Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

As a part of his Windows Vista launch tour, Bill Gates was on the Today show on NBC, as well as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  The interview was filled with Stewart cracking jokes and lite on the content, so don’t expect anything on that front.  Hit the play button above to watch.

Video [YouTube]

Camron shut down his life for about 3 days just to be in the front of the line of over 150 for a PlayStation 3 at my local Best Buy.  The funny thing is that almost everyone I talked to in line doesn’t even plan on playing their shiney new PS3...they’re all going to sell them.  Is it really worth $1000 bucks to sit on a sidewalk for 3+ days?  I suppose it is.

Unfortunately our calls and emails to interview the folks over at Mozilla Firefox are never returned. So in liu of a deep Gadgetell Interview, check out this interview with Mike Connor, lead Firefox Engineer. It may not be much but at least you will get some insight into the world of Firefox prior the the launch of Firefox 2.0.

Via [Firefox Flicks]

Karl Wiley is the Senior Director of eBay’s technology and media category. He is responsible for developing and executing long-term strategy, and implementing marketing and promotional programs to drive increased seller and buyer activity. Since joining eBay in 2001, Wiley has most notably created and manage eBay’s Preferred Solution Provider Program and was one of the founding members of eBay’s business-to-business initiative one of the company’s fastest-growing categories today.

Karl, thank you for taking the time to give our readers a greater insight into the world of eBay. Please tell us a little about yourself and your role at eBay?
Currently, I am the senior director for eBay’s technology and media category. I am responsible for developing and executing long-term strategy, and implementing marketing and promotional programs to drive increased seller and buyer activity in that category.

2. What are the most popular categories in eBay?
The most popular categories on eBay are: Motors, Clothing & Accessories, Consumer Electronics, Computers, Books/Music/Movies, and Home & Garden.

3. What sort of data can you share about the growth of the tech business?
As of Q1, 2006, the following eBay technology and media businesses delivered $1 billion or more in worldwide annualized GMV (gross merchandise volume):  Consumer Electronics, Computers, Books/Music/Movies, Cameras & Photo.

4. Why do you believe tech is such a large business on eBay?
eBay is well-suited for the sale of tech products. Sellers (retailers, manufacturers, independent entrepreneurs) have access to a huge global community (more than 200 million registered users) and buyers can easily comparison shop for not only new, in-season merchandise, but for used and refurbished goods.

eBay also enables consumers to upgrade to the latest models by selling their existing products on the eBay marketplace.

5. How does eBay deal with grey-market products being sold, such as a Japanese Sony PSP prior to it being released in America?
eBay follows the same laws as the offline world. We develop our policies in partnership with our community, government agencies and industry associations. Also, eBay is a marketplace, not a retailer. We do not sell goods and can’t confirm the origin of items on the site. As a marketplace, we seek cooperation and rely on the expertise of rights owners to inform eBay of listings in violation, which then are taken down.

6. Do you believe eBay has a positive or negative affect on retailers like Best Buy?
eBay offers a complementary sales channel that allows sellers (retailers, manufacturers) to reach more and different customers than they could through traditional distribution channels - their brick-and-mortar locations or through their own Web sites. eBay also enables sellers to liquidate returned, refurbished or out-of-season merchandise, which they generally would not be able to do cost-effectively through their existing channels.

Currently, many retailers run successful storefronts on eBay.

7. Do eBay sales increase or decrease in times of a recession? In a boom?
eBay sales have shown consistent, steady growth, regardless of changes in the overall economy.

8. What was the least popular product ever sold? Most popular?

Judging the least popular product would be difficult, but popular items (and by that I mean items with the most searches) include Sony PSP, Xbox360 and iPods. In fact, as of today (7/17) those are the most popular searches on eBay overall (according to eBay Pulse, http://pulse.ebay.com/).

During holiday 2005, the Xbox was one of the hottest items sold on eBay
-- it caused quite a frenzy!

Karl, thank you for taking the time to give our readers an insight into the world of eBay. We are looking forward to the PS3 and Wii listings as well as all the Blu-ray and HD-DVD products as they become more popular and available.

This week we called up all the guys over at PerSecondPodcast. We talked to them about transforming the million dollar homepage to ”the million dollar podcast.” Not only are these guys trying to make money to pay for school buy selling podcast space but they are also trying to keep a record of today’s media by locking it up on the ground of Yale. Additionally, learn why this isn’t only a ploy to make money but how they are helping out new artists as well as where else you will be able to hear these podcast besides on your PC or iPod.

This podcast was once again sponsored by GoDaddy.com and comes with a 10% off coupon. It was also made possible by Gizmo Project, PodServe, and Logitech’s 350 USB computer headsets.

