPEAKER_390: I'm good at talking up videos. The kind of the advertising agency wasn't really what I was good at, but the broadcasting element, the cybercast, there you go again. And so with apps, now it's the same for me. I do think we're coming around, though. Radio is going to be very exciting again because it's been completely obliterated and destroyed. Absolutely. I mean, it's been... I don't know if you heard of Howard Stern, $100 million a year.

SPEAKER_435: I actually heard you on the air offer it to me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_390: And I had serious backing for that. We can still do the deal. Wow. Because you look at Sirius Satellite, Sirius XM now, you know, which has $4 billion of debt. Right.

SPEAKER_431: And by the way, they've got to shoot satellites into space. Right.

SPEAKER_390: Where all you need now is an iPhone or Android and an app, and you're there. Any phone. This is the new radio, but Clear Channel has rolled up all these stations. The way it works is if you have a DJ in your town, it can be a community of interest, but it can't be a guy who is in L.A., Texas, New York, all at the same time. You can't communicate with the audience. I know how to build an audience. Right. And you know how to do that, too. This is what Weblogs Inc. also showed. You build an audience around community of interest. Right. And you interact with that audience, and you take crap from them, and you build, and it continues to build up. Yeah. So I do that predominantly with radio, and so now it's kind of come full circle with a combination of podcasting and live streaming with no agenda. Right. I mean, we reach half a million people. We do it twice a week, Thursday morning and Sunday morning.

SPEAKER_441: And is this your conspiracy show, like news? No, it's media assassination.

SPEAKER_390: I mean, these are very dark times. Right. People are very confused. What comes through on television and news, but all kinds of mainstream media confuses people, and it's intended to confuse people. And so we poke through that. John C. Dvorak and I have been in media a long time. He's even longer than I have. And we can help people understand not only how it's being done, what is being done, and often what it means. And it's kind of like an awakening. People are like, okay, now I don't feel as bad. I don't feel so depressed about what I'm seeing around me, because I understand this is messaging. Right. And they're trying to keep me...

SPEAKER_348: So you're actively being manipulated, and you're helping them defend themselves.

SPEAKER_390: Yes, because we're all basically slaves. Right. I mean, we're all slaves to the government. They're taking all our money, or at least a lot of it. No matter where you live, Gitmo Nation. Right. It's worldwide. Yeah. And so you might as well understand what's going on behind the scenes, and who's really running the show. And a lot of that, of course, is financially based, and bankers who are screwing us out of our money all the time. Not that I can change that, necessarily. Yeah, maybe we can try and vote people out. Maybe that's an idea, but that may be... But just awareness is... That's for our kid's generation. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_359: Hopefully they'll get it right.

SPEAKER_50: Have enough awareness of it to...

SPEAKER_359: But it's our parents who screwed it up. I blame them.

SPEAKER_50: Absolutely. So, you never answer the question, though, of what is it about Adam Curry that gives

SPEAKER_36: him the ability to spot the trend a year early? I mean, you have. It can't be coincidence five times in a row.

SPEAKER_450: But it's not like I'm out there, where's the trend?

SPEAKER_17: Well, the trends don't just magically show up at your doorstep five times in a row.

SPEAKER_390: I just follow what I feel is right. Right. That's what I'm always doing. So you have some gut for it. Yeah, totally. But I want to broadcast.

SPEAKER_17: So maybe it's just that you're broadcasting so strongly, you sort of sense, oh my God, this could impact broadcasting?

SPEAKER_390: No, I don't analyze it that way. I just want to build an audience, get a message out. And the minute an audience responds, I know I've got something. And then I'm into it.

SPEAKER_457: And it's always about just having a good time, doing a show, whatever it is. And I love that audience feedback.

SPEAKER_211: What's the impact of all this stuff, like Google TV, Ustream live streaming? I mean, we're seeing so much innovation in video.

