Robert Scoble walks through his daily routine: checking Techmeme and Twitter for 30 minutes each morning, answering email, and conducting two interviews a day for Rackspace. He discovers startups through his network and Twitter, and highlights technologies he admires like Groupon, WordLens, Flipboard, and Microsoft Kinect.
Questions this video answers
About half an hour.
About 18 months old.
$6,000.
$1,000.
So we're here at the DLD 2011, and I'm extremely happy and excited that I'm having Robert Scubble with me. Hi, Robert.
Thanks for having me.
I don't think I have to introduce you because everybody knows you. And what I would like to ask you first is how do you start your day? What do you do first when you get up?
Usually I look at techmeme, which is a site that shows me what happened overnight in the world of tech news. And then I'll just start opening up my Twitter. I have Twitter streaming on one of my screens. I just watch it, or if I'm in bed, I just play with the iPhone and go through thousands of tweets in the first half an hour.
Okay, so you're spending half an hour.
Scanning your tweets, right at first. Then I'll have breakfast, get some coffee, get up, and then I'll start answering email and watching a little bit of Twitter. If there's breaking news, I'll focus much more on Twitter. If it's just the average news day, I'll just be answering email and checking in on things and trying to plan my day. Every day for Rackspace, I go around the world and I interview tech executives. Like what you're doing. So usually I have two interviews a day. And so by that time, I'm out the door going to interview some executive like Mark Zuckerberg.
And you're pretty famous for discovering new startups and new rising technologies.
I try. It's hard to keep up with TechCrunch nowadays.
Do you have a strategy?
Well, I have a good network that brings stuff to me, and people tell me, hey, you should check out this company. But also PR people get a hold of me, and then I'm watching a lot of Twitter for new companies that are just getting talked about that didn't get a lot of PR yet. So I'm looking for interesting new companies. And then like today at lunch, I went out to a German company to see an augmented reality company. So a lot of people just want to talk to me about what they're doing, what they're building in their labs, and that's a lot of fun. And that's how I build relationships and see stuff over time.
Okay, and what are the most. Most influencing startups or most interesting startups that people who are interested in technology should have a look right at the moment? What comes to your mind if you should name three.
That's a tough one because there's so many from so many different angles. I Mean, if you're talking about Commerce Groupon, which I don't even think is a startup anymore, but it's only 18 months old, something not that popular. Well, but it's only 18 months old. Right. It's a crazy company that grew up. But if you look at what's happening in the last few months, wordlens is a good example. You use your iPhone and point it at a Spanish menu and it converts it to English live on your screen. It's really pretty cool technology.
Does it work well?
It works well for menus and signs. It doesn't work well for long form text. You can't read the Economist magazine with it. That's a good example. I like Flipboard, which was named the number one Apple's most favorite iPad app, which lets you read news. What are some other examples of things? Not a startup, but I love my Microsoft Kinect. And for people who haven't seen that, it's a camera with laser device on your Xbox and it watches your body so you can play table tennis just by moving your hands or you can dance and it watches you. And that's a lot of fun. And I think that's really going to change how our society is going to expect to interact with all sorts of devices like this camera. Why do I need to push a button to start it? Why not just tell it start with my hand or tell it start or something like that?
You're traveling a lot, as you mentioned. So what would you say which is the most influential conference for you in Europe and which is the most influential in the us?
The most inspiring? Well, that's different. I actually like Lyft for inspiration. Lyft is a feeder conference for ted. If people have seen the TED talks and the year I was there, the last year I was there, five of the speakers went on to give TED talks at the main TED event. So that's pretty good. Le Web D and Lyft are all competing. Le Web is the biggest one. It's 3,000 people and it seems to be the one that everybody has to go to. DLD seems like more the TED style, where it's a little bit more expensive, a little bit more exclusive, a smaller audience, but very influential. We've had some awesome speakers here. And then Lyft is the boutique. It's the surprise. Very few of the stars go to it, but it's really an interesting conference to go to. In terms of the United States, that's a tough one because there's like the Web2 Expo or Web2Summit. There's Wear 2.0. There's a lot of conferences on different topics that are influential. I'd say that the one I would most want to go back to is Ted, but that's hard to get into. And it's $6,000 if you want to go to the main auditorium. I'm actually going to watch it this time at Venture Capitalist Office because they pay $1,000 for a video feed for a few people, and then people can watch it.