Listen In
[MP3] Direct Download (Right click, select save as).
[RSS] Add the Gadgetell Podcast RSS feed to your RSS reader to have the show delivered right to you!

Host: Adam Berger
Guest: Matthew Brimer, Joseph Citarella, and Bradford Hargreaves
Producer: Greg Cherniet
Music: Dvir Tzadok
File size: 21.5MB
Length: 00:31:26

Sponsored by GoDaddy.com:
As a listener of The Gadgetell podcast, enter code GADGET1, that’s G-A-D-G-E-T and the number 1, when you check out, and save an additional 10% on any order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com.

Interested in sponsoring the podcast or advertising on the site? Please check out our advertise page or send an email to advertise (at) gadgetell .com.  We are specifically looking to get the resources for some sweet podcasting equipment (microphones, a mixer, cables, etc.).

Feedback is much appreciated. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email us at gadgetell (at) gmail.com.  Thanks for listening!

We had the opportunity to speak with Robert Sprogis, Vice-President of Your World Games, publish of The Shroud. The game is a fusion of the farming sim Harvest Moon and the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. It is designed for play on GPS enabled mobile phones and can be found here.

1. Robert, we appreciate you taking the time to sit down and offer our readers a glimpse into your current project, The Shroud. Can you please tell our readers what the Shroud is all about?

The Shroud is a role playing game for the mobile platform. Hopefully I don’t come across as too overconfident here, but it will be the best game for this platform yet. It has an incredibly deep single player mode, as well as a multiplayer component that uses the latest phones’ GPS capabilities.

2. What sort of handsets are required to play it?

The single player versions of the game will run on most handsets.  But because the game is visually superior to other mobile games, phones with larger screens are ideal. GPS enhanced phones are obviously crucial to playing the location based aspect of the game, but most modern high end phones have this capability. The only determining factor as to whether or not someone can play the GPS version is operator support. Long story short, the Shroud will run on pretty much any phone made in the last two years, but the ideal gameplay experience will be had on a GPS phone from the last few months. The game is certainly pushing the technology, sometimes I feel like we are waiting for the tech to catch up with us!

3. Are there security issues you’ve had to address with the game, considering the GPS component?  Will be people be worried that others are watching them?

Protecting people’s rights is paramount to Your World Games. If I am playing a game on Xbox 360 Live, the Internet or even The Shroud I certainly want to know I am safe. Both physically and financially, I say financially as there seems to always be a new way to lose your credit identity these days. I’ve said this in other interviews before, but we designed the Shroud first from a consumers point of view and then from a business point of view. We did not want to create a game no one would like and enjoy playing and we have carried that mentality over to our security features as well. I am pleased to say that we’ve looked at the security issues, and we have found that there is no more risk of playing the GPS component of the Shroud than there is using GPS in one’s car to get directions to the movies. There isn’t any personal info being used when playing the Shroud and no one will ever be able to find out where another player is. The only organization with the ability to access a player’s location is the operator and well quite frankly they have always had that power.

4. Did you develop the game to primarily develop GPS gaming, or is the emphasis on a single player, more evolved mobile game?

That is a hard question to answer as I don’t see this as either a single player game with GPS gaming or a GPS game with single player features. The Shroud is best looked at as being almost 2 separate games. A fantastically feature rich single player game and a state of the art revolutionary GPS enabled game. There will be people who want nothing to do with the GPS game, which is fine as we have an amazing single player game for them to play. On the flip side there will be people who scramble to get the latest GPS phones just so they can play the GPS version of The Shroud. In some ways comparing the two versions is like comparing apples and oranges. They are both fruit but taste nothing alike. It is our hope that all our games in the future will be GPS enabled and that people will play the Shroud as a stepping stone to more engrossing GPS enabled games. I do hope however that players will migrate from the single player version to the GPS version and at least get a taste of GPS gaming. It really is pretty cool!

5. How does the GPS integrate into the game?

First let me say that even if you own a GPS phone and are using the GPS version, playing a GPS challenge is entirely optional. “GPS Challenges” are initiated by a player physically moving into a hotspot, or a “breach.” It is within these areas that evil is seeping out into the game world. It is necessary here to get a bit deeper into the story of the Shroud… there are places where monsters and other evildoers have broken through to the real world. These are the “breaches” - from here evildoers begin their fight against all that is good!

In terms of the GPS, the only way to close a breach is to actually go there. Once a player enters, they will then participate in an in-game challenge – complete the challenge rid that area of monsters and add to your high score. Players with GPS compatible phones will be alerted to breaches, so they know to play. A compass will point them in the direction they need to go, and they will have to physically move themselves to these hotspots in order to play. Once completed, new breaches will be revealed, and players will have to continue to move themselves to new breaches.