SPEAKER_00: Obviously, YouTube, free, HD bandwidth, which, I mean, just five years ago, the whole concept of, wait, HD video can be hosted for zero dollars? Really? It makes no sense. Right.

SPEAKER_414: What is the impact of all this stuff? I mean, is it going to create a huge number of networks like Leo's or this one or Ref3?

SPEAKER_462: No, I think it's really decentralizing.

SPEAKER_390: I don't see a need for huge networks necessarily in the future. An individual guy. Look, if you're looking to get rich, maybe not get into that. If you want to make rent and have a good time and work and provide a service to a community, yeah, you're going to be able to do it. Gone are the days, I think, of huge networks that have all the audience. And we're in a very slow, painful transition period where everything mainstream and centralized is being chopped up and killed off. Radio is pretty much dead. Newspapers, pretty much dead. Dying. No one figured it out. They still don't believe it. Murdoch still believes that this paywall thing works, even though it's now publicly a failure. Television networks in general, the movie industry will happen as well. It's all going to get killed off. And what's going to come back is we're going to have fantastic stuff to enjoy. And hopefully we'll have some kind of social connection. And we already kind of have that. You know, I'm going to find something great that someone made. And, you know, will people make a lot of money off of it like the old days of the music business? No.

SPEAKER_464: Right.

SPEAKER_390: But it'll be more authentic.

SPEAKER_431: It doesn't matter if it's authentic or not as long as people enjoy it. And we're still going to have our Justin Beavers and Lady Gagas for a while, you know.

SPEAKER_390: But is that it? Is that going to enrich? Or do I kind of like the double rainbow guy? Yeah. You know, that to me is like, yeah, that really struck a chord.

SPEAKER_360: You know, Lady Gaga, not. But when I hear the guy go, you know, what does it mean? What does it mean? Triple rainbow. And it was good. And it's good for a week. And I'm done. I'm ready for the next one. And then it's the auto-tune the news guys. And, you know, will they get rich off of it? No, probably not. Yeah. But thank you.

SPEAKER_475: You know, I'll wash your car if I see you. Yeah. For sure.

SPEAKER_50: Let's bring Lon in to do the news. My God, I can talk to you for three hours. It wasn't so cool.

SPEAKER_337: You're here. You've got the news. I'm here. Getting your iPod. I've got to get my iPad set up. iPad set up, rather.

SPEAKER_371: I've got it ready to go. You've been listening to this discussion about media and the future of it.

SPEAKER_482: Mark, the CEO of this week, and I were both in the office listening to the discussion. Fascinating to hear about, like, the early days of the Internet. I remember it was just bringing back memories for me. In the mid-'90s, I went to UCLA, and I had just been on dial-up. And, you know, it was e-mail. E-mail and movie times. That was the Internet. And then all of a sudden, you're on Ethernet, and it's, like, streaming video and music, and ICQ is brand new. And it's just, it all came flooding back. Napster.

SPEAKER_481: Early era of, like, oh, my God, there's, like, an Internet out there. It's amazing. And tell Adam, how old were you when you first saw him on MTV? He loves this.

SPEAKER_492: I was very young back in the early MTV days. You had no pubic hair. But I remember. Absolutely, but I'm old enough to remember.

SPEAKER_496: Was it pre-pubes or post-pubes? It was very pre-pubes. Very pre-pubes. Very pre-pubes.

SPEAKER_399: Okay, I was post-pubes. I had pubes when I was watching Adam. I know, I'm sure he wants to know that. Yeah. This is God in a dark place.

SPEAKER_497: It's going to be, like, we veered off in some weird direction now.

SPEAKER_498: All right, tell us the first news story.

SPEAKER_500: So this is interesting.

SPEAKER_502: It's great that Adam's here to discuss this one. According to the New York Post, Apple is talking to major record labels about starting their own response to a music subscription service. For a monthly fee, users would theoretically get to download unlimited songs from within iTunes. An anonymous source is saying the service could start as low as $10 to $15 a month, although that is yet to be finally determined. The move is suspected of being maybe a response to Spotify's plans to move to America with its free ad-supported streaming music business service. Because Apple apparently believes labels will prefer a subscription model. So how likely do you guys think it is?

