Our own Tim Stevens (literally) rolled into Fort Mason this morning to kick off Expand and shortly after walked his way backstage to chat with Myriam Joire about — you guessed it — Expand. To find out more about where the event came from, where it is and where it’s going, check out the full interview after the break.
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He’s just taken the title of inaugural speaker here at Expand, now Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler is giving us even more face time in our first ever backstage interview. Since its launch in 2009, the crowdfunding powerhouse has become a household name, bringing us success stories like the Pebble smartwatch. Myriam Joire sat down with Yancey to talk about Pebble, OUYA and the future of Kickstarter. Check out the video after the break to watch our backstage interview in its entirety.
Follow all of Engadget’s Expand coverage live from San Francisco right here!
Filed under: Internet
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In this edition of our weekly question and answer, Ford’s director of electrical and electronics systems Jim Buczkowski chats about increasingly tiny tech and his 007-style dream car. To take a gander at the full rundown of responses, head on past the break.
Filed under: Misc
We’re here in Austin for SXSW Interactive, but it’s impossible to avoid a little bleed over from the film and music portions of the event — particularly when you get invited to cover the latest webstreaming news from AMC Networks. The company set up camp in the IFC Theater on 6th Avenue to unveil its new online offering, Yeah, a rental service that provides the viewer contextual information on movies mined from interviews with the filmmakers and cast, along with two months of research for each of the titles. According to the company, each curated movie features some 400 to 500 new pieces of content.
Of course, what we were really looking forward to at the event was the chance to speak with a couple of filmmakers tied to the service, beginning with the great Wes Craven, who provided new interviews for his early films A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left. Craven, it turns out, is one of the new service’s biggest cheerleaders, with a genuine enthusiasm about the opportunity to offer some new insight into works that have, admittedly, been fairly well-tread by both film historians and fans.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet
“Hi, I’m Richard Lai from Engadget. You guys probably hate us but…”
“No no, I don’t hate you,” Vertu’s 52-year-old President and CEO interjected with a charming smile. He then laid a hand on my shoulder and explained our in-joke to the other chuckling diners, “These guys, they read the specs and they only judge by the specs.”
Of course, it was just a light-hearted banter the night before our interview, but having been with the luxury phone maker since June 2009 as President, Perry Oosting obviously knew of everyone’s ongoing jokes about the rationale of his super expensive phones. Even before Vertu, the Dutchman would’ve faced a similar problem when he held senior positions at the likes of Bulgari, Prada, Gucci and Escada, except these brands have been around for a lot longer; and for us mere mortals, their existence is already widely accepted. Not so much for the luxury gadgets, though.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
At a show where developers are rock stars, Leap Motion just might be this year’s Beatles. SXSW isn’t the first time the company has given demos of its motion-controlled input devices, but it really seems to be the moment the world is taking notice — and realizing the potential — of its offering. Over the weekend, co-founders Michael Buckwald and David Holz addressed a packed Austin Convention Center hall, ahead of keynote conversations with Al Gore and Elon Musk.
The company set aside some time this morning to speak with us and offer up some demos of the technology, expanding upon what we saw on stage the other day. At present Leap Motion’s primary offering is a small box that sits by a PC, just in front of your keyboard. The little sensor detects the motion of your hands with a precision that allows it to distinguish the movement of individual fingers.
Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables
We’ll be honest, we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into when we headed to BlackBerry’s SXSW event. Gone are the business-suited low key gatherings traditionally tied to trade shows. The smartphone maker is here to meet developers on their own turf, putting together a bumping house party with a backyard DJ and a velvet rope line up front. The event is certainly in line with the company’s shift toward a larger lifestyle focus in its latest operating system, along with an attempt to deal with potential developers on their own level.
Tom Anderson, the company’s Manager Developer Evangelists Team Americas is one of the individuals tasked with leading that charge — a central focus if the operating system is going to turn around its fortunes. BlackBerry knows that better than anyone, hitting the pavement here at SXSW to convince developers of all sizes that they need to be a part of the operating system. It can certainly be an uphill battle, with a user base that pales in comparison to the iOSes ad Androids of the world — and then there’s the fact that the OS hasn’t actually launched in the States yet.
Filed under: Mobile, Blackberry
The job of kicking off this year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference fell firmly in the hands of none other than MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis — and really a show like this couldn’t ask for a better, more enthusiastic evangelist for emerging technologies. And certainly the fact that Pettis’ company has firm ties to the event doesn’t hurt matters either. Pettis spent much of his talk espousing the “next industrial revolution,” a phenomenon in which he sees desktop 3D printing playing a pivotal role — MakerBot’s 3D printing specifically, if he has his way.
The company took a big step in that direction with the announcement of the Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner. Still in its early prototype stages, the device is an attempt to do for 3D scanning what the Replicator and its ilk have done for printing — i.e. democratize the process in such a way that makes it affordable and user-friendly enough to make it an appealing prospect for hobbyists and later consumers. It’s hard to say just how realistic that dream is at this point, of course — the device is set to go up for order in the fall, and Pettis is the first to admit that the company still has a long way to go before the Digitizer is consumer-ready. But if anyone’s going to convince us that such a dream is close to coming true, it’s the MakerBot co-founder. Click through after the break to hear him discuss the device.
Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.
In this week’s edition of our nerdy 21 questions, Wire to the Ear blogger and musician Oliver Chesler drops by to discuss planet communicators and Lego-colored Skylabs. The full bank of responses awaits just past the break.
Filed under: Misc
We’ve heard it shouted from the mountaintops more times than we’d care to mention: the patent system is fundamentally broken. But that manner of righteous indignation can often fail to make an impression on those attempting to live their lives unaffected on the sidelines, as hardware behemoths level a seemingly endless string of suits based on often overly broad language. One’s perspective shifts easily, however, when targets change and the defendants themselves are no longer aggressively litigious corporations with an arsenal of filing cabinets spilling over with intellectual property, as was the case when one company used a recently granted patent to go after a number of podcasting networks.
When we wanted to get to the bottom of this latest example in a long line of arguably questionable patent litigation, we phoned up Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has also been designated the organization’s Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. Samuels has been fighting the battle against dangerously broad patents for some time now, recently traveling to DC to support passage of the SHIELD Act (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), a congressional bill that would impose heavy fines against so-called patent trolls.
We spoke to Samuels about supposed trolls, podcasts, SHIELD and how those with microphones can make their voices heard.
Note: The owner of the podcasting patent in question declined to comment on the matter.
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