6. Is the Shroud ahead of its time concerning phone tech? Are you worried a lot of people won’t be able to play it?

I do feel like the game is a bit ahead of mobile phone technology – I would love to have the processing ability of a PSP or even a Nintendo DS! But I truly believe that the mobile platform offers a lot of advantages, even if not everyone has GPS tech or the graphics aren’t as good as the traditional handhelds. But we were very, very careful to make sure lots of people can play the Shroud, we have tested the game on a seemingly endless number of handsets. If you have a high end phone, The Shroud will be at its best, but if you don’t, it will still play just fine. Sure some phones can’t support the GPS version but that should not stop people from downloading the single player version which assuming people have bought a new phone in the last decade should be able to play The Shroud.

7. Who is your competitor?  Gameboy DS games? Other mobile games?  PSP?

All mainstream entertainment is our competitor. I don’t look at many mobile games right now as our competition, because they seem content to offer only casual gameplay. The Shroud is a real game!

8. I’ve read elsewhere that there are farming challenges in the game? Can you explain this?

The farming challenges is the International Farming League (IFL), a component of the game that lets you compete against others at things like chopping wood or growing a the largest variety of different crops. We loved Harvest Moon, we were certainly influenced by that game. The IFL is not GPS-enabled, it is something designed to add more depth by bringing competition into the mix. Winning an IFL event will result in the player being awarded points which will then be added to the IFL leader board, which will viewable at The Shroud’s website. Upon the close of each month’s competition a winner will be crowned and rewarded.

9. What games have influenced the Shroud?

Harvest Moon, as I just mentioned, is a big one. All of the Zelda games had a big impact on me as well, I’ve played all of the Gameboy versions, and they taught me that a compelling RPG could be made on a small screen. Modern MMO’s like WOW have motivated me as well, because I’m fascinated with perpetual virtual worlds where people connect and play with each other.

10. Are there any cell phone games that have influenced you?

Actually quite a few games have influenced me, not in the typical sense however. I’ve never played a cell phone game and said “wow that was great!”. I wish we could do that. Rather quite the opposite. Apart from the really casual puzzle games like Tetris, every cell phone game I’ve played have actually disgusted me. At times the controls and graphics have made me want to hurl my phone across the room. But as it turns out this strong reaction I keep having to cell phone games is actually a good thing as it inspired Your World Games to create the Shroud. Basically by looking at cell phone games now on the market we pretty much tried to do the exact opposite and buck the trend completely.

11. Bill Gates recently said something along the lines of “Why would we develop a handheld Xbox when everyone is already carrying a cell phone?” What are your thoughts on this?

I couldn’t agree more. Look at the installed base of phones, I do believe the number of cell phones in the US topped 200 million just recently. And look at the number of people playing videogames who may not want to go buy a DS or PSP, much less carry something else around!  Then compare the cost. Basically, there are a lot of people out there carrying the technology to play good games right now, but don’t do it because they have no idea where to get the games. I think this will improve as the operators realize the demand and urgent need to fix things. It is time for mobile games to break out of the casual ghetto.

12. Can cell phones replace the current popular handhelds, namely the Nintendo DS and PSP?

There will always be a place for handhelds dedicated only to gaming, especially as long as Nintendo keeps delivering such high quality content. And no phone is going to match the screen size of the PSP any time soon. But mobile phones are catching up in terms of processing power, and the operators are learning about games, so I do believe that mobile gaming will certainly carve into Sony and Nintendo’s market share.

Well Robert, we wanted to thank you again for taking the time to offer our readers a glimpse into the Shroud and the new possibilities this type of game is exploiting. We are looking forward to seeing people on the streets interacting with one another in The Shroud and in real life.

This week we called up David Hayden, CEO of Jeteye. We talked to him about the social bookmarking arena, who the real competitors are, how Jeteye can come out ahead, why Jetpacks will not make you fly, and what Yahoo! messenger has to do with Jeteye. We also got a little hint that their may be some teamwork between Flickr and Jeteye in the near future--our assumption. Will they be purchased by Yahoo, listen in!

This podcast was once again sponsored by GoDaddy.com and comes with a 10% off coupon. It was also made possible by Gizmo Project, PodServe, and Logitech’s 350 USB computer headsets.

Listen In
[MP3] Direct Download (Right click, select save as).
[RSS] Add the Gadgetell Podcast RSS feed to your RSS reader to have the show delivered right to you!