SPEAKER_482: And if this happened, would any of these other music services that currently exist be able to compete with Apple and iTunes?

SPEAKER_503: Well, I think that they're competing against a complete global Internet.

SPEAKER_431: You know, this is about the money-making aspect of the business. And it's very hard to get people to pay for digital products. It's very easy when you say, here's a CD, give me $20. It's like a physical thing. It's like a dollar is a piece of paper with a number on it. And the number 20 is worth more. But it's physical, so people accept it. But when it's digital, it's like apps. 13% of people buy an app and the rest want it all free. I think that the enjoyment of music is going to come from people who are just getting their stuff out there.

SPEAKER_390: They're going to make money from touring and merch and support from their audience. I think this is a great try. Who cares? I mean, that catalog, I love that catalog. I love buying stuff from iTunes. I love playing that on my show, whether it's legal or not. I figured I've made these guys so much money, they owe me one. And I know that it does spur on purchasing of stuff. But really, the new cool stuff, it's not going to come from an all-you-can-eat network.

SPEAKER_431: I just don't see it. I don't think, for Apple, they need to do that. I'm not interested.

SPEAKER_333: Interesting. It's definitely a reaction to Spotify.

SPEAKER_399: I mean, I have a Spotify PR account they sent me up with. I don't really use it that much. But Tyler's got one he hacked from Europe. I mean, you love that thing.

SPEAKER_15: Love it, love it, love it. Why do you love it? It's social music. It's like that Facebook integration they did with Spotify is unreal. It's what Apple wanted to try and do with.

SPEAKER_20: Ping, yeah. Better version of Ping. Spotify had done it better before Apple ever did it, which is rare that you ever say anyone

SPEAKER_151: did anything better than Apple before Apple did it. iTunes 10 blows.

SPEAKER_107: I'm really pissed off about that. I hate the icon. The icon is the worst part.

SPEAKER_431: They've got to switch back to the old icon. They messed up my entire interface. There's Ping everywhere. The fonts are ugly. It's more cartooning.

SPEAKER_523: I don't like how they group albums. No, I don't want that.

SPEAKER_431: Those weird boundaries between. Give me a list. I just want a list of stuff. I don't like that. Old skin.

SPEAKER_525: Time to go back to the old skin. I agree.

SPEAKER_431: That is a turning point for that company. I'm telling you. That is very, very weird. That is interesting. That Steve Jobs actually on stage said, doesn't this icon look cool? No, I don't believe he even believes it. This is not Steve Jobs. Johnny Ives didn't design that.

SPEAKER_508: This is ugly. How did he approve the logo?

SPEAKER_33: It looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon. It's horrible.

SPEAKER_533: It's oddly retro. Woody Woodpecker to come out or something.

SPEAKER_537: It looks nothing like the rest of my Mac. It doesn't look good. No, it's not elegant.

SPEAKER_538: It doesn't have that Apple touch. Spotify looks like a very Apple product when you use it.

SPEAKER_71: And what's cool about it is you have every language. So I type in Bob Dylan covers in German. Boom. You can listen to German people. Which is a pretty horrific experience.

SPEAKER_333: I was about to say. But French people singing Bob Dylan is wonderful. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_450: But do you have David Hasselhoff singing Bob Dylan in German? Unfortunately, yes. Oh! Unfortunately, yes.

SPEAKER_482: I believe it, my kids. That's huge. It's like that on the Life Aquatic soundtrack, you have that guy who does all the Portuguese David Bowie covers. Oh, sweet. Those are amazing. I love all that ironic stuff.

SPEAKER_64: It's a little ironic.

SPEAKER_20: The problem the music business has more than anything is the artists and the young kids themselves these days have become jaded to the idea of getting record deals. Which means the kids aren't trying to aspire. They realize I'm just going to go at this on my own by default.

