JD Lasica

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interviews

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

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For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica caught up with Thomas J. Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics of Youngwood, Penn., at the RoboNexus trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., last month. As robots whirled by on the floor, Burick talked about robots coming down in price to the consumer level, battling PCs for supremacy in the home, and why he didn’t care for “I, Robot.”

Tom_Burrick

Before we get into White Box Robotics, tell me about the field. Robotics has come a long way in the past few years.

It really has. I’ve been working on the 9-series robot for the past five years. Quite honestly I started out by thinking about applying computer parts to robotics in some way because computer boards are so cheap and plentiful, I thought, If we could take them and apply that to personal robots and mobile robots, oh boy. I actually started doing mockups of the robot’s body in 3D and then graduated into several laser-type chassis. That took five years of refinement and then working with our production partner. We’ve come a long way.
[Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Tom Burick, CEO of White Box Robotics

The Engadget Interview: Niklas Zennstrom of Skype

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For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviews Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström about the future of voice communication, using Skype through wi-fi handhelds, and the coming death of the telecom dinosaurs.

Niklas_ZennstromPlease give me a quick backgrounder on Skype.

We were founded on Aug. 29, 2003, and now have 70 employees, about half in London and half in Tallinn, Estonia, and some in Luxembourg. With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense. If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently. [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Niklas Zennstrom of Skype

The Engadget Interview: Mike Ramsay, CEO of TiVo

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For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist and Engadget correspondent J.D. Lasica cornered TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay in a hallway at the Web 2.0 conference, where the head of the pioneering digital video recorder company talked about TiVo DVD recorders, government meddling in new technologies and what the future of television holds.

Mike_Ramsay

Talk to me about TiVo not as a company, but as an idea. TiVo owners are passionate about their TiVos. Why does the cult of TiVo command such power?

The insider language around this is, Oh my God, we’ve created a monster. It’s apparent we’ve got this compelling consumer proposition. At the end of the day, it has to do with fact that people are discovering they can be in control of television and, more broadly, can be in control of their home entertainment. It’s not until you discover what you can do that you realize how much a slave you were to the old way.

Television has a bad rep, it’s kind of broken. When you have 500 channels and there’s nothing on, television is definitely broken. I think what TiVo has done is put people back in charge.  And that’s a primal, important thing that people like as far as a social trend that’s far broader than television. And when you give them that empowerment, they get very excited and love it. And so you get a statement like, ‘It’s changed my life. I can never go back.’ That’s a huge motivator for us as a company. [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Mike Ramsay, CEO of TiVo

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

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For this week’s Engadget Inteview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spent a few minutes with Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, to discuss digital media, digital music, DRM wackiness and Mona Lisa smiles.

Anthony_Wood

For readers who aren’t familiar with Roku, what are you guys about?

We’ve been around since October 2002 and we’re based in Palo Alto, Calif. Our focus is building digital media players for home. Our core expertise is to produce great-looking products and great user interfaces.

Such as?

Our product line includes the Roku SoundBridge and the HD1000. We tell people, wouldn’t you love to see a slide show of your family pictures in full-quality digital on your flat-panel TV in your living room? That resonates.

And Roku means what?

“Six” in Japanese. It’s the sixth company I’ve been involved with. [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku

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

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Last week we kicked off The Engadget Interview with outgoing MPAA president Jack Valenti. This week journalist J.D. Lasica tries out the Sidekick II and speaks with Hank Nothhaft, CEO of Danger, Inc., about the device’s upcoming release, the market for wireless handhelds, the cachet of having Derek Jeter and Paris Hilton as Sidekick fans, and whether, if forced to at gunpoint, he’d buy a Blackberry or a Treo.

Hank_Nothhaft

Give me the 30-second lowdown on Danger. You started back in 2000?

That’s right. We’re a 3 ½-year-old private company in Palo Alto, Calif., backed by such big venture capital firms as Redpoint, Mobius and Softbank. Most of our 140 employees are in Palo Alto, California, though a handful are in Europe, Japan, and around the U.S.

Let’s talk about the market before we get to your new device. What’s the evidence that people want a converged device that combines email, web browsing, a cellphone and organizer all in one? [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Hank Nothhaft, CEO of Danger, Inc.

The Engadget Interview: DivXNetworks’ Shahi Ghanem and Jordan Greenhall

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For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spent a few minutes with CEO Jordan Greenhall and President Shahi Ghanem (pictured below) of DivXNetworks. The San Diego company has morphed from a codec-centered technology startup to a full-fledged CE business.The execs offered tantalizing hints about looming deals with Hollywood studios and Netflix, DivX movie kiosks, high-def camcorders and the coming grassroots video revolution.

Shahi_Ghanem

I’m sure some readers have never heard of DivXNetworks. What do you folks do?

Ghanem: First, let’s talk briefly about what DivX is. DivX is a compression-decompression technology, a codec. DivXNetworks is the company that invented that technology. We were founded in 2000 in San Diego and now have 110 employees.

What’s your business model? [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: DivXNetworks’ Shahi Ghanem and Jordan Greenhall

The Engadget Interview: Jack Valenti

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This week we’re introducing a new regular feature: the Engadget Interview. Every week J.D. Lasica will speak with someone who is helping shape this crazy world of gadgets and technology that we’re all so obsessed with. We’re inaugurating it with Jack Valenti, outgoing president of the Motion Picture Association of America, who spoke to Lasica about movies, technology and whether the new breed of digital gizmos threatens Hollywood. His last day at the MPAA’s helm is Tuesday. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Jack_ValentiYou have personally come to personify the MPAA—

Well, I’ve been here 38 years, so if you last that long, you become an institution.

Some people have portrayed you as anti-technology. Not guilty?

Over time, I believe that technological innovation is the best way to go. All of our companies are working very closely with the best brains in the information technology industry right now to try to see if there’s some way that we can deal with the piracy problem. [Read more…] about The Engadget Interview: Jack Valenti

Jaron Lanier discusses virtual reality & music

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The man who coined the term ‘virtual reality’ discusses art, science and life in the post-Sept. 11 world

jaron_lanierJaron Lanier — artist, scientist, visionary, and coiner of the term “virtual reality” — spoke by cell phone with J.D. Lasica from a café in Tribeca, New York, on Oct. 4, 2002, in advance of the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine.

The PopTech program teases us with your presentation by saying only, A Musical Experience With Virtual Reality. What should we expect?

Oh, my, that’s news to me. There is a thing I do sometimes which involves using some of the equipment from virtual reality research and stage performance, and I try to make virtual worlds that are themselves musical instruments in some way or have instruments in them. It’s fun, and it works on stage, but I’m struggling with this question of how to make creative tools for invention inside virtual worlds, and these instruments are, for me, the most familiar and appropriate metaphor to start with. However, I was not planning to do it in Maine, the reason being that it’s kind of a big production, and it’s expensive and involves a lot of equipment, and I had been thinking of this as a much simpler affair. [Read more…] about Jaron Lanier discusses virtual reality & music