Host: Adam Berger
Guest: David Hayden, CEO of Jeteye
Producer: Greg Cherniet
Music: Dvir Tzadok
File size: 17.8MB
Length: 00:25:57

Sponsored by GoDaddy.com:
As a listener of The Gadgetell podcast, enter code GADGET1, that’s G-A-D-G-E-T and the number 1, when you check out, and save an additional 10% on any order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com.

Interested in sponsoring the podcast or advertising on the site? Please check out our advertise page or send an email to advertise (at) gadgetell .com.  We are specifically looking to get the resources for some sweet podcasting equipment (microphones, a mixer, cables, etc.).

Feedback is much appreciated. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email us at gadgetell (at) gmail.com.  Thanks for listening!

This week we called up Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr.com and Director of Product Management at Yahoo!. We talked to him about how he and his team transitioned from creating a PC game to the photo sharing service Flickr, what impact being acquired by Yahoo! had on the company, what to do about the industry competition, and how the company stays out of copyright issues.

This podcast was once again sponsored by GoDaddy.com and comes with a 10% off coupon. It was also made possible by Gizmo Project, PodServe, and Logitech’s 350 USB computer headsets.

Listen In
[MP3] Direct Download (Right click, select save as).
[RSS] Add the Gadgetell Podcast RSS feed to your RSS reader to have the show delivered right to you!

Host: Adam Berger
Guest:  Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr.com and Director of Product Management at Yahoo!
Producer: Greg Cherniet
Music: Dvir Tzadok
File size: 12.7MB
Length: 00:18:36

Sponsored by GoDaddy.com:
As a listener of The Gadgetell podcast, enter code GADGET1, that’s G-A-D-G-E-T and the number 1, when you check out, and save an additional 10% on any order. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy.com.

Interested in sponsoring the podcast or advertising on the site? Please check out our advertise page or send an email to advertise (at) gadgetell .com.  We are specifically looking to get the resources for some sweet podcasting equipment (microphones, a mixer, cables, etc.).

Feedback is much appreciated. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email us at gadgetell (at) gmail.com.  Thanks for listening!

In his interview with New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel shared a lot of his thoughts regarding the company’s future.  He mentioned that Yahoo is an internet company and is not interested in producing TV shows.  “Television does a very good job...” He then went on to talk about how if Yahoo is going to do something revolutionary in video, “[It] better look like something new. This medium better take advantage of its assets, take advantage of what it does well. ... If what we do looks like television, then we’re making a huge mistake.”

If Yahoo is going to get into the market of distributing TV shows, it seems that Semel would feel more comfortable if other companies do all of the work for them (smart man!) and they simply license it.  I could definately see NBC, ABC, and CBS signing on with Yahoo to have some of their channels distributed on the web.  Maybe there will be some tie-in with their recent purchase of what is now dubbed Yahoo! Go for on-demand content.

In the interview, Semel also dropped some numbers.  He mentioned that there are 1 billion people on the internet today… 500 million of them “touch Yahoo at least once a month"… and 250 million of them “have accounts with Yahoo.”

[Direct link to the video]

Read [New Yorker]

Kevin Rose is well known in the tech community for his work on TechTV’s The Screen Savers, and Attack of the Show!  Since then, he quit his day-job to pursue projects like digg and Revision3 (his IPTV production company).  For more information about Kevin, check out his blog and Wikipedia entry.

Alright Kevin, lets get right into it… What is digg?

Digg is a news and content website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.  It prioritizes content based on actual user interest rather than editorial assumptions made by a few people.

How and when did digg start?

Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project.  It was a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control.  After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.  Today digg has more than 140,000 registered users - a figure that is doubling every three months—and more than 500,000 unique visitors every day.

How much money did you start the company with and what did you put it towards?

To get the initial site off the ground, probably about $1,500.  I spent the money paying my friend Owen Byrne, who is now the senior developer on digg, for his help.  Our servers were $99 first month, and a $99 set up fee.

How many employees did you start with?  How many currently?  How did Jay Adelson get involved in the mix?

Just myself at first.  After thinking through the concept, I wrote a scope document for my friend, and developer, Owen Byrne to create a beta of the idea to run out of my house.  My friend, Jay Adelson, the founder of Equinix, then joined as an advisor and eventually CEO.  Once we received our VC funding in October, we were able to hire several others.  In fact, we’re still hiring, so if you know any good developers, send them our way.

We’re currently at 10 employees.

Is there one thing that you would go back and change about digg or the company if you could?

When we initially built digg, we didn’t put a whole lot of thought into scaling the site.  It was just a social experiment at first.  Several months later (due to success) we had to spend several weeks rewriting several key parts of the site.  Lesson learned: Plan for wild success.