SPEAKER_553: Yeah. They don't need them.

SPEAKER_20: But having a record deal is not the... Because you don't have this legion of people that you're cherry-picking off of that are trying to get deals. To a much less extent. The record. Right.

SPEAKER_16: The breast rate is having an audience that comes to your concert. Right. It comes to your gigs.

SPEAKER_555: Having an audience is what it is.

SPEAKER_20: And now they're going to artists that are starting to sell and they're like, look, you should have a record deal. And then it's like, well, why should I? The tables are starting to turn.

SPEAKER_559: Sort of like the angel venture capital thing. It's like, well, I don't really know if I need the venture capital.

SPEAKER_502: Next story. So rumors were spreading this week of high-level talks in San Francisco between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan. May have included discussion of an acquisition. That was the original guess. Now the Wall Street Journal is saying it's more likely the deal will result in some sort of collaboration in maybe cloud or mobile computing. Adobe stock originally climbed 11.5% as news of the meeting spread and then fell 6% the day after when the deal looked like it may not actually happen. Neither company really commented. Specifically, Adobe said, Adobe and Microsoft share millions of customers around the world and the CEOs of the two companies do meet from time to time. We do not publicly comment on the timing or topics of their private meetings. So any guess as to what this all might be about and what kind of deal, if any, do you think these two companies may enter into?

SPEAKER_17: Adobe and Microsoft obviously are not happy with Apple. And so this is just them conspiring to figure out how do we F with Steve Jobs the most.

SPEAKER_71: I mean, the Adobe guy is on tilt about Flash. I mean, Steve Jobs laid the smackdown on him. And he's right because every time my browser crashes, I don't know about you guys, it's because of Flash.

SPEAKER_431: I've actually, for Safari, you can install this extension. Yeah. Which then the page loads without Flash. It just has boxes. And if you want to enable one, you click on it.

SPEAKER_566: Right, and then you go, oomph.

SPEAKER_567: But that's really when you see the problem because pages that I load have 15 boxes and one of them is content and 14 are ads.

SPEAKER_431: This is a lot of Flash stuff. And they have all these different issues with different integration things. But until you can get HTML5 really functioning with pre-rolls on video, it ain't going to take off. I mean, I know it can be done. Yeah, we're still a year away. It can be done with Canvas on Canvas, but someone's really got to do that and really support it, really support it. Google will. I mean, Adobe is truly... Mevio supports it. It supports HTML5, but still to put in your waterfall and your whole ad system.

SPEAKER_576: And that's a big step for any company, a lot of money to integrate that.

SPEAKER_338: Like Flash, Microsoft Office is sort of holding on to their sort of...

SPEAKER_545: And it's going to be like AOL dial-up. It's going to just go like this. Right. If you stop innovating and you're one of those billion-dollar companies, a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, it just takes a while for the revenue stream to die. Yeah.

SPEAKER_71: But it's still a lot of money, so you're sort of obligated to take the money. But there's no revolution going on at Adobe to do something better. That's the problem. They should solve their software problem. They should do, like, whatever is after Flash, which they haven't. No. Nothing yet. But, I mean, why doesn't Apple own Photoshop and all the whole Adobe suite? Wouldn't that make perfect sense for them to own it? Seems like it would.

SPEAKER_431: Yeah. Steve Jobs would say, we're a small company. We say no to almost everything.

SPEAKER_50: Yeah. We're a small company. Yeah. I mean, we're just making televisions next. Tyler, any insights on this? No. Next story. So we're going to wrap up in five minutes.

SPEAKER_500: I would not be a good newsman if I let the show end. I know this is going to be an Arrington issue.

