Interview with Robert Scoble

If you're going to a concert, you're not going to even allow to carry something like this into a concert, you know, because they don't want you to record it. But you know, you sneak in a little cell phone because they can't keep you from carrying a cell phone in and you start recording that. And first you call up all your friends and say, hey, check it out, I'm in the front row of YouTube. You say check it out on quick, you know, then you hit a button and you're broadcasting or streaming live on quick, you know, lets me do media that other methodologies don't let you do. That was why I started it. Now what's really cool if you start a quick video and start show up and the audience interacts with you and that's an experience you don't have Encore. Like what you're using. Yeah, and it's the, that's when you want to have an audience, is when your life is interesting, not when you're sitting string email in the middle of the night, you know.

How have you incorporated quik.com well, Fast.

Company TV right now is only two shows. There'll be more shows coming soon. But there's a professional Scobalizer show which is done on really expensive cameras and that's really Fast Company Live which is done with quick and done with a Nokia N95 cell phone. If there's a show that's really good, like today we did Astropix. We'll put the best ones up on Fast Company Live and then we're going to put some sort of calendar there. When I know that I'm going to shoot something like I know tomorrow afternoon, which you probably won't get this video up in time. But I know that at 4 o' clock I'm going to be shooting a Microsoft executive talking about a new product announcement. So I know at that time I can, you know, Twitter and I can tell people, hey, show up here and you'll see something live. And then later, later that night I'll grab the embed code and put it up on Fast Company Live. Fast Company Live also is to get more people with Nokia around the world who are going to contribute to it. So we'll have different Fast Company Live, not just my show. Video World is an interesting one. I mean if you're somebody who's really pushing around the video and understands the online video, you know that there's lots of services. There's you know, Viddler and Vimeo and Revver and you know, on and on dotsub. I mean, there's like a list of 50 of them. If you do some Google searches, you'll find, you know, it's not just YouTube, right. But to the normal person out there who wants to watch an online video, pretty much all they know is YouTube.

Yeah.

And so YouTube has a huge audience on it, even though the quality is not quite as bad. Or maybe the feature set is not as good as, like, quick, I can't do a live cell phone video on YouTube, so I know the audience is on YouTube. So I'm going to shoot on Quicc and then I'm going to put my videos up on YouTube to get the audience and try to get the audience to come back to my Quik site or my Fast Company Live site to interact with me live. Because that will take some education to normal people who don't understand quite what I'm doing with the site. Cell phone.

Thousands of followers on Twitter, and every single time there's. You start recording a quick video or start streaming, it sends a tweet. And so how.

Well, not every time I turn that feature off, actually. Oh, so okay, yeah, so actually I hit 55 on my cell phone and then it sends the Twitter. I had it set up to automatically tweet every time it started the video, but it really pissed off a lot of people on Twitter and they started saying I was spamming them. So I changed my behavior there. And it works better that way. That way I only 55. I only Twitter from the phone if I know I'm really shooting something interesting that a lot of people would, you know, like Annie Leibowitz. I have a feeling a lot of people would find that interesting. Right? But me talking or typing on my computer or playing around, probably not. So I try to choose the moments when I set Twitter and I also try to set some expectations before I start it. Like, hey, tomorrow I'm going to be filming Annie Leibowitz or Bill Gates or whoever and show up there around 5 o' clock and then I'll Twitter you when I start sending, when I start the interview. So. So you know, that it's going seismic is a rough one because I need a code for Seesmic as well. I turned that one off because Seasmic's community really has an expectation that you're going to be very conversational with the video. In other words, you're going to be talking to a camera live and then you're going to watch other people who respond to you, and then you're going to talk back and have this conversational aspect to it. But because I'm always shooting interesting people out on the field, you can't reply. I can't reply. First of all, I can't see it. So as soon as I can see the seismic videos and watch the replies on my phone, then I think I'll start using it. But right now it's two. One way to really fit in a seismic Mogulus, though, is interesting because I'm going to start doing a live channel and it'll be interesting to have my live videos have it able so that you can watch the Mogulus live channel and be warned right there that something new is happening and be able to put many cell phone users into one live channel with a director, because that'll be interesting. If I have five people going to south by Southwest now, I can have five people who are covering that event from different perspectives and they can call me up and say, hey, I'm about to get an interview with Mark Zuckerberg who runs Facebook. Can you put me on live when you see my video come up? And then I'll go, okay, I'll put you in next. So start your interview in one minute and I can drag you into the live channel and everybody who's watching that live channel can then see you. And we can almost build like a TV station all based on little cell phones. And that's going to be very exciting.

What other integration do you want to see?

That's enough for right now. YouTube is the big one. I'm hoping to see some better YouTube integration. There's a lot of different players that are really interesting. And that's the problem is every video company has a different feature that's really cool. Like Viddler has the ability to comment in the timeline and put little comments. That's really cool. When I put a video up there, I got a lot of little comments along the timeline and it made linking into them really cool. And people had a lot of fun with that. Sub is another one that does captioning and multilingual captioning. So if you want somebody in Japan to watch your videos, they don't speak English there. So somebody would translate your English speech to little Japanese text strings underneath the video. Like live captioning. Right.

What's the website for that?

Dotsub.com and that's really great, but it doesn't do the Viddler thing. And it's like, oh, why doesn't somebody come out with Dotsub and viddler style comments together so that people can interact, right? And then what's another one? I was at Astropix today, which does. It automatically senses my face and puts a link on it. And so that's a new advertising type that would be really killer. But again, Astropix doesn't do dot sub and it doesn't do middler and it doesn't do cell phone video. So it's like, ah, you got to pick, you know, one or the other, but you can't use them all together. And hopefully this industry at some point goes, this is really lame. And we need to figure out how to come out with the ultimate video player that takes this feature and this feature and this feature and this feature and mixes them together and then shares the revenue between everybody. Because obviously it's all about money. Everybody wants to have a feature that causes you to go there and therefore watch their advertising and make their money that way. And until we figure that out as an industry, that's going to be a tough one because everybody will have a different future, you know.