With such a simple, yet genius concept for a site, we have to ask… How does the backend work?

We are a proud LAMP site.  Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

I have to complement you on the new Digg Spy.  What other features are you working on?

Soon, we’ll be expanding outside of the tech news category into areas like science news, political news, etc.  In this sense, we’ll be developing new areas for digg that will be similar to sections of a newspaper.  We’ll also be adding more tools and functionality to the site.  Our goal is to give users even more control and to provide real-time visibility into what’s happening on digg.

As you may know, we took questions from our readers for our interview with you.  “KSDigerati” has a great question for you…

“Congratulations with the success of Digg, Digg is so successful however that once a site makes the homepage it becomes “Diggoomed” or so heavy with traffic that access may be unavailable. Has there been any thought to caching sites when they are promoted to the homepage?”

We have to be very careful when caching content.  Reducing the number of hits to the source site may impact that publications advertising revenue and overall site traffic.  While caching would help some sites that crash under heavy load, the last thing we want to do is take traffic and users away from the sources that deserve it.

It’s amazing that a site can be run without editors or anything.  Do you feel like you’re placing too much trust in the digg community?

Not at all.  We definitely believe in the wisdom of crowds and that this phenomenon that is driving digg, Wikipedia and other user-driven sites is poised for strong growth in many different areas.  Our basic philosophy is giving users the power to change the site and the tools to change how they interact with each other.

And yet another question from a reader… “grizwald” asked the following…

“Is the moderation of digg strictly automated, or do you sometimes find it necessary to manually remove some entries?  If you have manually removed things, why do you do it, and how often?”

The moderation is entirely user-driven.  In very limited cases, if users violate the terms of service, digg will intervene.  But, the great thing about the digg community is that it is self-policing and thus, we rarely need to intervene because users have already done it for us.

I can’t even believe that digg’s only been around for a year.  It seems like it took off within weeks… Did you ever see it getting this big?

We really started this as an experiment and were hoping that the idea of web democracy would work.  We were really surprised how fast the website became popular.  When digg was indexed on Yahoo! and Google News after the infamous Paris Hilton cellphone hack, it created so much traffic that we knew we were on to something big.

When did you realize that digg was going to get so huge?

Definitely with the Paris Hilton cellphone incident.  That was a major turning point for us.  A user close to the hacker submitted the story to digg, and due to its *cough* traction with the digg audience it was quickly dugg to the homepage.  That same night Google and Yahoo! both indexed digg and gave us the top position for the keywords ‘paris hilton hack’.  At the time we were only running one webserver.  As you can imagine, for the next two days the site was hammered with traffic and digg hardly functioned.

You and Alex work very well together on the podcast.  Has that significantly increased the amount of hits that digg gets?

That’s hard to say.  I know that the popularity of digg has definitely driven a large number of people to Diggnation.  Diggnation continues to be a fun outlet for us to discuss our favorite digg stories, as well as an excuse to drink more beer.

Now to the business question… Tell us about this $2.8 million investment.  How did that happen?  How did you get in touch with the investors?  (Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.)

In mid-2005 we realized that to take the site to the next level and accommodate the growing community on digg, we needed some funding to buy more servers and hire developers.  So, for this, we went to the VC community for a small round of funding.  We spoke with several and were in the fortunate position of being able to be selective.  In the end, we went with Greylock, Omidyar, Marc, and Reid Hoffman because we felt their understanding of our business and the perspectives of their organizations made them ideal partners.

And here are some final readers’ questions…

“What programming languages do you know?” -mddigger

In school I studied Pascal and C.  Later I picked up PHP and Perl.  However, this was years ago.  Owen is truly the man behind all digg code.

“How did you get your start in the tech business?”

I studied computer science in college and worked for several dot coms during the boom years.  Then I started working at TechTV, primarily to help them with the systems behind the scenes.  They brought me on the show a few times and eventually I became a regular and then host of The Screen Savers.

“What are some sites you visit daily?”

hmm, techcrunch.com, we-make-money-not-art.com, macrumors.com, makezine.com, boingboing.net, askaninja.com

“When you first left college, did you ever think that your career would reach this point?” -Christopher

No - I just pursued my geek interests and it led me here. I’m just happy and fortunate to be doing what I love.

And finally… “what would you say is the most time consuming… digg or Revision3?”

Digg is the primary focus at this point.  The site is growing so fast and we have so many plans to expand the community that it has been non-stop for the past year.  Revision3 has several full-time employees that are working on creating new shows and expanding the network offering in 2006.  I do however spend time working on Rev3 but right now it’s mostly on the weekends.

Thanks for your time Kevin.