SPEAKER_502: The elephant in the room, which is the Facebook groups. Oh, Facebook groups. After going into lockdown for several weeks, Facebook emerged with a suite of new features, including the ability to download materials you have stored in Facebook, which you had been calling four months ago, and a new option to form groups for sharing documents, email, chat, all those kinds of things. Many criticized the fact that it appeared individuals could be included in groups without actually opting in. You're calling it force-joined.

SPEAKER_589: Like forced feminization? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_502: As a result, you could be force-joined into groups in which you don't want to. If you don't want to participate, you and Michael Arrington, I won't bring up the actual group. NAMBL, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Don't worry.

SPEAKER_482: Mark Zuckerberg's a member as well.

SPEAKER_595: Right. Wait, did you get forced into that group? Somebody force-joined myself and Mike Arrington into NAMBL.

SPEAKER_140: So I log into Facebook to see what the groups are like, and on the side of my navigation, it says NAMBL. NAMBL.

SPEAKER_598: I'm like, what the f*** is that? I click it. I just cursed $10 in the curse drawer. That's funny.

SPEAKER_140: And I look, and I see Mike Arrington's a member. So I email Zuck at Facebook as his email, and I see CCC Cheryl at Facebook. Facebook's got some rock and roll back. That's funny. So I emailed them. I was like, you might want to fix this. By the way, I know I'm not a member of NAMBL, and I can't speak for Mike Arrington, but I'm going to assume that he's not a member right now.

SPEAKER_71: And why can people, you know, force-joined other people? He's not an active member. But I specifically thought his dues, I don't even want to know his dues in a couple years.

SPEAKER_135: He's got to, yeah, he's got to sign the new charter. That's bad. It's really bad. So I take a screenshot of this.

SPEAKER_71: I'm like, and by the way, when you release new features, if you want to save yourself a couple million dollars on privacy lawsuits, I'll take a look at them for you. Smiley face. I like to F with him a little bit.

SPEAKER_348: A little poke. But I said, I'm going to come up with a word. And we were in the Virgin Upper Class Lounge, which I know you love.

SPEAKER_610: Yeah, I haven't flown it for a while.

SPEAKER_348: Yeah, exactly. $48 million. You don't have access to that anymore.

SPEAKER_71: So we're in there, and I'm like, what would be a word I could come up with that would accurately display and embody, like, what's happening here that's, like, a violation? So it was, like, forced.

SPEAKER_333: I was forced to be subscribed to this. And now, like, everybody's talking about force-joined, force-joined as a keyword.

SPEAKER_579: What happened to Diaspora?

SPEAKER_481: Is that still... Supposedly, people are reviewing their code base. They're going to be out in a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_617: They're going to launch. And actually, in two weeks, Maxwell from the Diaspora team is going to be on the show. Two weeks from today.

SPEAKER_619: I really like that idea. I really, really do. And I think that did a developer release or something.

SPEAKER_431: I'm going to try and... I don't know Ruby on Rails, but I guess I'll try and hack something together. I'd love to host a seed, because I guess you can customize it however you want. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_567: That sounds kind of cool. That sounds kind of rock and roll. And I think Facebook made a seminal mistake. I have not seen it yet, but apparently now you can download your stuff. Yeah. Right. Dot Zip It.

SPEAKER_450: So if you can download all your stuff, does that mean I can take that and import it into something else? Oh, yes. That's exactly what it means. That was a big mistake.

SPEAKER_545: You know there's going to be a toolbar where it will sync your Diaspora profile over there. That's a big mistake. Well, they had no choice, because they're under so much pressure right now, I think.

SPEAKER_567: Of course they had a choice. That's a big mistake. I don't know who came up with that or who decided that was a good idea.

SPEAKER_00: I think what's happening now is Zuckerberg is cracking under the pressure of being so hated and the privacy issues and the movie. Right. So they're trying to put anything...

SPEAKER_71: He's trying to do anything in the world that makes him look a little better.

SPEAKER_284: That is the Achilles heel. It's all about your address book.

SPEAKER_567: It's all about your relationships to people. They gave away the farm. With that, totally gave it away. And I can't wait to see what's going to happen.

