The other day I introduced you to Comcast’s Tunerfish. Comcast has lots of advantages due to its branding and market presence. But there’s a little startup that got there first and is, in my experience, doing a better job: Miso. Here you meet Miso’s CEO, Somrat Niyogi. You’ll find him very passionate about TV. Will he win? Well, this is a disruptive area and startups tend to do better than more established companies when disruption is happening.
Oh, and if you haven’t had enough social TV, in Israel I met with the founder, Kevin Slavin, of Starling, who also has a unique perspective on this new world, although he hasn’t shipped yet and Miso has. Which one do you think will win?
Yesterday I got a tour of TED’s headquarters in New York with June Cohen, executive producer of TED.
While touring she gave me some of the latest stats and they are mind-blowing. Did you know that TEDx (independently produced TED events) are only a year old but already there are about 1,000 TEDx events planned or held in 80 countries and 25 languages.
In the 40 minute tour you’ll meet some of the people behind TED and see the editing suites where TED Talks are edited.
Thanks to June for this awesome tour and look behind the curtain.
Today I, along with a ton of other journalists, met with Facebook and listened to their presentation on the new privacy settings. Afterward I met one-on-one with Mark Zuckerberg and I told him that Facebook still has a trust problem (you can watch that entire video interview here). I like Mark, some people say I’m a shill for Facebook, and that’s OK. I think Facebook is THE most important Silicon Valley company right now and still is. Anyone who disputes that is just not facing reality. Yes, I know Apple just passed Microsoft in market cap, but Facebook is the one that is shaking up my world view more than any other company (and, I’m hearing that inside Apple they are working on a range of things that will use Facebook, so even Apple is thinking hard about what Facebook means to its future customers).
Yes, Facebook largely solved its privacy problems by giving us simpler choices and giving us more control over our info and what we want shared with whom and I think Zuckerberg won over enough of the critics to — at minimum — allow us to move the discourse around Facebook to other issues than just privacy.
But I’m still don’t trust Facebook enough to move my business into it. Will I ever? Yes, probably. But it will take time for me, and you, to trust this company beyond just playing games or poking our friends.
What is holding back my trust:
1. This is a very ambitious company that changes its approach to the world every year or two and doesn’t have a good roadmap of what’s ahead. Even Zuckerberg, in the interview I did with him, admitted he doesn’t know where Facebook is going tomorrow. Some of that is excusable, we are radically changing our entire culture due to a range of new web services, but some just needs a more steady and predictable approach that will come as Facebook grows into a more mature company rather than a rough-and-tumble-run-by-20-year-olds startup.
2. They need a more mature approach toward customer service. People and content are still getting deleted by spam filters which no one understands or can explain to me and there isn’t good place to go to appeal content deletions. This the problem with not having a federated system that runs on our own servers. Facebook has too much control over our digital lives and that power to delete content really freaks me out.
So much has been said about Facebook today that I’ll just shut up now, and let the changes soak in and see where things go from here.
What do you think after watching this interview and the other press reports that came out today?
Scobleizer 