SPEAKER_559: Why buy the milk? Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free? That's what it's about.

SPEAKER_567: I mean, so now you can just suck it into some other system, which is great in the we-love-everybody open-source way, but from the type of money that's involved in Facebook? Dumb.

SPEAKER_71: The thing I'm having a hard time with, actually, is I'm an old-school internet guy.

SPEAKER_334: We're like pre-commercialization. And I think guys like us look at the internet as freeing, empowering, good thing, like force for good in the world, right? I hope so, yeah. I hope so.

SPEAKER_20: Which was, back then, it was even, you couldn't come on and do anything commercial. Right. Kids today have no understanding of that whatsoever. It's the foundation of what it was about.

SPEAKER_71: And when you're designing a product, there's this sort of like rules of engagement. And one of them is you let the users opt in and you never abuse the users. You never force them into something they don't want. And Zuckerberg just doesn't have it. Something's either he's maniacal in that he doesn't care or he's just clueless. But they seem to think this is okay. Just like checking your friends in at a location is okay. It's along those same lines. You know, in the check-in product, I could check you in. Hey, we're both at the Hustler store. I saw Adam Curry there. He's checked in now.

SPEAKER_140: And all of your friends see that you're checked in there. Right. Or at the Nambla meeting when we were there last week. You could have checked me in. I don't want people to know where it is.

SPEAKER_502: It was even before that. Because if you remember, you could tag somebody in a photo. So I could take a photo of you somewhere you don't maybe want people to know you are. And tag you.

SPEAKER_635: Put it up on Facebook and say, this is Jason Calatannis.

SPEAKER_334: And if you don't like that, well, then you have a problem with where the world is heading. I'm Mark Zuckerberg. F everybody. Right. It's always been a philosophy.

SPEAKER_71: And it just is depressing for me that, like, in order to compete in the playing field today, you have to not care about the users. And you have to actually cheat and just, you know, it's like every little edge you have to get. And you know what he'll do is he'll reverse this decision four months from now when the groups thing is huge. It's like just lie and steal and cheat and then beg for forgiveness years later.

SPEAKER_431: At the end of the social network, it said 500 million people, $25 billion. What do you think the real numbers are? Because that really upset me. I mean, I'm not like Wayne. But, like, people have this perception now that's a $25 billion company that 500 million users. I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So here's the real deal. They have $2 billion in revenue this year. No profits. Let's say next year they double it. $4 billion. That would be hard to do, but doable. It's happened in the history of the Internet. So next year it's $4 billion.

SPEAKER_71: Let's say they have a ridiculous 25% margin. They clear a billion dollars in profits. A billion dollars in earnings, 20 times forward-looking revenue would make them $20 billion. That would be, like, the ultimate, like, 5% chance of that happening.

SPEAKER_08: The reality is, at this point, if they even had 25% of their current revenue, you know, it's just not enough.

SPEAKER_641: I don't think they have 500 million users. I think they have 500 million profiles. Right. But I think maybe 150 million real users, probably.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, how you define users would be people who have logged in in the last, I don't know, the 60 days, 90 days.

SPEAKER_20: The 60 billion valuation part comes out of those online, private stock trading. Yeah, secondary. Right, but that secondary trading is at such low volume. It's equivalent to the stock market has, during the day, the trading hours. Right. After the trading hours, there's after hours, where there's very, very, very few people trading at numbers that are way above and below what it had just traded at 30 minutes before.

SPEAKER_16: I'm going to guess it's worth, in reality, it's worth 10, 15 billion.

SPEAKER_00: Really? So, it gets double its value. Wow.

SPEAKER_42: But that is betting on a company that's continuing to grow. But they're not making money. They can't be profitable now. No, they're not profitable right now, no. No.

SPEAKER_641: They're investing like crazy. That's going to be a huge overhead. How are they making money? What is their main revenue source?

SPEAKER_230: Those ads on the side, those little ads.

SPEAKER_641: Is that really, that's really the money? Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_650: Is the ads, the whole thing in the movie that we're supposed to be against, that's the ads?

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, there are ads along the side now that are targeted, and their targeting system is how many women in Florida who play Guitar Hero do you want to reach?

SPEAKER_08: Right. How many males over 40 in Los Angeles?

SPEAKER_652: And they have enough scale that they really deliver for the advertising.

SPEAKER_71: It'd be like there's 8,000 people. There's 80,000 people. Right. So, unlike the keyword market over at Google AdWords, the Facebook market is based on demographics and what you've put on your profile.

SPEAKER_484: Your profile, you're opting in to what ads you see based on what you tell them you like. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, basically, they can go to an ad agency and say, you want to get females with, you know, in this age bracket and sell them this soap, and then this bracket, this soap, and then, you know, whatever. And they could slice them like nobody's ever been able to.

SPEAKER_482: I did think that was interesting in the movie, how they play up so much that Eduardo is like, well, we've got to start selling ads, and Mark is just, you know, oh, that's not cool.

SPEAKER_71: Yeah, and then his whole history is just compromising user in with the, what's called, Beacon. He's like, yeah, we're just going to sell your information to Beacon or auto-personalize.

SPEAKER_481: Right, because in the movie, he's so against it. He's like, no, it's not cool. It's all going to be cool. That's not cool. Well, I mean, and he's the most uncool person you've ever met.

SPEAKER_661: All I know is Justin Timberlake for Supporting Actor Academy Award. He was fantastic. Yeah, he's going to get that. Stole the movie.

SPEAKER_663: I agree. He's the best part of the movie. I don't know. They're playing the Winklevoss twins. It's one guy playing both twins. Actually, quite, yeah, yeah. Wait a second. No. Armie Hammer. Really? No. No one guy.

SPEAKER_667: They CGI'd that? That's one guy who's playing twins.

SPEAKER_567: That's true, too. That's true, too. Sped it up so that, you know, your voices stay the same, but it moves, like, a little bit faster. It takes frames out. Yeah, it took frames out and then moved it faster.

SPEAKER_674: Yeah.

SPEAKER_482: Fincher does that. He's done that on a couple. He did it in Zodiac, too, I know, where he'll take frames out of a scene. And it gives you, it's kind of awkward, but you can't tell why it's awkward and everything seems to be safe.

SPEAKER_675: Well, it's like we used to do on the radio. Every Top 40 radio station back in the day would spin up the records.

SPEAKER_567: You would always run it, like, 108%. So the records were always going faster because they gave you a more, especially with Top 40 music, give you a more driving force of the radio and big compression and stuff. It's all designed to suck you in and keep you with us.

SPEAKER_677: It is, like, psychologically just designed to, yeah.

SPEAKER_678: So I think, but it worked. It really worked. I mean, the movie's very compelling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_502: Last story. Last story. According to Reuters, Hulu is preparing to IPO in the first half of 2011. The company is allegedly looking to raise between $200 and $300 million in a deal that would value it at $2 billion. So considering the criticism of the subscription service, Hulu Plus, heavy competition from sites like Netflix and products like Google TV, Apple TV, and their ongoing issues with studios, for example, you still can't watch CBS shows on Hulu, and Viacom pulled a lot of their big Comedy Central sites from the site. Is this premature, and how profitable do you think Hulu is really going to be?

SPEAKER_560: The ads on Hulu are more effective than the ads on TV. Are they profitable, Jason?

SPEAKER_71: Hulu? I don't know that.

SPEAKER_683: I don't know that.

SPEAKER_71: They don't have to pay for their content. They do a revenue split. Right. So in that way, they'll probably be able to show some good economics.

SPEAKER_684: The margin is razor thin. Very. The margin is always thin.

SPEAKER_500: It's going to be razor thin. And you'll notice, if you watch Hulu long enough, you're not seeing that many ads. It's not very diverse.

SPEAKER_685: No, I know. But you have to click continue on the ad.

SPEAKER_652: This is just getting everybody out before the big depression of 2013.

SPEAKER_619: Everyone just has to get out. I mean, I don't know what revenue they have. But it costs so much with Sarbanes-Oxley to run a public company. I wouldn't want to do it. I wouldn't want the liability. I mean, who's going to run that? This is just to get investors out. I don't see it. It's just a financial play. I don't think it means anything else. Yeah.

SPEAKER_687: That's what IPOs are. What else do they need? It's liquidity. Yeah. They don't need anything else.

SPEAKER_71: But this was created by those four studios. Yeah. Yeah. Plus the private ad. They all own it. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a way for them to get cash off the table. When they sell that, they'll each get...

SPEAKER_619: As long as I can just watch Family Guy, I don't care.

SPEAKER_08: Absolutely. Thank you to .co and GoDaddy for sponsoring the program and independent media. Thank you to Tyler for a great insight today, like a Sunday in... In a snowstorm.

SPEAKER_64: Sunday in a snowstorm. Sunday in a snowstorm. Really well done. Lon, thanks for the news.

SPEAKER_560: Do we want to show the TriCaster music video?

SPEAKER_695: We will end with the TriCaster video, of course, for the new tech. God, we're showing for these sponsors like crazy.

SPEAKER_08: Everybody, it is your giri. It is your honor, your secret duty to download Big App Show. Go to Android Marketplace or iTunes or go to BigAppShow.com.

SPEAKER_698: How much does it cost?

SPEAKER_08: It's free. It's free.

SPEAKER_445: Unbelievable. All this free content?

SPEAKER_450: Why wouldn't you go download? It's free. But, of course, we want you as an Appaholic. If you find some value from the show, support it and pay value some cash.

SPEAKER_567: And how do you do that?

SPEAKER_642: Is there like an in-app, like, give you some money?

SPEAKER_567: No, there's actually an Appaholic support link, and that takes you to PayPal. And then if you've donated, there's an Appaholics tab, and you get listed in the app.

SPEAKER_700: Oh, that's a sweet idea.

SPEAKER_452: Yeah, and people like supporting the show. What's the minimum I can do to get on that list? One dollar. Really? Yeah, you get one dollar.

SPEAKER_135: I'm going to sign up with, like, Jason Calcutt has one, Jason Calcutt has two. I'm going to sign up, like, 20 times. And you're in. This way I can get, like, a big swap there. You're in. You're in.

SPEAKER_71: No problem. That's what people should do. If you really want to get marketing, that's a great way to get marketing. It seems like, cool, just put ten of them in there for a dollar.

SPEAKER_450: If it's $50, I link to anything you want. $50 for the link?

SPEAKER_704: Yeah.

SPEAKER_661: That's awesome. Which is a pretty good deal. And if it's $200, you become executive producer. You get the credit on the opening of the show. Really? You can use that on IMDb. It's a real credit. I love it.

SPEAKER_287: Yeah. That is a smart idea. Thank you for being on the program. It was an awesome interview.

SPEAKER_708: Thank you for inviting me. It's really nice. You've got a great place here. And I love what you're doing. Thank you. It means a lot. No, I think it's cool. You know, this is rock and roll. I like this setup, and I think I know where you're going with it. I think it's great.

SPEAKER_662: We'll figure it out. You know, we're just a small company. You need to lift a little more. I just said, we're a small company.

SPEAKER_713: We're trying to make our way in the world.

SPEAKER_711: It's almost like Mike Tyson.

SPEAKER_713: We're just a small company.

SPEAKER_715: We're just trying to get it. I've got sports jointed than me.

SPEAKER_135: I've got sports jointed. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like me. Thank you, New Tech. Let's see New Tech's commercial. We'll see you next time on The Swing Startups.

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SPEAKER_03: Tell by my attitude that I most definitely leave from. New life.